re: .

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CNN is fake news

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No. There is a difference between having a liberal or conservative slant on the news and reporting fake news. Fox News has a conservative slant on the news, but it is not fake news. CNN has a liberal slant on the news, but it is not fake news. The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the New York Times is liberal. What makes all of these media outlets legitimate media and not fake news is that they do not literally make up factual allegations out of thin air and present them as fact. If Fox, CNN, WSJ or NYT tells you something did happen, then it's almost certain that it did. If they find out later that it didn't happen, they will at the very least stop saying it did and will likely issue a correction. Now, what spin they put on the facts they report and the opinions they have about it are op-ed and not news, but they are not fake news.

This doesn't mean legitimate media outlets are not misleading. They certainly are. But they don't mislead with actual lies. Choosing what to report and what not to report is one way of misleading that both sides of legitimate media frequently use. When you watch or read these outlets, you do have to be aware of their slant and take their op-ed with a grain of salt, but you can generally depend on allegations of fact to be accurate. As long as you have accurate facts, then you can form an educated opinion no matter what slant the source is putting on the facts with its op-ed.

Fake news, on the other hand, is completely different. Fake news sites literally make up completely false shite and simply claim it is true. The Pope did not endorse Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton did not run a child-sex trafficking network out of a pizza parlor in Washington. No FBI agent, connected with the Clintons or otherwise, murdered his family and killed himself a few days before the election because of some feared fallout over revelations about some kind of wrongdoing. These stories and many more appeared on fake news sites and got many millions of views and shares, more than legitimate media sites on both sides of the political spectrum.

Surveys consistently show that a growing majority of people use social media and websites as their primary source of information. A survey by Buzzfeed (I think) showed that 38% of stories by right-leaning sites and 19% of stories by left-leaning sites contained fake news. This isn't to make the point that the right is less honest than the left, but to point out that even 19% of stories being simply false is appalling. It becomes even more terrifying when you consider that MOST people are relying on these sources as their primary sources of information. When a majority of the electorate are depending on information from sources that are anywhere from 19% to 38% bullshite, there is no way to have an informed electorate.

A democracy is dead if its people do not have accurate information and cannot agree on even the most basic of facts. Not opinion or philosophy, but the facts themselves. We literally do not even have a consensus in this country on what reality is, and anywhere from 19% to 38% of what people think is real is flat-out bullshite made up out of thin air. This is the most alarming thing about the election. Who won is barely relevant compared to this.