According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem
&gt; the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer.<p>Mass media has mostly lost their grip on manufacturing consent.<p>It was effectively used in the past for that. The Democrats have relied on it too heavily. That was the old school strategy - those who control the media, control the outcome. In this case it backfired on them.<p>The more money, manipulation and control they poured into it, the more insiders they had, the less trustworthy they became. Instead of stopping and re-evaluating, they doubled down on lies, which made them even less credible.<p>One thing they missed is that to be effective, they had to keep up appearances of some nominal impartiality.<p>In a way they are one of the primary reason this election was lost. They manufactured Kool-Aid, which is fine, that&#x27;s their job, but then instead of giving it to the Trump supporters, they gave it to Hillary supporters. They were showing all blue maps with a Hillary landslide. There was no other choice, of course, after endorsing her openly for months, they&#x27;d never show an all red map. Even if somehow they had one projected. (They didn&#x27;t. USC &#x2F; LA Times poll predicted a win for Trump, and it is an interesting reason why, but that for another discussion...)<p>The idea perhaps was to discourage undecided&#x2F;Trump voters by showing that candidate has 1% chance of winning, so why bother voting.  In the end it had the exact opposite effect. They showed a Hillary landslide and so Hillary supporters stayed home. Why bother putting your shoes on or staying in line if it is landslide anyway.<p>So then last week everyone started talking about &quot;Fake News&quot; almost overnight. All was good, nobody likes lizard people, everyone thinks that&#x27;s crazy. But then it quickly turned into a label that gets thrown at &quot;news I don&#x27;t agree with&quot;. Just a few days ago, a story about an oil field and Texas and it seems they got the estimates wrong or the model for the cost was off and it immediately got slapped with the label of &quot;Fake News&quot;.<p>In a certain way it is not surprising. Throwing labels around is basically the new way of conducting discourse. One can blame Twitter for it (I am sure there is some study already on how Twitter affects discussion and exchange of ideas). You can say so much in a 140 characters so what you do is throw a label at the end &quot;Fake News&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Soros&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Sexism&quot;  and you&#x27;re done, point proven.