The Media, Fake News, Fox, CNN, MSNBC and any other media outlets, Trust No One

[allegro]

Those are excellent points.

Our news has been edited (censored) for years, too; during Vietnam, we received daily updates of casualties, saw actual combat footage during the nightly news, complete with injuries and bodies. Cut to Iraq, and the Government censors everything claiming security breaches (even if the footage is submitted later) when the reality is that the Government doesn’t want the public to see the realities of war. The actual casualty numbers are covered up, too. This enables them to continue without the public protesting.

But, I'm not sure that people have an "appetite" for "fake" news; I think they don't even KNOW what "kind" of news it is - they just assume it's something they can trust. People assume that if it's coming from a source they "trust," then it's actual "news." They don't even realize that it's biased news, or hyperbolic news, or slanted news, or opinionated news, or news that is designed to appeal to a target audience or to appease corporate sponsors.

My husband has relatives on Facebook who pass around "articles" or "stories" that are - to us, anyway - OBVIOUSLY false. When my husband calls this out, his cousin says "what, am I supposed to LOOK THIS UP TO SEE IF IT'S REAL?"

YES! YES, YOU ARE! With social media and your ability to pass this shit along comes RESPONSIBILITY.

Often, this information is SO obviously fake that you shouldn't even NEED to look it up.

People don't want to have to use their own logic - what my college psych professor called our inner "bullshit bell" - to determine if it's "fake" so long as it aligns with their own predetermined beliefs.

I see headlines that are misleading and people on the left pass them around on Twitter with comments that bolster their own beliefs without even reading the actual article, which article often completely refutes their position.