Fake News 101: How to recognize fake news and avoid being fooled by it. - Softcover

Although we appear to have entered a Golden Age of Fake News, fake stories have been passed off as news for a long time in the United States and throughout the world. On December 28, 1917, the New York Evening Mail presented readers with one of the greatest fake news stories up to that time. A Neglected Anniversary by H.L. Mencken was a totally fake history of the bathtub. It may be hard for people to believe that an article about bathtub history could go viral, but it did. Flashing forward to 1980, Janet Cooke wrote an article for the Washington Post about an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy. The story, which was titled Jimmy’s World, was heart-breaking. After Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize, people wanted to locate Jimmy so they could help the lad. Unfortunately, there was no Jimmy. Janet had cooked the whole story up. In 2003, The New York Times disclosed that award-winning reporter Jayson Blair had been a plagiarist and a frequent fabricator. In his articles, he had a bad habit of inserting quotes from interviews that never took place. According to The Times, there were problems in “at least 36 of the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting assignments.” Stephen Glass was another “journalist” who found his way to fortune, fame, and infamy by making things up. He wrote mostly for The New Republic where he became an associate editor by the age of twenty-five. Forbes.com outed him in May of 1998. The article was titled Lies, Damn Lies and Fiction by Adam L. Penenberg. These are but a few examples of fake news in which journalists intentionally misled consumers of the news. Sometimes the media also report fake stories unwittingly. In October of 2009, the Balloon Boy captivated audiences as he reportedly floated through the sky in a balloon. Reporters and TV viewers alike ate the story up. It turned out that Falcon Heene had never even left the ground. He had been safe at home the whole time. It turned out that his parents had pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in modern history. Since the turn of the millennium, fake news has been evolving at an accelerated pace. Not so long ago, tabloids including The Weekly World News, which specialized in fake news, could be readily found in many grocery stores. Fake news in print is not as common as it once was, although we still see it occasionally in newspapers and magazines. Now most of the fake news is on the internet. The Onion is the most well-known publisher of fake news, but there are dozens of other online magazines cranking it out. With some websites, like The Onion, it’s clear that the stories presented are satirical. Nevertheless, there are people who believe the articles. Other websites do a very good job of looking legitimate, and for many readers it is easy to believe the articles. For many readers, it has become difficult to distinguish what’s real and what’s not. Fake News 101 will help readers to recognize various types of fake news. It also presents information on how fake news operates, with examples. Aside from disconnecting and finding a wireless cave to live in, there’s probably no way to avoid fake news completely. However, it is possible to avoid being fooled by fake news. The objective of Fake News 101 is to help people to do exactly that.