The Defamation of Mainstream Media Comes from Two Words, "Fake News"

Since the beginning of journalism, misinformation and fake news have been problems for journalists. More recently, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the controversial 2020 Presidential Election, the fake news crowd is more significant than ever.      

One of the problems with the fake news crowd is that whenever someone disagrees with something or sees something they do not want to see, they call it fake news and move on. That practice is a dangerous rabbit hole when supported by those in power, like politicians. Politicians are influential public figures that their fans look up to and follow their every move and blindly agree with anything they say, believe them without reading the article or tweet, and will not do any research to see if the story or source is credible. Another dangerous way is parents discrediting the media in front of their children from a young age, so the children have that distrust instilled in them since they were young. The kids then grow up not believing the media, and it is an entirely new generation of fake news. We saw a spike in this fake news problem with former President Trump. Whenever a media organization came out with a report or an article and did not like it, he just called it fake news. His followers would then not read it and go right along with him in discrediting the article when it could have very reputable sources behind it, making the report very accurate. Here is a video was done by BBC talking about how

Trump has used Fake News. But, unfortunately, we can also see this on the other side of the aisle when it comes to people just brushing off any lousy publicity for democrats but just discrediting the article or report.

Another problem with fake news is when people intentionally fake the news. Some people like to just fake reports and fake content in articles and pretend that it is true. For example, some people will make a Twitter account and pretend it is a real reporter or breaking real news and completely misinform people about real issues. We see this type of fake news most prevalent during the black lives matter movement and protest when people fake what was going on during the protests. You also can see it when it comes to people breaking sports news on Twitter. People will replicate their Twitter account to look like someone with credibility and break sports news that is entirely false and get people to like and retweet it. That is not as damaging as some other fake news but another great example. Bleacher Report did an article explaining fake sports, Twitter, and the best ones.