All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print

“This means that fact-checking is the fake solution to the real problem of fake news. It helps debunk the simple hoaxes, but it only adds undeserved gravitas to fake political narratives and metanarratives.”

The term “fake news” has been used to describe everything from nonsense fabricated by Macedonian teenagers, to Breitbart, to The New York Times. That is, the term has been applied to people who make up stories with zero factual basis, to organizations with explicit political bias that report on real events, and to “the newspaper of record.” To some, it may seem dangerous to cast the “fake news” epithet so broadly. Sam Harris, for example, has lamented the equation of all these sources of media into the same category. And The New York Times itself has recently staked a claim on “truth” with its first brand campaign in a decade, which presents the newspaper as the place to find truth in a world of conflicting and unreliable sources. There are certainly large differences between The New York Times and pure hoax websites. They cannot both be fake news in the same way, but they can both be fake news.

There is a simple way that factual news can be fake: selectivity. A purely factual publication can create a false narrative by means of including certain facts, while excluding certain other facts. Genuine facts can have genuine alternative facts, and the choice between facts is determined by deeper assumptions, ideologies, cognitive biases, and philosophies that do not lend themselves to be listed and stamped for approval by “fact-checking” organizations.

Generally, this fact-selectivity is simply understood as bias in media. Charges of media bias are nothing new. Jim A. Kuypers of Dartmouth College investigated the issue of media bias in his 2002 book, Press Bias and Politics. In this study of 116 mainstream U.S. papers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Dr. Kuypers concludes that the mainstream press in the United States tends to favor liberal (American left) viewpoints. Dr. Kuypers identified liberal bias in the reporting of a variety of issues including race, welfare reform, environmental protection, and gun control.