Illinois Valley Times

Asserting that the so-called epidemic of “fake news” is nothing new, the LaSalle County Republican Party recently postulated that the surge of questionable reporting has merely been magnified by the ever-growing scope of social media.

“Frankly, we've been getting ‘fake news’ for decades, packaged by ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and others,” the LaSalle County GOP said on its Facebook page. “It's the Internet and multiple diverse social media platforms enabling everyone to have a voice that is killing them.”

A recent study conducted by Buzzfeed, the news and entertainment website that reports trends in politics, business and technology — as well as culture — went as far as to suggest that “fake news" actually ranked higher than “real” news during the last three months prior to the U.S. presidential election.

Even President Barack Obama alluded to the phenomenon’s potential threat to our national political structure, Reason.com, an online resource for “free minds and free markets," said. However, Reason.com’s A. Barton Hinkle said much of the perception has been grossly exaggerated in the public’s mind. Hinkle, a senior writer for the website, who also serves as a columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, said the trend of false reporting itself is improperly documented.

“There are at least two problems,” Hinkle said. “First, the epidemic of fake news is overstated. Second, fake news is far from new.”

The exaggeration is relatively simple to grasp because distortion of coverage may run rampant more easily in the information age. By delving beyond the headlines, the  Washington Examiner discovered that Buzzfeed’s conclusions erroneously factored in only “engagement metrics,” or social media posts that sparked responses from online viewers.

“If Facebook were the only source for news, that could be alarming,” Hinkle said, adding that “engagement does not equal acceptance” and that calculations based on “likes” or simple responses potentially ranging from nonchalance to sarcasm cannot be properly quantified to represent viewers’ positions.

The flip side — that this news on fake news is itself not news — motivated Hinkle to list well-known examples of problematic journalism throughout the latter part of the 20th century, from writers such as Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke of the New York Times and Washington Post, respectively, who fabricated stories, to smaller publications forced to admit to falsified stories, and in many cases, issue retractions.

The proliferation of questionable news items is made easier by the instant accessibility of material through the Internet. Because the nation is at a point in time when the advancement of technology is possibly running ahead of industry regulations, journalists and readers alike continue to struggle to sort out facts from fabrications.

“To be fair, professional news organizations that discover flaws in their own reporting admit the mistakes in public and do whatever they can to correct the record,” Hinkle stated. “Purveyors of fake news … do nothing of the sort.”

Recent examples of false stories include the item that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for the president, which sparked 960,000 engagements, or responses.

Hinkle suggested that suppliers of false narratives should not have the power to control what the public reads.

The LaSalle County Republican Party said it suspects that there are more insidious motives that explain why the media is playing up the alleged "fake news" scourge.

“When you can't compete in the marketplace of ideas, you (stomp) your feet, cry and call people names,” the LaSalle County Republican Party said on its Facebook page. “This ‘fake news’ tirade is just another example of the aristocracy, old media and their ilk attempting to eliminate their competition … 'Americans aren't smart enough to separate the truth from the untrue, so we will do it for you.' ”