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I'm personally opposed to almost everything Trump is trying to do, but don't act like it's only a problem on the right. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?

> Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?

You mean the ones contained in a dossier which accurately predicted several Trump related events that were not publicly known to be in planning at the time it was written, but were verifiable to have occurred as predicted before it was published?

Seems to me that it was plenty newsworthy.

BTW, it also reported that part of the carrot side of the carrot-and-stick blackmail and bribery by Russia was that Trump was promised a bribe of a share of Rosneft coincidentally the same size that was just sold off, on credit, to buyers concealed by various cutouts.

If I was Putin and I was trying to interfere in US politics, then after seeing that dossier I would have done this anyway just to mess with people, setting up a bunch of shell companies and essentially selling a 19% share of the company to itself.

Gonna need more hard evidence before being concerned about this.

This fails ~~occasion~~ occam's razor. By that logic, Putin could also dress up as an orange ballerina while announcing a 15% sale of the company, just to screw with people.

> This fails occasion razor

Occam's razor, but I'm guessing that was autocorrect.

Anyway, no, because there is no incentive for him to do what you are suggesting.

If however you believe his goal is to destabilise U.S. politics, then there is large incentive and zero downside for him to fake a sale of 19% of the company.

Many, and I mean MANY, of the people relaying/pushing the story did it with the caveat 1) it's completely unsubstantiated and 2) this is EXACTLY what the right did to the Clintons for 2 decades.

When did the people pushing the N Clinton conspiracies every say "this may or not be true..."???

So, your statement is disingenuous, at best.

> Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?

Well, that's actually a pretty interesting example to look at. For one, the dossier concerned contained a lot of accusations to do with members of Trump's team travelling to Eastern Europe to meet with Russian contacts, suspect financial transactions and the like - you yourself are doing it a disservice by describing it only as rumours of a "piss orgy".

But irrespective of that, the dossier had been known about for months. But the media organisations didn't report on it, specifically because they couldn't verify the information contained within it. But then Buzzfeed decided to publish it anyway, and at that point any responsible news organisation is left in a pretty impossible position - either don't report on the thing everyone is talking about, or report unsubstantiated accusations.

If any story includes a presidential piss-orgy everything else is filler. The journalists who ran that story did a lot of damage by running it the way they did.

I think it is at least more complicated than you are painting it. If it's something that is widely known in media circles as well as political ones (at least one Democratic senator alluded to it on one of the many occasions Hillary's e-mails were brought up), the media holding it back from the public isn't really a fantastic look either.

Sometimes it feels like the media is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Report unsubstantiated rumour? You're biased! Hold back information because it isn't verified? You're biased!

If you apply the same standard you have displayed here to fake news on the other side of the political spectrum, then almost none of it would be fake news either.

That's not true. The dossier exists. It was prepared by a respected former intelligence officer. It was ordered by Jeb Bush's campaign. None of these facts are in disrepute. And the vast majority of news reports accurately stated that the contents of the dossier cannot be verified. It's miles more credible than the stories found on fake news sites.

> It's miles more credible than the stories found on fake news sites.

1000 * 0 is still 0.

If the Trump campaign had ordered a dossier of dirt on Hillary Clinton, and paid a respected former intelligence officer to provide it, would the claims made in it be credible?

Let's take one of the big 'fake news' items from the recent election, the one regarding Hillary's health. What do you make of this article by a former secret service agent on Hillary Clinton's health:

http://ijr.com/opinion/2016/09/260018-protected-hillary-clin...

None of the facts in that article are in disrepute either, and it's also from a respected secret service agent.

So are the questions it poses about Hillary's health more or less credible than the Trump dossier, and is it fake news or not?

No it's not?

The definition of fake news is getting stretched to include controversial news.

"Fake news" is fiction being sold as news on websites that look credible.

Flat out making stuff up, and polluting the media stream with it in order to manipulate people.

This is the easy case to solve. As people actually try to grapple with this, "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition.

A dossier actually compiled but unverified is still not fake news - it's a shady bad practice circa 1990. Unfortunately we're dealing with much worse problems today.

Ok, so if I compile a dossier of unverified stories regarding Hillary, and package them up then it suddenly makes otherwise fake claims not fake news?

I mean that's the whole sub-prime mortgage problem all over again. Take a shitty product and wrap it in layers of respectability until people don't know any better.

When there is also evidence to suggest much of the contents of the dossier came from a 4-chan prank, it's hard to see where the difference is.

I think you need to clarify 2 concepts/definitions, agnostic of real world events.

1) fake news: a recent phenomenon where fraudulent/fictional/completely made up literature is peddled as legitimate news. This is then distributed on steroids via social media. It uses unsuspecting people to transmit this.

Bias in news. This is an older problem and involves how news is presented and what spin is put. In the worst case it is deliberate in order to support an agenda.

I don't think 'bias in news' begins to cover the sort of things that went on in the recent US election though.

There was a lot of anti-Trump news that basically matches what you said above:

> "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition

* Trump kicked a mother and baby out of rally

* Trump mocked a reporter's disability

* Trump proposed building database of muslims

And the list goes on.

This goes well beyond the realm of media bias, and in to direct collusion between media and the campaign.

I have no problem calling that 'fake news', which is perhaps a descriptive approach rather than a prescriptive one.

Hey - trump alone was a candidate unlike any other - and entering the stage after years of escalation in rhetoric.

On top of that trump himself courted controversy at a rate and scale never seen before.

That's why this election was faced with drama unlike elections before them.

A lot of stuff listed above is sadly the regular calumny inflicted upon candidates. Iirc someone got kicked out of the race because of a bad photo op.

But These are all things that are problematic- without being fake news.

> * Trump kicked a mother and baby out of rally

> * Trump mocked a reporter's disability

Do you deny that these things happened?

Has any other candidate - of any party - ever done anything like this?

Is the media supposed to pretend that it didn't happen?

This is where the "the facts have a well known liberal bias" joke comes from

> Do you deny that these things happened?

For the first one, the mother who was supposedly 'kicked out' denies it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/...

For the second one, he was not mocking the reporter's disability. He was mocking the reporter for pulling a story and the impersonation he did is Trump's standard impersonation for a flustered, bumbling person. There is multiple video of him doing the exact same action to able bodied people - from Ted Cruz to military generals, and all sorts of others.

Not only that, but the reporter's disability is nothing like the action Trump did. The reporter actually has frozen/locked up joints e.g. almost the exact opposite of what Trump did.

So, either Trump knew of the reporter's disability and wasn't mocking it (completely different actions), or he didn't know of the reporter's disability (and therefore couldn't have been mocking it).

In either situation, Trump wasn't mocking the reporter's disability.

Unfortunately a freeze frame from the video of Trump's movement matches a still photo of the journalist, hence the belief that he was mocking the reporter's disability.

And this is why people say the media has a well known Trump bias.

I wouldn't describe this as fake news at all, but I'd say that one person's view on a video they have watched isn't comparable to that dossier, which was (apparently) compiled from numerous in-person visits and interviews. Not to mention, reporting on the dossier always clarified that it was not verified, while this opinion piece is making broader conclusions.

I agree with you broadly, though. To me, fake news has absolutely no mooring in reality whatsoever and is pure clickbait - usually without political motive beyond getting angry people to click.

> isn't comparable to that dossier, which was (apparently) compiled from numerous in-person visits and interviews

And that (apparently) can trace its origins to a 4-chan prank?

That depends on whether you consider the word of an anonymous 4channer to be as reliable as that of a former intelligence officer.

Personally, I do not.

It's not so much the word, as the time-stamped posts from months before the news was published.

Any links? Last I checked those were pretty thoroughly debunked.

http://gizmodo.com/4chan-idiots-claim-they-invented-the-trum...

I saw that story as being similar to the "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer" meme going around. It was less that people thought it was true and more that it was funny.

I'm not arguing to remove all interpretation from the facts. That's impossible with our language. But what we are experiencing from the news every single day is a far cry from objective journalism. We are almost only getting the interpretation without many facts (or facts that are taken out of context or edited to fit a narrative).

Yes you can convey information much more objective than today. For example, on the more recent migration ban story:

"The White House has announced today at 7h30, through speaker ..., a piece of legislation that, quote: ~first paragraph summary of the legislation~.

You can read the full text here.

On the opinion of Bla bla, this legislation is innefective etc etc.

Disclaimer: Bla bla is not related to any of the mentioned organizations, though he declares he tends to agree with the opinion of former president Obama on most issues. You can read more about this commenter here."

Leading with a verbatim reproduction of the text describing the purpose of a bill (almost invariably a statement carefully crafted to make a political point) and adding a disclaimer to any points made in opposition is anything but an objective approach to news reporting.

> It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts.

Fallacy of gray. Just because you can't ask for perfect doesn't mean you can't ask for better.

Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them.

I've addressed this elsewhere, but there is definitely cases where this can be done.

No, Tom Cruise is not moving to Buffalo, Missouri[1].

No, there is no attempt by lawmakers to legislate the disposal of unused semen[2].

Etc, etc. Some of these are satire, but some are just complete deliberate fakes.

This is a different class of problem to "OMG Hillary is a Nazi/OMG Trump bought Pizza" opinion spam.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/celebrity-moving-small-towns/

[2] http://www.snopes.com/unused-semen-bill/