The term “article” used to refer to a piece published in a newspaper or periodical that went through a thorough drafting, editing and review process before publish.

Nowadays anyone can post an article on the internet. That’s great. But because of this, the definition of “article” has become basically meaningless. An article could be entirely fact based, full of falsehoods, or misrepresent facts by mixing them with opinions. There really should be a distinction between different levels of reporting. Most of the problems cropping up these past two years can be traced to the fact that people put the same credibility in a piece by some random person on the internet as they do in one by a career journalist.