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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we should start with Dan Rather. His fake memo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy) was the first attempt (that was caught at the in real-time) in using fake news (literally a faked meo) to influence a Presidential election by a major network. A lot of today's distrust of media traces from that incident.

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That was a failure of fact-checking, not fake news as it's typically understood. It has happened occasionally in otherwise-respectable publications. The network fired a number of people involved including Dan Rather not because they intentionally crafted a false narrative but because they claimed they had done fact-checking when they hadn't.

"Fake news", as typically understood, is news that is known to be fake by the publisher.

I'm glad you brought this up.

I remember this incident and what is striking about it is:

- How seriously the fake memo was taken by some in the media; and

- Just how bad a fake it was. Like it was literally just printed off from Word and photocopied at Kinkos. Had someone instead used a typewriter from the era and not been seen at Kinkos it could well have been a different story.

If it had been a reasonable fake it may well have changed the result of the election. People on the right like to argue the media has a "liberal bias". These sorts of incidents don't really help.

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