On: Fake News Challenge

[intended]

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.

[imron → intended]

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.

[intended → imron]

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.

[coolgeek → imron]

> * 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

[imron → coolgeek]

> 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.