Propaganda has been around for a long time, preceding the era of mass media. Propaganda is weaponized speech that mixes truthful, deceptive and false speech, and is designed explicitly to strengthen one side and weaken the other.

There's another type of 'fake news' that surfaces during virtually every political campaign: propaganda. While media outlets overfocused on the non-scandal of the emails, this wasn't 'fake news' so much as it was 'false balance,' with newspapers playing up a Clinton 'scandal' to counterbalance an endless sequence of Trump scandals. There's a compelling argument that the release of Clinton and Podesta's emails by Russian hackers - and the media firestorm that ensued - were key to the outcome of the US election. 'Fake news,' in this usage, means 'real issues that don't deserve as much attention as they're receiving.' This form of fake news was likely an important factor in the 2016 campaign. It's tempting to say that Trump is using 'fake news' to mean 'news I don't like', but the reality is more complicated. CNN did not reproduce the dossier ( online news outlet Buzzfeed did ), but the president-elect was incensed that CNN would call attention to the story based on unverified documents. Trump's evasion referenced his anger at CNN for reporting on an intelligence dossier that suggests Russian authorities have been compiling compromising information on Trump in the hope of blackmailing him. Faced with questioning from CNN reporter Jim Acosta during his first press conference in six months, President-elect Donald Trump refused to take Acosta's question, declaring, ' You are fake news. 'Fake news' and its detrimental effects on democracy has become a major theme in contemporary politics. Īs you likely know, these stories aren't true, though they did circulate widely on Facebook and other social media sites.

But the strangeness of the election was complicated by news stories that seemed just plausible enough to be true: a papal endorsement of Donald Trump, the fiery suicide of an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton's emails, Black Lives Matter as an attempt to create a race war in the US. Watching the 2016 US presidential election was already a surreal experience, as dozens of qualified candidates lost out to a failed businessman and reality television star.

Red herring fallacy advertisement 2020