Assignment task:
From Where Do People Get Their News?
Given the divisiveness of the 2016 election, it is not surprising that Trump and Hillary Clinton voters got their news from different places. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that Trump supporters were relatively uniform, with 40 percent saying their main source was Fox News. Coming in at a distant second was CNN with 8 percent. Third place was Facebook at 7 percent. Clinton supporters listed CNN as their top choice with 18 percent, the liberal-leaning MSNBC was at 9 percent, and Facebook was third at 8 percent.86 Pew is one of the best sources of information about media habits of people in the United States, and its reports are used consistently throughout this book.
It is worth noting that Facebook itself does not produce any news; it simply allows its users to post links to news. So, although similar percentages of Trump and Clinton supporters listed Facebook as their news source, as the Pew report suggests, it is likely they are getting news from vastly different sources and sometimes from illegitimate or erroneous sources.
Given the wide range of news sources available, it can be hard to know which provide reliable, balanced, and objective news; which provide good sources of opinion and analysis; and which are the fringe news organizations full of actual fake news and false reporting.
Patent attorney Vanessa Otero created the chart printed on this page and has taken it through multiple revisions. She distributed it by posting it on Facebook. The chart rates news organizations on two axes:
Overall Quality-Ranging from Original Fact Reporting to Contains Inaccurate/Fabricated Info
Partisan Bias-Ranging from Liberal to Conservative
"We are living in a time where we have more information available to each of us than ever before in history," Otero wrote. "However, we are not all proficient at distinguishing between good information and bad information. This is true for liberal, moderate, and conservative people. I submit that these two circumstances are highly related to why our country is so politically polarized at the moment."87
Unsurprisingly, Otero got lots of criticism of her chart. Infowars (which she categorized as "Utter Garbage/Conspiracy Theories" in an early version of her chart) completely rejected her work and suggested instead a chart that listed liberal-leaning sites as promoting "tyranny" and the conservative sites as promoting "liberty and freedom."
Otero has continued to revise her chart, doing away with the "Utter Garbage/Conspiracy Theories" and going instead with "Most Extreme Liberal" and "Most Extreme Conservative" on the horizontal axis. The chart is now up to version 3.1.
Otero does not demand that readers accept her analysis, offering a blank version of the template where people can create their own chart, but she does offer some advice:
I respectfully submit that if you make your own, you should be able to place at least one source in each of the vertical columns, because they exist, and at least one in each of the horizontal rows, because they also exist. If you have just a couple sources that you think are in the middle but none exist either to the right or left of them, or up or down from them, you may be on the wrong track."88
Fake News
Since Trump started his successful 2016 campaign for president, the term fake news has become a popular way to describe a wide range of stories ranging from outright fabrications to news a person simply doesn't like. By 2020, the term fake news was so commonly used to refer to so many things that it became hard to know what it means. But there were least five common usages:
Satire-Fake news as an ironic term refers to stories that stretch the facts in order to make a joke or cultural criticism.
Mistakes and fabrication-Sometimes news stories have errors in them that eventually get corrected. Sometimes stories are fabricated by unethical reporters (you can read more about this topic in Chapter 15-Media Ethics).
Partisan clickbait-Sometimes websites make up sensational stories designed specifically to attract readers to their pages so that the readers will see the ads that appear with the fake articles. Oftentimes, if you dig deeply enough into these pages, you will see a mention that the stories are "fictional and presumably satirical news."
Foreign political manipulation-The Russian intelligence agencies have planted and amplified stories throughout the United States and Europe in order to try to manipulate elections. Some of these stories are made up, similar to partisan clickbait, while others are simply manipulated to appear more important and popular than they really are.
Media criticism-Politicians and others often use the term fake news to refer to news outlets they don't like as a general-purpose media criticism.
We will take much deeper look at the issue of fake news in Chapter 15-Media Ethics.
Based on the information in the textbook, how do liberals and conservatives differ in where they go for news, and how do those varied news sources differ from one another? For the second part of the question, what news sources do you trust? (By news sources, I do NOT mean simply social media such as Facebook or Twitter.) Do you think your media choices reflect your political point of view? Why or why not?