Mardi Link: Researching, and fact-checking, fake news

Former President Donald Trump, since at least 2019, has falsely taken credit for coining the term “fake news.”

“I call the fake news now the corrupt news because fake isn’t tough enough,” Trump said during an October 2019 press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinistö.

“I’m the one that came up with the term — I’m very proud of it,” Trump said, “but I think I’m gonna switch it to corrupt news.”

A few minutes of easy research proves his vocabulary claim is more than a century too late.

In 1891, a Los Angeles Times writer used the words “fake news” to refer to the reputation Willcox, Arizona, residents had for spreading falsehoods.

And, in 1895, the editor of a popular trade journal, Electricity, told readers, “We never copy fake news.”

Just because Trump took credit for something he did not invent, that doesn’t mean the thing itself wasn’t real then — and isn’t real now.

It is real. Experts are even studying it.

In 2014, five years before Trump’s press conference with Niinistö — news editor Craig Silverman was running a research project at the Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism to track fake news.

“I began using that term once the work got underway and I came across sites like National Report that were designed to look like real news websites, published articles written in the news style, but everything on the site was false,” Silverman told a writer with The Washingtonian.

(National Report acknowledges it publishes satire, and that readers are to presume its stories are “fake news.”)

Satire and fake news aren’t the same thing, though. And a satire website using the term fake news is . . . satire.

Fake news is news that purports to be real, and isn’t. Corrupt news is fake news with a fraudulent financial component.

Court filings show recent fake news and other unethical accusations were lodged in various courts this spring against three media companies known for their pro-Trump coverage.

In April, The Gateway Pundit, an influential and far-right news site, filed for bankruptcy after being sued for stories claiming that election workers committed fraud.

The election workers said they faced harassment and threats for doing their jobs.

Among the plaintiffs are Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, Georgia election workers who previously won a $148-million verdict in a defamation suit against former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, according to Reuters, said the bankruptcy was a standard reorganization that many businesses use, that it did not signal culpability, and blamed the lawsuit on “progressive liberal lawfare attacks.”

Then in May, a different media company that distributes “2000 Mules,” a film by far-right political commentator Dinesh D’Souza that purported to uncover evidence of ballot fraud, pulled the film from distribution.

Salem Media Group had been sued and, in response, issued an apology to a Georgia man shown in the film putting ballots in a drop box – which D’Souza, in a voice-over, said was a crime and that the ballots contained fraudulent votes.

Instead, an investigation revealed the man was actually delivering ballots for his own family, which is legal under Georgia law.

And finally in June, federal agents arrested the now former chief financial officer of The Epoch Times, a global news site, and charged him with money laundering — at least $67 million, the agents said, in prepaid debit cards, stolen personal information and fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, when bankers asked questions about the company’s finances, Weidong “Bill” Guan, who on June 3 pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan courtroom, said the money was donations from supporters.

Reporters from legitimate news outlets, whether those outlets are small and local like the one I work for, or large with a national or international audience, bear some responsibility for the spread of fake news.

We were slow to call it out and even slower to use words like lies or liar.

And we’ve since learned that trying to discredit fake news is not a straightforward endeavor.

By stating that a claim is fake, we can inadvertently achieve just the opposite. Our reporting could simply remind readers of the original false claim, and appear to confirm it.

If you, for example, believe the 2020 election results in Antrim County were stolen, despite a livestreamed recount of paper ballots, a circuit judge’s decision upheld by the Michigan Court of Appeals, and findings by data scientists and voting experts, then you probably also believe local media tried to cover it up.

Nope — more fake news.

News consumers, too, should shoulder some responsibility for the rise of fake news.

Clicking share on a conspiracy meme can make people feel powerful, for a few seconds. It also makes them complicit – especially since fact-checking is available to anyone, anytime, online, for free.

One place for this, FactCheck.org, is updated regularly. Reuters also has a fact-check site that focuses mostly on social media.

I tried out FactCheck for myself, by asking a seemingly innocuous question unrelated to elections: Was the former president’s statement about electricity-generating windmills — “They say the noise causes cancer” — true?

Nope — fake news.

Do your own research, sure. But do your own fact-checking, too, because artificial intelligence, and some partisans, aren’t going to.

There are no innocuous questions anymore.

That whooshing sound you hear when you click “share” on a lie isn’t just a sound effect — it’s the trust we used to have in our leaders and one another, disappearing into the void.