President Donald Trump’s list of fake news award winners failed to impress as it was mostly a compilation of reporting errors corrected after publication. And Trump’s first place winner was from The New York Times, a Paul Krugman op-ed that the stock market would fall after Trump’s election. As a prediction, it should not be included as fake news. (Vox, January 17, 2018, by Jen Kirby and Libby Nelson)
The fake news awards are widely viewed as an escalation of Trump’s attack on the news media while his supporters welcomed the list as a playful jab at inaccurate and unfair reporting. The Republican Party noted that with the list, traffic on their website was “off the charts.” (The Telegraph, January 18, 2018, by Ben Riley-Smith and Chris Graham)
Jeb Lund, NBC News, January 18, 2018, sees hypocrisy in Trump’s list in that it was mostly reporting errors that were corrected, but that Trump himself is constantly spewing false statements he feels no obligation to correct. Lund found particularly galling the listing of Russia collusion as false news in the face of growing evidence of that collusion.
Daniel Funke, Poynter Institute, January 17, 2018, argues that Trump’s awards contribute to the public’s uncertainty about which sources they can trust and that 42 percent of Republicans think that accurate stories about certain politicians or groups are necessarily fake news with 17 percent of Democrats of the same mind. “That’s partially why media and misinformation experts have even advocated for journalists to stop using the term [fake news] altogether,” writes Funke, “in order to prevent its further weaponization and improve clarity in our reporting. Trump’s awards are newsworthy for their attack on the press, but cast further doubt on our collective capacity to discuss solutions to a specific form of misinformation, while further exacerbating the climate of confusion and distrust in journalism.”
For recent FAC coverage related to this issue, click here and here.