CBC...Time to challenge their fake news!

I don't like the term "fake news" and it disgusts me that someone on babble would use that term.

all media coverage has a bias. There are topics that don't get coverage because it doesn't seem newsworthy even though we think they are important to cover.

the term "fake news" was made up by Donald Trump and people who absorb that term into their vocabulary are endorsing the validity of Trump's attacks on the media.

I prefer the term jingoistic, yellow journalism. America's finest papers have always provided biased coverage that occasionally contains outright lies. The vaunted American love for freedom of the press was a lie right from the get go. One of the first thing that happened when the colonials revolted was that every loyalist press was burnt to the ground and many of the publishers were murdered.

Etymology and early usage

The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical usage often refers specifically to this period. Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well. An English magazine in 1898 noted, "All American journalism is not 'yellow', though all strictly 'up-to-date' yellow journalism is American!"[5]

The term was coined by Erwin Wardman, the editor of the New York Press. Wardman was the first to publish the term but there is evidence that expressions such as "yellow journalism" and "school of yellow kid journalism" were already used by newsmen of that time. Wardman never defined the term exactly. Possibly it was a mutation from earlier slander where Wardman twisted "new journalism" into "nude journalism".[6] Wardman had also used the expression "yellow kid journalism"[6] referring to the then-popular comic strip which was published by both Pulitzer and Hearst during a circulation war.[7] In 1898 the paper simply elaborated: "We called them Yellow because they are Yellow."[6]

There's a big and dangerous flaw in this line of reasoning. Of course all media has a bias, and of course all media to a greater or lesser degree passes on flawed or outright false information. Usually that varies reporter to reporter, unless one wants to believe the conspiracy that it is all controlled.

So given the choice of believing all of it or none of it, most people just opt for believing what aligns with their values and politics. They don't do the work of comparison and verification. Especially when it comes to checking if sources they disagree with might be telling part of the truth. If you don't check those sources, and your own blind spots, you probably aren't reading for comprehension.

And most significantly nowadays, there is the propagandist line that you can't believe any of it. Of course there is a clear motive behind that, because if you can't verify or trust anything it is easier to believe what you are told.

As for the notion that we can just throw out these large institutions, the problem is that small media don't have the resources to conduct a year-long investigation like the one into Trump's family business dealings. Not to knock alternative media, because they are necessary, but so are the large ones with the resources to finance big projects and fight big court battles. Alternative media also wouldn't have much of the information they use without the work done by large international media.

A good remedy to this cynical line of thinking is Doris Kearns Goodwin's book The Bully Pulpit, part of which is about Theodore Roosevelt's relationship with progressive media at the turn of the last century.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-bully-pulpit-roosevelt-taft-...

The saying is waaaaaaaay overused, and there are people who believe and have internalized it as normal and legit in any context.

When Hillary Clinton used the two words, it was poignant. Then Trump uses the term and it sounds plain dumb.

What a reduction for anyone to continue with Trump's baseless mentality and legitimize his hateful attacks against the press and his annoying sayings.