Quote Originally Posted by surviva316 View Post

Just to use CNN as an example. Again, I hate them, probably tuned into them once since the Obama/Romney election and that was on November 8th. I do use their website for their exit polls, but other than that, I don't use them, they suck, they are sensationalist with very little journalistic integrity and if the channel and website fell out of existence, I'd be better off for it.

But if we're comparing their standards to fake news? If we're setting the bar all the way down there? Then Christ. Just take the dossier as an example. If they had written that themselves (maybe stitching some half-truths together from some random shit they've heard on various grapevines) and then published it, that'd be fake news. They didn't fabricate the dossier. They got it from a source. In fact, they were able to verify that the source was a member of the UK intelligence community. They tried to verify the legitimacy of the source beyond that. They were able to do so circumstantially when they learned from multiple sources that the CIA was briefing the standing POTUS and the president elect on the contents of a dossier that was likely to be the one they held.

... and it still didn't meet their standards for publication (I think a few people, including the president elect, got a little confused between them and Buzzfeed).

Am I patting them on their back? No. But if we're starting at ground zero and working our way up, we are far up from the ground.

This goes back to throwing the baby out with the bathwater with this whole anti-establishment thing. You should absolutely be skeptical of information you receive. You should carefully read what the source is, what other outlets are corroborating it, what the other side's rebuttal would be, etc. But when people shout "fake news" at everything, they aren't being skeptical. They're not using their critical thinking faculties at all. They're just blanket ignoring information for lazy and convenient excuses.
I can see that. The "fake news" thing is a culture war right now. Each side is fighting to pin that label to the other side. Reasoning like the type you explained gets lost in the noise of battle.

Regarding my claim that CNN is fake news, I have seen them on more than one occasion change something Trump said to make it look like he said something else (I couldn't source this again if I tried though). From the perspective you are arguing, I can see how the case can be made that CNN reporting something like "hands up don't shoot" isn't fake news since they reported on what they were told. But that isn't necessarily the reason people call it "fake news." Some call them fake because of how readily they reports on things that support their narrative that end up being fake. Perhaps a way of thinking of it is that different media organizations that engage in fakery do so in different ways.