How We Ended Up Here: A Brief History Of “Fake News”, And The Role Of FaceBook
With major media outlets having launched their campaign against fake news, which can be seen in in action in the screengrab below in which ABC News is disputing a news item…
You can see the Facebook “fake news” warning label in action here — “disputed by ABC News” https://www.facebook.com/Bipartisanism/posts/1226204234123249?mc_cid=ac1a251744&mc_eid=b08cb83114 …
… we wanted to share with our readers an insightful “tweetstorm” by Matt Stoller who goes through the history of not only the so-called “fake news” phenomenon, which is nothing new, but the recent evolution of the “news” business model, to observe how we ended up with Facebook effectively dictating what is and isn’t news.
By Matt Stoller:
Fake news was a core concern of New Dealer media reformers. This is part of a statement I found in the Patman archives.
Newspapers owned by reactionary publishers constantly made things up about New Dealers. Like that Congressman didn’t pay taxes.
Patman’s particular newspaper was called the Paris News. It was, as he put it, ‘absentee owned’. This is a core concept.
Absentee ownership meant that the owners didn’t pay attention to how their institutions affected people where those owners didn’t live.
It didn’t matter to a New York news magnate whether info put out by his chain about Paris, TX was true. He didn’t live there.
The basic idea behind media and telecom reforms was to keep institutions local, and keep them decentralized.
Multiple structural barriers were organized to preserve truth. Newspaper unions, for one, fought publishers over editorial independence
A diversity of news sources, like union newspapers and newspapers in lots of languages, was another.
The Communications Act of 1934 was a key law to block control of our telephone system by AT&T.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
