After reading the following article one wonders just how passive US news organisations are generally in spreading false news in addition to Tweets by Trump. Publishers know that some copy sells better than others. Additional considerations play into it, things that are much more sinister and originating from higher levels of politcal control.
(Twitter accounts managed by the selected news outlets did not label Trump’s statements as false in the body of the tweet.
This is a problem, the authors write, because of research that says headlines embedded in social media posts are often as far as readers get, resulting in the passive spread of misinformation on the part of new organizations.
“We have been covering this phenomenon for more than a decade,” Gertz says. “I think the general way journalists construct articles doesn’t work given what we know about how people process information. The Trump phenomenon has made this a more pressing concern because it’s so clear that Trump says things that aren’t true over and over, yet journalists have not incorporated that into their general practice.”)
At the same time as I was looking at this, I was listening to an Ideas show on Bellingcat. From passive misinformation to big data analytics. Using technology to rhetorically gloss or deepen.
Had a passing awareness until this editorial that Pierre Karl Peladeau (net worth 1.8 billion USD) and Quebecor own the very popular and influential nationalist newspaper Le Journal de Montreal, the largest in Quebec with approximately 250,000 subscribers, call it Fox News North.
https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/macpherson-quebecs-fox-news-only-bigger
The JdM and the Gazette, Quebecor and Postmedia, two peas in a pod.
Facebook continues to enable propagandists and good journalism suffers…
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/how-facebook-screwed-us-all/