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Longtime newsman talks ‘fake news’

AMHERST – Once we sat in front of our TVs and watched anchors tell us the news. Many of us read a daily paper, and we trusted the newscasters and reporters to give us the truth as they knew it.

The idea that any of that news could be deliberatively false was inconceivable.

Sure, fake news was a staple of supermarket tabloids, but most people knew they were for fun and they had little impact on public opinion anyway.

Then along came the Internet and everything changed.

Randall Mikkelsen is a managing editor at Thomson Reuters, and before that a reporter who covered the fall of the Soviet Union, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the war on terrorism and other major stories. He also was a front-row member of the White House Press Corps for nearly seven years.

During his recent slide presentation at the Amherst Town Library, Mikkelsen explained how to tell real from the fake news, how to recognize distortion, propaganda, and outright lies in an information landscape dominated by social media.

“We can’t just count on Walter Cronkite to give us a straightforward picture” anymore, he said.

Fake news, as Mikkelsen defined it, is knowingly false or misleading, appears to be real, is spread through social media and includes business and science news as well as political stories.

They flood the Internet when there is breaking news, Mikkelsen said, because “people fall for them hook, line and sinker.”

After the election last November, for example, he was looking through news sites and found a story that said Donald Trump had won both the popular and electoral college vote, half of that claim clearly false, yet “nevertheless it was on top of the Google news feed.”

Some recent headlines in the fake category:

“Black Lives Matter thugs block emergency crews for hurricane victims.”

“Scientists find roots that kill 98 percent of cancer cells in 48 hours.”

And providing an economic base for some of this specious news are companies like Chrysler, said Mikkelsen as he showed a salacious headline about Hillary Clinton and Yoko Ono accompanied by ads for Dodge Ram.

And then there is a phony newspaper called the New York Journal that “reported” that President Obama was refusing to leave office after the election.

Another one said the leader of the Klu Klux Klan was picked to head the Department of Education. There were ads for Walgreens next to those false stories.

How to tell when stories are false, especially when the website has the look of the real thing?

Be alert for emotive words and phrases like“are you glad?” or “prepare to be infuriated.” Words like that “are a sign that somebody is trying to manipulate your emotions,” Mikkelsen said.

And legitimate news organizations are careful to report and correct errors, and they have recognizable Internet addresses, URLs. Politico is a legitimate news source, but “politicot.com” is not.

Between real and fake news, he said, there can be misleading layers of biased news. For example, opinion columns in the New York Times are easily understood to be legitimate opinions when they’re read in the paper or on the Time’s website. But when people spread them through the Internet, the columns lose that opinion label and things get murkier.

Fighting back

There are now blogs and publications devoted to separating the good from the bad, and Mikkelsen provided the audience with a media bias “cheat sheet” from a blog titled “All Generalizations are False.”

It shows mainstream sources like the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and the BBC all staying pretty much in the “fact reporting” category, with minimal partisan bias.

That group also includes network newscasts, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times and local newspapers.

The ratings go from green (for news), to yellow (fair interpretations of news), to orange (unfair interpretation of the news) to red (nonsense, damaging to public discourse).

Within the yellow rectangle are The Atlantic and New Yorker, both skewing liberal, the National Review, skewing conservative and the Economist, representing mainstream opinion.

The Wall Street Journal is labeled “skews conservative, but still reputable.”

Labeled “hyper-partisan liberal-fair opinion” is Mother Jones and MSNBC. CNN is on the boundary between “skews liberal” and “mainstream, with fair and unfair interpretations.”

The Drudge Report is rated “hyper-partisan conservative, with unfair interpretations.”

Beitbart News is squarely in the “conservative-utter garbage category. In “liberal-utter garbage” is Palmer Report, Patribiotics and U.S. Uncut.

Fox News hangs on the border between “unfair interpretation” and “conservative-utter garbage.”

The chart can be found at www.allgeneralizationsarefalse.com.

Mikkelsen’s presentation kicked off the library’s “Exploring the Truth” series for adults. For more information, call 673-2288 or go to the library’s website.

Kathy Cleveland can be reached at 673-3100 or kcleveland@cabinet.com.