With the fake news controversy bubbling over following the released list of web sites said to peddle false information composed by a liberal professor, a right-wing pundit and InfoWars contributor responded with a YouTube tirade aimed at the “mainstream” media.
Paul Joseph Watson focuses his rant against what he perceives as hypocrisy within the list. Among the sites named was his employer, InfoWars, as well as Breitbart News and The Blaze. The conservative commentator then mentioned some of the errors in reporting from left-leaning and more mainstream news sources over the past few years, like the Rolling Stone now-retracted story about rape at the University of Virginia.
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Many other right-of-centre media organizations have joined in Watson’s complaint. The libertarian magazine and news site Reason took issue with what the list considered examples of mainstream and reliable sources. The list ranked these examples based on user engagement on the “Facebook” social media platform, which is owned by Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB).
The top two mainstream news stories in the list were then called out for being essentially pro-Hillary Clinton opinion pieces. The top “real news” story was: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” As the headline suggests, this is a liberal opinion piece, complaining that the media doesn’t report enough on Trump’s scandals.
No. 2 on the list of “real news” stories was “Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton.” This is a rambling screed claiming that people only dislike Clinton because she is a woman. (Source: “This Professor’s List of ‘Fake News’ Sites Goes Predictably Wrong,” Reason November 17, 2016.)
While the list is by no means binding, it was sent out to act as a guide for Facebook and other large online media companies that are progressively playing a bigger role in how we find and consume news.
This has ignited a heated debate over just what responsibility Facebook (often implicated as the main target in need of protection against fake news, due to its growing presence as a news distributor) has to the public to ensure that false news is not given prominent positions on people’s feeds.
The list has since been pulled offline due to threats to the professor who put it together, as well as her students.
