Accurate News

The dotard in the White House tried to list fake news items on the GOP web site which promptly crashed a couple of times.  The items included a few know instances of media mistakes and one was an opinion piece which by definition is not news.

Looking at the things included, in the list, most of them were of little consequence in the first place, did it matter it someone did or did not shake the dotard's hand or if a bust was or was not removed from the oval office?

If these are the examples of fake news that they could come up with, I would argue it demonstrates the fact that the vast majority of items are actually accurate and when a mistake occurs it is quickly corrected.

Per a PBS-Marist Poll 58% of respondents trust their favorite news outlet more than the dotard with slightly less than a third going the other way. 

Our mainstream media has always had many checks and rules in place to report accurately.  Of course mistakes happen, but they are relatively rare and normally quickly corrected.

There is of course a need to distinguish between fact and opinion and much of what is in the media is opinion and not required to conform to the same standards.  Some of the people who have popular opinion shows purport to report facts on occasion and those should be held to the same journalistic standards as regular reporting but generally aren't.

You can strive to be accurate or you can strive to avoid legal penalties, the two things are different.

Unfortunately we have a ton of new media and much of it doesn't try to be accurate, only beyond prosecution.

This creates some of the sense that fake news is prevalent, and in some cases it is, but it is partly our responsibility to know who is publishing the item and what standard they use.

It isn't that hard most of the Times.