Fake News Week 10

Cameron Somers
Nov 1 · 3 min read

Fake news has plagued our society for some time now. Information that is stretched or completely fabricated. As someone who wants to be prosperous in the news industry, this sickens me. Fake news is slanderous and can lead to people's careers being scared or heavily damaged.

News is becoming more and more hard to come by and news only stays alive if there is an audience. When journalists loss that audience's interest some journalists resort to fabricating news stories to be more appealing to people and to get the audience to click on the story. As journalists, our first obligation is to the truth and the people. When we lose those aspects we lose our integrity and all we worked hard to accomplish.

News is constantly a huge meme nowadays because of how many journalists have lost sight of delivering news that is informative and important. This is due to some people's ignorance and gullibility for spotting fake news. The fact that there are many stereotypes of reported and news sources that give journalists a bad name is not a good look at any journalist.

Breitbart is definitely an interesting sight, to say the least. When I first got on the sight I was immediately spammed with ads about trump and the ad asking more my age. There were also ads about keeping low blood sugar and hot selling Christmas gifts. I feel his site has ads directed towards people who are older and gullible to fall for fake news or fake ads. The sight also seemed to be demographic towards the republican side as I stumbled upon a picture of a young attractive girl wearing a Trump hat. The ad read to “get this hat for free”

I clicked on a story titled “Patriotic Philanthropist David Rubenstein Donates $10 Million to Thomas Jefferson Memorial”. But the first thing I noticed was the ads changed on the sides. There were now NRA ads and even more Trump ads. I did some digging on the Internet and found no such story on David Rubenstein.

The Next story I attempted to research was titled “ Inmates Overpower Guards in Mexican Cartel Prison Riot”. Again I scrouged through the internet and Breitbart was the only location that has the story. This throws up huge red flags. If I can only find a story from one source there is a bigger chance that it was stretched or fabricated. I then tried to dive in deeper. In the story, there was a pice of what was said to be three dead guards mutilated. When I did the image search Breitbart was the only place on the entire internet that has used this photo. Not saying that this hurts the in fact I think it might help as they have photos that are not copied and pasted from google images.

I did find a story on twitter with some other photos of the police officers used. The twitter account seemed like a political spam account that had around five thousand posts to one thousand followers. The whole page was in Spanish so I had to translate it but most of the posts were pictures of fake news and captions promoting a Spanish Jourlnist with a few thousand followers.

I didn’t have much success being able to compare stories that were fake and true but I did think finding theses one source stories that could very well be fabricated opened my eyes about how people see the world. Everything about Breitbart is extremely political which I can see why this could relate to what we were just talking about on Facebook.

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