There are many fake news real empires including all the newspapers that published the WMD and Gulf of Tonkin and Syria chemical weapons/caliphate etc. stories:
Stories 1 and 3 are about one fantasist who managed to trick a bunch of regular news outlets.
Story 2 is about a single flawed report from the BBC.
You can sit back and complain that not enough checking is being done by reporters and editors at mainstream media sites, and you would be right; the pressure is always on reporters and editors to get the story out and move on to the next one; the news cycle has got shorter and at the same time budgets have got tighter.
But an occasional failing to meet high standards like that is a million miles away from deliberately setting up a ring of supposedly independent web sites with the intent of pushing lies 24x7 and carefully calculating how to get as many people as possible to believe in those lies.
And that is different how exactly from the advertisement industry, which pushes trash nobody really needs?
Not to mention the secondary industry of fake reviews latched onto that.
Not really meant as what about, because at the end of the day it is the same annoying shit almost everybody seems to accept as necessary evil, that's just the way it works, yada yada.
edit: Put another way, every channel is oversaturated with noise. No Signal anymore, except for Virtue maybe. I don't give a shit. Just bad entertainment.
Mainstream media clearly labelled their adverts (and BTW the BBC doesn't carry them at all). They also don't carry fake reviews. Fake reviews are the kind of thing that made money for Hacker X.
Doesn't matter. The beeb carried fake-news, though. And isn't neutral. At least not nowadays. Maybe that was different a long time ago. Why is it so hard to accept that you can't trust anyone? Is there an urge to believe which I seem to lack?
The BBC is right now an arm of the Tory government with very little editorial independence. I hope a future Labour government swiftly replaces the editorial staff to ensure independence and institutes mechanisms to prevent such hijacking from ever happening again.
Stories 1 and 3 are about one fantasist who managed to trick a bunch of regular news outlets.
Story 2 is about a single flawed report from the BBC.
You can sit back and complain that not enough checking is being done by reporters and editors at mainstream media sites, and you would be right; the pressure is always on reporters and editors to get the story out and move on to the next one; the news cycle has got shorter and at the same time budgets have got tighter.
But an occasional failing to meet high standards like that is a million miles away from deliberately setting up a ring of supposedly independent web sites with the intent of pushing lies 24x7 and carefully calculating how to get as many people as possible to believe in those lies.