American Fake News Sites

            There seems to be quite a lot of interest in fake and satirical news. Some provide a disclaimer, warning its audience that this is all in jest – the rest I think must be kidding, but also cause me to seriously question the editor’s sanity.

            I have compared three fake news sites to determine their portrayal of and impression upon the world; The Onion, The National Report, and The Daily Currant. Of the three, only the Onion and Currant seem to have disclaimers revealing their satirical origins. Although the National Report doesn’t seem to have a disclaimer, it does share something interesting with the Currant; a comments section. These comment sections can be more entertaining than the articles themselves, although sometimes it does cause me to question humanity. The Currant’s comments seem to be evenly balanced (half satirical, half rants from gullible subjects), but while skimming through the comments for National Report pieces, I found something troublesome. All of the comments seem to be completely serious. Some are actually impressively in-depth analyses of the issues presented by the article; the only problem is a simple fact-check (and some common sense) reveals the article to be completely false and there is no disclaimer to prove otherwise. If this is the information some unassuming people unfortunately buy into then no wonder the tone of American political conversation seems to be so loud, stubborn and confusing. No one would ever want to admit their intellectual conversation is stimulated by information that doesn’t actually exist, but this makes me wonder how many people are proudly defending facts they have picked up from satirical and fake news. How many people don’t actually know what they’re talking about because they have unfortunately believed what they read on the internet? What if I have been one of those people?

Needless to say, I will be much more diligent about my fact-checking from now on.