“The Supreme Court has always required substantive communication or self-expression as a necessary condition for the application of the First Amendment. And simply charging more money, or providing faster speeds, is not a substantive communication,” writes law professor Stuart Benjamin.
Read More in The Washington PostCategory: Media & Journalism
Amazon Echo Plays A Role in Finding Political Truths
A team at the Duke Reporters Lab has been developing a fact-checking app for the Amazon Echo. Owners of the Echo can “ask the fact-checkers” about claims they hear on the news and social media. The development team is led by Bill Adair, professor of the practice of journalism and public policy and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning site PolitiFact. Student researcher Julia Donheiser and project manager Rebecca Ianucci join Adair to talk through the promise and pitfalls of the project.
Trump, ‘Fake News’ And Russia Coverage
President Donald Trump offers a consistently defiant response to allegations about the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 campaign: “fake news.” The Reporters’ Lab at Duke catalogued 111 Trump statements about “fake news” over the five months following his election. “Of all the times we found Trump referring to ‘fake news’ from Nov. 8 to April 7, 41 percent were either direct or indirect responses to news coverage about Russia’s role in the presidential campaign,” writes student researcher Riley Griffin.
Read More at Poynter.
Can President Trump Handle the Truth?
Since winning the White House, Donald Trump has employed the weapon of spreading falsehoods at specific times, often when he is losing control of the national story line. “These big falsehoods are different,” explains professor Bill Adair, who created PolitiFact, the fact-checking journalistic site that won a Pulitzer Prize. “They are like a neutron bomb. They just take over the discussion and obliterate a lot of other things that we should be discussing.”
Read More in TIME
Media Fact-Checking More Aggressive Under Trump
Journalism/public policy professor Bill Adair, who helped start the PolitiFact.com website, notes the growth of fact-checking during the fall campaign and challenged journalists to keep it up. Since Election Day, Adair says they have.
Read More in The New York Times
A Novel Way to Help Readers Spot Fake News
Jack Zhou, an instructor in environmental politics, says some occupants of so-called “news bubbles” may prefer to accept fake news as truth. “The state of fragmented media may dull the potential practical impact of inoculation messages, particularly in terms of the audiences serviced by those media,” says Zhou, who has researched the identity politics of climate change.
Read More in the Christian Science Monitor
How to Crack Down on Fake News
“Our best option is to tailor laws and design institutions with the goal of containing fakery and fraud, an objective that depends as much on the operation of social norms and shaming techniques as it does on formal penalties and the cultivation of savvier consumers of products, investment pitches and news,” writes history professor Edward Balleisen.
Keep on Fact-Checking!
It’s been a banner year for running down political falsehoods. But the real challenge begins once politicians start legislating, writes Bill Adair.
Read more in the New York Times
