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As recent as the mid-2000s, when it came to be used in relation to satirical TV shows such as The Daily Show (which has been airing since 1996) and The Colbert Report (2005- 2014), the term ‘fake news’ even had a mildly progressive ring to it. Mimicking the spin and double-speak of politicians and corporations, which often goes unchallenged on mainstream news media, this TV format has been credited with “conveying real messages”: “As fake news, it satirizes traditional news by reporting in a style similar to network and cable TV news, but it amplifies their biases, mistakes, and deficiencies to ensure that viewers hear them loud and clear” (Gettings 2007, pp. 26- 27). Throughout, “various cues let the audience draw the line pretty clearly between the fake and the real, and the moderately attentive viewer leaves the show better informed about the world, especially the political climate and current state of the media” (ibid.). In satirizing the shortcomings of traditional news media, the “fake news” of The Daily Show “necessitates assumptions about some kind of authentic or legitimate set of news practices” (Baym 2005, p. 262); in other words, it presupposes a certain level of media literacy on the part of its viewers. Instead, it has come to be associated with (often anonymous) sources that spread falsehoods by manipulating their consumers’ emotions and tapping into deeply held partisan beliefs. Indeed, legitimate concerns about the trustworthiness of (putative) news sources, which originally motivated the introduction of the term ‘fake news’, are at risk of being drowned out by tactical usage of the phrase in order to cast aspersions on legitimate news organizations. Thus, as Matthew Dentith has recently argued, “the threat that is accusations of ‘That’s just fake news’ comes out of worries that it is […] merely a rhetorical device used by the powerful to crush dissent” (2017, p. 65). Dentith even goes so far as to define fake news as “an allegation that some story is misleading” (p. 66; italics added). On this account, ‘fake news’ would refer not to the misleading claim itself, but to an appeal to the allegedly misleading nature of a claim—that is, it would be a rhetorical device for undermining a given claim’s authoritative status by alleging that it “lacks some context or additional piece of information which, when revealed, undermines either its truth value, or saliency to some broader claim” (ibid). While I find Dentith’s suggestion intriguing, I do believe it puts the cart before the horse: arguably, both historically and as a sociocultural phenomenon, the emergence of fake news as a genre of purported factual assertions preceded the emergence of the epithet ‘fake news’ as a tactical way of slandering one’s opponents. I shall briefly return to this point in Section 5. For now, in what follows, the main focus will be on fake news as a class of purportedly factual claims that are epistemically deficient (in a way that needs to be specified), rather than as an accusatory speech act.
(Fragment from “Fake News: A Definition”, by Exel Gelfert, Informal Logic, Vol.38, N°.1, pp. 84-117, 2018. URL: http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informallogic/article)
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