Fake news is all over the real news. There's fake news that's completely fabricated, and there's fake news that's opinion claiming to be news, and there's fake news that publishes the lies of others without contradicting them. These things almost certainly turned the 2016 election, and probably affected several before that.
The government can't stop people from saying whatever they want, and rightly so. But could the government put legal limits on the use of the term "news"? We do
that in all sorts of other arenas. You can sell all the partially
hydrogenated palm oil you want, but you don't get to call it "chocolate" unless it has at least some minimum cocoa content.
What would those limits look like?
News has to be accurate, at least to some reasonable degree. Outright fabrications must not be allowed, and mistakes must be corrected rapidly, preferably in the same size and context in which they were made.
Opinions are also not news. Opinion discussion should never get the label "news", or at least it should be less than some small defined fraction of the content published under "news" and clearly marked as such.
Quoting or airing the statements of others is also not "news" unless it's fact-checked. If Donald Trump is on CNN telling lies for an hour, it's little different to the public than if Wolf Blitzer was saying the same things. CNN is still putting their name on the content and calling it "news".
Or perhaps we should even include funding sources. Any organization whose funding is directly proportional to the number of subscribers or viewers it has, has a clear motivation to lie to you to keep you interested. Unfortunately that eliminates 95% of news sources. Or is that unfortunate?
Any organization or outlet violating these rules would still be able to publish. They just wouldn't be able to call themselves "news", because they wouldn't be. We would have the "Fox Political Commentary Channel". Basically, truth in advertising.
Is there some reason this is a bad idea?
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