10 Amazing Ways You Can Prevent Click Bait and Fake News

Hello and welcome to the Sensibly Speaking Podcast, brought to you on iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play as well as here on YouTube with video. With Black Friday just having ended and Christmas season now upon us, I want to first plug my Critical Merchandise site, which has a slew of fun and informative designs that I think some of you might want to check out as gift-giving ideas. The link is in the description box below, shop.spreadshirt.com/chrisshelton and the commissions I earn from that help support me and my channel so I can continue bringing you this amazing and awesome content.

Speaking of which, this week I’ve put together a whole lot of good information for you about the media and how to do a little critical thinking about your news sources. We’ve been seeing seeing a lot of articles and news this past week or so about the subject of fake news and whether or not it influences our elections or other parts of our lives. Well, the obvious answer is “Yes, of course it does” but it may be debatable as to whether this factor alone is responsible for who we put in office.

I wanted to talk about this, though, because you can’t be very sensible or smart in your decisions if you are operating on false or misleading information. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. So let’s get down into some deep and gory details about this, huh?

News – what is it?

News is information about current events. The word itself is simply the plural of “new” and the idea of spreading what’s new has been around probably since we first started communicating. News was originally broadcast through word of mouth but with the invention of printing presses we started printing papers that had news on them and as our ability to communicate farther and faster has vastly improved since then with the invention of radio, television, computers and the internet. Now any piece of information you want to know can be transmitted at nearly the speed of light around the world in mere seconds.

As the potential has risen to get more and more information faster and faster, we as individuals are often in a position of sensory and data overload. Our ability to intake and comprehend information has not evolved at the same rate as our communications systems. At this point, it is simply impossible for any one of us to gain a fully comprehensive understanding of every subject known to man, or even a small percentage of those subjects. Science, industry and war have pushed our imaginations and innovation forward at a rate unprecendented at any earlier time in our history.

Yet if we can’t keep up with this as a whole, if we can’t keep our fingers on the pulse of what is going on and have an accurate and fairly good understanding of our immediate and distant environments, we can’t tell where we are going or how we are going to get there. In other words, to the degree we are misinformed is the degree we will make bad judgements or choose the wrong path for our life. So we have to figure out how to catch up with what’s happening and we have to know how to do this quickly and easily.

Development of News and Information Media

Let’s talk about the development of newspapers and news media organizations. I think a big picture, long-term view of this is important to understand that the problems we are facing with news today are nothing new. In fact, I was surprised at some of what I found looking deeper into this history.

People have always been curious about what’s going on around them. Once we started gathering into villages, towns and cities, systems were setup to get information, whether it was as simple as people asking travelers what was going on over the hill to establishing specific places where news would be spread, such as the Greek forum and Roman baths or, later English coffeehouses, Islamic mosques, roadside inns and the like.

Up until the invention of newspapers in the 17th century, written public notices or things that were considered important enough to tell everyone were written in official government edicts and bulletins and couriers would travel around and spread the news. In the 1300s, the whole system of town criers was well established but if you look back in history, ancient Egypt had the earliest known courier service on record, and this was very likely based on a much older practice, such as in Mesopotamia where they would carve things like the Code of Hammurabi onto stone tablets and slabs and put them on display for everyone to see. Caeser did the same thing when he was the Emperor of Rome. With the town criers, both in eastern and western cultures, they would not just read out government notices but also do announcements about petty crimes or missing slaves as well as requests for information. And get this: some of those town criers would be paid by local businesses to include advertisements. Old school Madison Avenue tactics.

Then and now, knowledge was power and people who were positioned in major cities and ran networks of couriers and news gatherers would be more on top of what was going on and therefore had the advantage over anyone not so well informed. It was really only people in power who had regular and routine access to the most fresh news and information. For example, the Rothschilds built up a banking empire throughout Europe and one of the key ways they were able to stay on top of the financial situation across their continent was their own internal systme of news couriers, who were faster and more reliable than military or government news sources.

Written news sources go back far earlier than the printing press. China appears to be the origin point for what we would today think of as a handwritten newspaper, such as the Spring and Autumn Annals which are a set of historical documents printed back in the 5th century BC and which recorded royal accessions, marriages, deaths, battles, natural disasters and that sort of thing. These weren’t handmade for common folk, but a lot of people in the Royal Court had access to them as a source of news and historical information and this kind of thing continued for centuries.

It was the invention of the printing press and the spread of paper, both from China, which really shook things up though. Simple wood blocks with letters or symbols on them had been in use for ink printing as far back as the third and maybe even second century AD in China. The concept spread through India to Europe where by 1300 it was a fairly common practice to print religious symbols on cloth. Movable type also came out of China around the year 1040 and spread to Europe by the late 14th century. Guttenberg and others in the mid-1400s developed the famous printing press we are familiar with today, opening up real mass printing for the first time.

In his book The Invention of News, author Andrew Pettegree said “…news first became a commercial commodity…in the eighty years between 1450 and 1530 following the invention of printing. During this period of technological innovation, publishers began to experiment with new types of books, far shorter and cheaper than the theological and scholarly texts that had dominated the market in manuscripts. These pamphlets and broadsheets created the oppportunity to turn the existing appetite for news into a mass market. News could become, for the first time, a part of popular culture.”

News then underwent a shift from factual and precise economic reporting, to a looser and fuller format. The first newspapers as such came out of Germany in the very early 1600s. The new format mashed together unrelated and perhaps dubious reports from far-flung locations.  Pettegree wrote “The news reporting of the newspapers was very different, and utterly unfamiliar to those who had not previously been subscribers to the manuscript service. Each report was no more than a couple sentences long. It offered no explanation, comment, or commentary. Unlike a news pamphlet the reader did not know where this fitted in the narrative – or even whether what was reported would turn out to be important.”

What’s more, the truthfulness of the reporting was also in question. Pettegree writes “Even as news became more plentiful in the sixteentha and seventeeth centuries, the problem of establishing the veracity of news reports remained acute. The news market – and by the sixteenth century it was a real market – was humming with conflicting reports, some incredible, some all too plausible: lives, fortunes, even the fate of kingdoms could depend on acting on the right information. The great events of history that pepper these pages were often initially mis-reported. In 1588 it was originally thought throughout much of continental Europe that the Spanish Armada had inflicted a crushing defeat on the English fleet; as in this case, the first definitive news was frequently outrun by rumour or wishful thinking, spreading panic or misjudged celebration. It was important to be first with the news, but only if it was true.”

We still have the exact same problems today. One of the first answers to this was to seek corroboration. Professional news men all the way back then learned to report news with caution and often said “this report is not yet confirmed” if they hadn’t yet verified it from more than one source.

But this had its own set of problems, since hearing the same story from different sources doesn’t necessarily guarantee it’s true at all. All those sources could have heard the same lie from the same source, or could only report what they themselves had seen or heard which might not have been the entire event, so key information could be missing which would change the whole picture.

In terms of making a profit on the news, this may surprise you, but the first people to make money selling news were a group of men in 16th century Italy who had their finger on the pulse of incoming and outgoing news from travelers, government sources and the like. They ran a shop of scribes who would churn out dozens of handwritten weekly briefing sheets which would be given for money to European leaders and advisors. The idea caught on and this was the birth of what we now refer to as news services.

For the common man, though, they didn’t have the money for this. The more common news pamphlets were not as well sourced and also started being used by government and religious leaders as a means to influence and sway public opinion. And the people were creating these news pamphlets wanted them to sell so they exagerrated the reports to make them sound more salacious.

Pettegree wrote about this:

“Competing for limited disposable cash among a less wealthy class of reader, the purveyors of the news pamphlets had a clear incentive to make these accounts as lively as possible. This raised real questions as to their reliability. How could a news report be trusted if hte author exaggerated to increase its commercial appeal?”

The influence of civic and government leaders on the news also became more prevalent with some governments such as England and France engaging in outright censorship through official decrees and orders which limited who could publish newspapers and all and what they could say.

In addition to official censorship, there were also underhanded methods used to influence news content. Daniel Defoe, the guy who wrote Robinson Cruesoe, first wrote essays for A Review of the Affairs of France and was secretly paid a retainer by English politicians to promote their policies. Sir Robert Walpole was the longest-running English Prime Minister in the 18th century. He handled press criticizing him by buying the newspapers and making them his own mouthpiece.

This was all before there was any profession we would recognize today as journalists. News came from a variety of common sources and the newspaper publishers would decide personally what to put in their papers based on their own discretion. Which also meant, of course, that if a politician or someone amongst the royalty didn’t like what a publisher was saying, they could potentially seek retribution through rough or even violent means.

For people who didn’t want slanted or biased news, they’d have to get it from multiple sources outside their own countries, where state censorship wasn’t happening.

In the United States, newspapers flourished following the Revolution and the concept spread even to the Middle East, although it didn’t really take root there for many decades because the Arab world has a stronger tradition of oral communication and didn’t really trust this new European news model.

Broadcast news on radio and then TV

Now that we’ve covered some early news history, let’s look at broadcast news and how this came about.

The electric telegraph was developed in the early 1800s and was seeing widespread use by the 1830s, allowing for the near instant communication across hundreds or even thousands of miles. Once the Transatlantic Cable was laid, news that had taken days to transmit took only hours. By 1903, Britain and the US completed connecting the entire world from Canada to Fiji and New Zealand and from the US to Hawaii and the Phillipines.

And this opened the door to a global news network to form, which it did. Wolff, Havas, and Reuters formed this news cartel, dividing up the global market into three sections, in which each had more-or-less exclusive distribution rights and relationships with national agencies. Due to the high cost of maintaining infrastructure, political goodwill, and global reach, newcomers found it virtually impossible to challenge the big three European agencies or the American Associated Press.

In 1904, the big three wire services opened relations with Vestnik, the news agency of Czarist Russia. After the Russian Revolution, this eventually became the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS)

The Chinese Communist Party created its news agency, the Red China News Agency, in 1931 and this became known as Xinhua in 1949.

These agencies all became major source of global news by reducing news events into “minute globules of news,” 20–30 word summaries which kept their reports simple and factual. Key facts appeared at the start of the text, with more and more details included as it went along. Many newspapers simply reprinted what they were getting direct from the wire.

And how did these news agencies make money? By providing special services to political and business clients. The wire services maintained close relationships with their respective national governments, which provided both press releases and payments.

No small part of the news that these services sent around was economic information and data necessary for transportation and logistics matters. This was crucial for international trade and the speed of the information had a lot to do with integrating foreign markets. As quoted from the book Trading Facts by Gerben Bakker: “In order to send goods to another area, merchants needed to know first whether in fact to send off the goods and to what place. Information costs and speed were essential for these decisions.”

Radio transmitted news started with the BBC in 1922, a completely state-run agency which initially catered to the upperclasses and made little effort to present itself as unbiased.

NBC and then CBS started up here in the US in 1926 and these broadcasts were supported with advertising dollars. The USSR, Germany and other countries soon followed suit, all using the radio to broadcast news and nationalist propaganda. By 1939, 58% of Americans surveyed by Fortune magazine considered radio more accurate than newspapers and 70% chose radio as their main news source. There were 30 stations in 1920 but this expanded to a thousand in the 1930s. It’s not hard to see why radio became the preferred medium for news since it could provide near-live coverage of historic events as they happened such as the crash of the Hindenburg, the Allied Invasion of Normandy and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Radio also gave rise to a new breed of news journalists – the radio news announcers and correspondents. These would not just sit in a newsroom reading scripts, but were also sent out to report from the scene of the news itself, such as CBS radio’s Edward R. Murrow in 1940 reporting directly from a London rooftop during a night-time blitz attack or going up with a team of British airmen in Dec 1943 for a real bombing run. These reporters gave their news in clipped, sharp descriptions which made the listeners feel that they were getting the straight dope from someone who was really there.

There were also a very few women in this group, such as Dorothy Thompson, who was the only female reporter to interview Hitler and who later got kicked out of Germany for her antipathy to Nazis and Sigrid Shultz, who reported on the Allied landing in Normandy, the conquest of Germany and covered the Nuremberg trials.

The era of the television news was ushered in following the end of World War II and increased dramatically in the 1950s. The same broadcasting companies that ran radio here in the United States, took over the TV broadcasting and these were CBS, NBC and their new spinoff group ABC. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite were among the first war reporters to make the leap to TV.

As televisions became more ubiquitous, so too did TV news become more influential, more immediate and therefore more trusted by the public over print media and even over radio. The primary sources of information remained the news wire services, such as Reuters and the Associated Press. They hadn’t gone anywhere since they formed in the early 1900s but these were now being supplemented by TV correspondents and in-studio news anchormen. Their style of reporting the news in sharp detail without hinting as to their own personal feelings about the issues earned them the respect and trust of the public. It wasn’t just a marketing ploy but was actually true that Cronkite was thought of as “the most trusted man in America” in the 1960s and 70s.

Cronkite, for example, was the first reporter to bust in to live TV on November 22, 1963 to announce the news of President Kennedy having been shot only minutes before. Although broken up personally and in a bit of shock at the events unfolding literally as he was reading the news bulletins, Cronkite held it together and relayed the facts to a shocked world. Three days later, with the President dead, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald also dead, Cronkite offered these thoughts at the end of the nightly broadcast:

“It is said that the human mind has a greater capacity for remembering the pleasant than the unpleasant. But today was a day that will live in memory and in grief. Only history can write the importance of this day: Were these dark days the harbingers of even blacker ones to come, or like the black before the dawn shall they lead to some still as yet indiscernible sunrise of understanding among men, that violent words, no matter what their origin or motivation, can lead only to violent deeds? This is the larger question that will be answered, in part, in the manner that a shaken civilization seeks the answers to the immediate question: Who, and most importantly what, was Lee Harvey Oswald? The world’s doubts must be put to rest. Tonight there will be few Americans who will go to bed without carrying with them the sense that somehow they have failed. If in the search of our conscience we find a new dedication to the American concepts that brought no political, sectional, religious or racial divisions, then maybe it may yet be possible to say that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not die in vain. That’s the way it is, Monday, November 25, 1963.”

I would argue that this is not the kind of reporting we see much today. In fact, Cronkite announced his retirement in February 1980 and his last day as anchorman was March 6, 1981, less than a year after the launch of the first 24-hour cable news station, Ted Turner’s CNN. By 1991, the BBC had its competitor online, the BBC World Service Television, followed by Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, Sky News in Britain and Star TV in Asia. These 24-hour news services have completely changed the nature and content of broadcast news and not for the better.

How news is reported

So how is it determined what is news? What do we want to hear about and why?

Well, there have been some guidelines established over the years, some of which feed into our more base nature and some of which are hard standards to maintain some sort of integrity and truthfulness in reporting. Stories, for example, are supposed to contain the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why and how) and not leave any lasting or lingering questions.

In 1923, the American Society of Newspaper Editors set some rules for unbiased news reporting. Here are a couple:

“I. RESPONSIBILITY: The right of a newspaper to attract and hold readers is restricted by nothing but considerations of public welfare. The use a newspaper makes of the share of public attention it gains serves to determine its sense of responsibility, which it shares with every member of its staff. A journalist who uses his power for any selfish or otherwise unworthy purpose is faithless to a high trust.

“IV. SINCERITY, TRUTHFULNESS, ACCURACY: Good faith with the reader is the foundation of all journalism worthy of the name.

“1. By every consideration of good faith a newspaper is constrained to be truthful. It is not to be excused for lack of thoroughness or accuracy within its control, or failure to obtain command of these essential qualifies.

“2. Headlines should be fully warranted by the contents of the articles which they surmount.

“V. IMPARTIALITY: Sound practice makes clear distinction between news reports and expressions of opinion. News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.

“1. This rule does not apply to so-called special articles unmistakably devoted to advocacy or characterized by a signature authorizing the writer’s own conclusions and interpretation.”

These could be considered ethical guides and of course, have not been universally adopted by all nations or news agencies. Since the beginning, media have been used by some governments merely as an organ of the state to deliver propaganda to its citizens. The United States has freedom of speech and the press, but its media is not immune to government or corporate interference.

Also, and probably more important as far as what we are told, our human appetites for salacious tidbits and gossip feed a multi-billion dollar celebrity news industry and give us a lot of the reality TV, celebrity stalking and personality-based stories which dominate so much of the airwaves.

Yeah, we want to know what’s going on that might affect us in terms of new or changed laws or government programs, but we also want to know if Brad is cheating on Angelina or where the Kardashians are traveling to now. This isn’t really so different from Beatlemania in the 1960s and is not just an internet phenomenon.

For those reasons, news has developed to mostly aspects of reality which seem unusual, deviant, or out of the ordinary. Hence the famous dictum that “Dog Bites Man” is not news, but “Man Bites Dog” is. Also, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

It’s not that the news media don’t value impartiality, neutrality, and objectivity, but that the perception of these values has changed greatly over time as sensationalized ‘tabloid journalism’ has risen in popularity.

Professors Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have written about the propaganda model, which is a theory that says that because of the way in which news is structured now through advertising, concentration of ownership and government sourcing, it creates an inherent conflict of interest and that the actual interest of mass media is not delivering quality news to the public but selling products through its advertising. They proposed five filters which determine the type of news that is presented. These are:

1. Ownership, meaning that the corporations which own media outlets will censor or influence the news they report based on what is best for the corporation’s interests. If there is a conflict of interest between a news story and corporate profits, then they will have no choice but to filter the news to maximize profits, not tell the truth.

2. Advertising, meaning that since our business model for news is to sell advertising and make money from the advertisers, they could potentially have an interest in the style and content of how that news reporting is being done. Advertisers can act as a filter because if they feel a news story is going to conflict with or distract from their advertising, they can try to influence whether those stories are run by pulling their financial support to the news agency or try to change how the news is told so it doesn’t get in the way of their sales.

3. Sourcing, meaning that news media are dependent on sources besides their own reporters and investigators for news. If a source, such as a labor union or business, wanted to give slanted or biased information to the media and then the news reporter questions it or doubts it, this could cause that source to refuse to give any more information or news in the future. Either run what I tell you, or I won’t be telling you anything ever again, putting the news media in a bad spot because they might need to continue their relationships with that news source for future stories. This can act as another filter on what does or doesn’t get reported.

4. Flak, meaning negative reactions to news or media statements which can include letters, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, bills before Congress, etc. Business organizations regularly come together to create flak machines. One example of this is the Global Climate Coalition or GCC. This group was formed by fossil fuel and auto companies like Exxon, Texaco and Ford and exists only to attack the credibility of climate scientists and ayn of their “scare stories” about global warming.

5. The last is fear, meaning manufactured or created ideas of who or what we should be afraid of and react negatively to. For example, the idea that Saddam Hussein was anti-American and a collector of weapons of mass destruction influenced all of the media reporting about him leading up to the Gulf War. Here’s what Chomsky himself said about this fear filter: “So I think when we talked about the ‘fifth filter’ we should have brought in all this stuff — the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose… partly to get rid of people you don’t like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority.”

Citizen Journalism and Fake News

In addition to the advertising model and these other factors which have always had an influence on media to one degree or another, the internet has forced a new change on journalism and that is the emerging power of citizen journalists and bloggers. Unfortunately, this has been a real double-edged sword.

On one hand you have a network of people all over the world who are transmitting information that no reporter or journalist can easily have access to, such as what was happening on the ground during the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt. That on-site, eye-witness information is crucial to news media, yet all by itself, it doesn’t give any big picture perspective on what it is showing. Therefore, much citizen journalism is limited to immediate events only. Very few citizen journalists are trained or have the time to put together complete, contextually relevant news stories that give a truly comprehensive overview of what they are talking about. When the professional news organizations fail to collect this citizen journalist information as valid sources and compile them into a big picture view, they are falling down on their own jobs too. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with much of the reporting these days. The big news agencies have reduced their coverage to focus so much on what is going on right now now now and rarely back it up to give comprehensive overviews, which the citizen journalists are themselves rarely in a position to do either. So where the big media outlets could use these citizen journalists to enhance and detail their own reporting, too often nothing of the sort happens.

But what’s even worse now is how individuals who I can’t even call citzen journalists, but more accurately opportunists, use the internet and fake news sites to spread what they know is misinformation and outright yellow journalism in the same spirit as what William Randolph Hearst was so famous for back at the turn of the 20th century.

Yellow journalism was a term for sensationalized news stories told purely for the purpose of sucking in advertising dollars by selling lots and lots of newspapers. The truth in such cases always took a back seat to financial gains. While it’s been debunked that Hearst actually got the Spanish-American War started when he supposedly said to photographer Frederick Remington “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” it is true that Heart’s paper did do everything it could to incite and rile up passions in favor of Cuba and against Spain by publishing stories which were not very fact-based.

This of course opened the door to more and more tabloid journalism, as people simply came to expect that newspapers were not really a source for accurate news anymore. Remember, shortly after radio started it didn’t take long for people to believe radio more than newspapers, and that was definitely a reflection of how yellow journalism had tainted the whole medium.

Now from a psychological perspective, there are two factors which are very important to how we find and accept news and information. Negative news has a higher value to us than positive news. The evolutionary reason for this probably has to do with the fact that it’s important for us to quickly focus attention on, evaluate and respond to threats. A strong negative stimulus is something we avoid, like if we are confronted by someone pointing a gun at us. We will immediately and without hesitation try to get out of the way of the gun and get out of that situation immediately. But if the stimuls is less negative, it draws our curiosity to see if this is something we should be afraid of or not. So we are drawn to it and want to find out more about it. Negative news media would be an example of this kind of potential threat and this is why we likely are always drawn to reading those stories instead of the ones about fluffy rabbits and unicorns.

Newspaper editors and writers understand this about our psychology and so this is how the news is presented to us. Journalist Alastair Hetherington said “…anything which threatens people’s peace, prosperity and well being is news and likely to make headlines.” The news value of a story is determined by the degree of change it contains and the relevance that change has for the individual or group. Analysis shows that journalists and publicists manipulate both the element of change and relevance to maximize, or in some cases play down, the strength of a story.

The second psychological factor is confirmation bias. A lot of the time, when we are scanning headlines or reading a news story, we are not being a blank slate receiving new information and analyzing all of it only after we’ve read the whole story. Instead, we are skimming the information to find whatever facts or opinions will agree with what we already think about something. If we have the idea that all illegal immigrants are criminals, we are naturally drawn to stories that confirm or reinforce that idea and we are automatically less prone to want to read any stories that are going to challenge that view.

You don’t have to think about your confirmation bias, it’s already there and is a totally usual reaction. You have to think and work hard to overcome confirmation bias.

So these two factors – our desire to find negative or threatening news and our desire to have our views be reinforced by whatever we are reading – have made it super easy for opportunists to get on the internet and spread misinformation on purpose which may feed our egos but which do nothing to give us any real or factual information.

The subject of fake news has become a real hot topic over the last week since it’s correctly being blamed as part of the problem with voter misinformation and how that can influence our actions. This is on all ends of the politcal spectrum and is no effort on my part to say that any side got duped more than any other side. One of the problems I’m seeing right now, and the reason I’m talking about this in our podcast, is because the left and the right both seem to think they have a monopoly on the truth and its always the other side which is at fault. You’re both totally wrong on that count. There is so much misinformation being spread around at such an alarming rate on almost every political and social reform issue these days, it’s kind of amazing anything positive or constructive is getting done. And of course, when you look at Congress and how it’s been acting over the past decade, you see a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Partisan politics, goofball ideas and a determination to just stop anything the opposing side says or does have all replaced common sense. We citizens get so caught up in taking sides that many of us don’t see how we are being played and the Congress has been getting away with just plain highway robbery.

Alright, now about these fake news sites. We’ve established already that we have a real problem with objective journalism in the established news media organizations for a number of reasons. However, we do also have some journalistic standards and actual laws in place which control what the media can and cannot do.

According to the Journal of Media Business Studies, regulation tries to strike a balance between positive and negative regulation so that media can be regulated in terms of expression, publication, commerce and whatnot while not over-regulating it to the point that citizens cannot be informed.

In the United States, for example, we have the First Amendment which guarantees the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Yet we must have regulations to ensure people do not use these rights in such a way as to abuse them or bring harm or threat to innocent people. You have the right to speak out in public, but you don’t have the right to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater when no fire exists because you are putting lives in danger when you do so. Similarly, there are enforced standards of decency and demand to not maliciously twist the truth, such as liable/slander laws and FCC regulations against nudity, swearing and the like.

It’s interesting because professional fields such as journalism and psychology are regulated by boards of professional conduct. These hold their members to sometimes very strict standards and can take away a member’s right to practice in that field if they are proven to have been violating their codes and rules. You know when you go to a licensed psychotherapist, for example, that if that person abuses you or mistreats you, that you can complain to their licensing board and have them investigated.

Yet untrained, uneducated or inexperienced people can engage in activities very similar to these professionals and because they are not licensed, they are not subject to the same professional standards or regulations. For example, not just anyone can practice psychotherapy but anyone who wants to can hang out a shingle as a “life coach” and give amateur psychological advice or direction. In this case, it’s cavaet emptor, “let the buyer beware” and all the responsibility for any mishap that occurs is not on the life coach but is on his customers.  I am only making that comparison because while we can and should criticize professional news media for their shortcomings, and seek to get them corrected, when it comes to fake news sites, there is very little to no recourse for any damage they do.

So what are these fake news sites? These are sites which purposefully publish “news” which they know to be false, misleading or entirely unreliable. They often use headlines which present mysteries, known as click-bait, to drive people to link to them and then they collect revenue from things like Google Adsense. The more people they can drive to their fake news websites, the more money they can make. Here are the names of just some of them:

• enduringvision.com
• pakalertpress.com
• 21stcenturywire.com
• politicalblindspot.com
• GeoEngineeringWatch.org
• ActivistPost.com
• GovtSlaves.info
• PrisonPlanet.com
• AnonNews.co
• BigAmericanNews.com
• IfYouOnlyNews
• ProjectVeritas
• Infowars.com
• JonesReport.com
• LiberalAmerica
• LibertyTalk.fm
• LibertyVideos.org
• MegynKelly.us
• MSNBC.com.co
• MSNBC.website
• ConspiracyWire
• TheDailySheeple.com
• DailyCurrant.com
• DCGazette.com
• NoDisInfo.com
• ZeroHedge
• EmpireNews.com

Some of the people who are running these sites have been tracked down and reported on in the recent spate of stories about fake news. And what they found was not something I was particularly shocked by, but you should know this because when it comes to news, sources are important. One of the guidelines we’ll be going over here about how to trust the news you read is that you should always always always find out who wrote the story you are reading. If there is no source or attribution, that alone is pretty much cause to simply dismiss it out of hand.

MPR detailed two days ago that during the election, there was a completely false story on DenverGuardian.com which had this headline: FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide. Despite the fact that nothing about that headline is true, this was shared half a million times on social media.

In tracing this anonymous news site down, they found the owner was Jestin Coler, a man who also anonymously ran other fake news sites from the same server he rented on Amazon Web Services such as NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co and WashingtonPost.com.co. And get this: he ran all of these sites from a company called Disinfomedia.

They tracked Coler down to a Los Angeles suburb and got him to talk about why he was doing this. Here is MPR reported:

“Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

“‘The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction,’ Coler says.

“He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

“‘What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened,'” Coler says.

Does any of that sound at all familiar to anyone? The story goes on:

“During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. ‘It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they’re about to get served,’ Coler says. ‘It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election.’

“Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.

“Coler’s company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won’t say how many but admits it’s more than 25. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

“At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the Denver Guardian that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.

“‘The people wanted to hear this,’ he says. ‘So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then … our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.’

“And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn’t give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.”

Yes – this is a big business with big money for anyone who wants to invest some time and imagination in lying to the American public. Personally, I’ve never seen Coler or any one else who runs these fake news sites ever issue an apology or statement of correction about any of their clickbait or take any responsibility for spreading disinformation.

The article ends saying:

“Coler doesn’t think fake news is going away. One of his sites — NationalReport.net — was flagged as fake news under a new Google policy, and Google stopped running ads on it. But Coler had other options.

“‘There are literally hundreds of ad networks,” he says. “Early last week, my inbox was just filled every day with people because they knew that Google was cracking down — hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites.'”

Then there’s the Washington Post’s Terrence McCoy, who tracked down fake news writers Paris Wade and Ben Goodman in Long Beach, California. They are the creators of LibertyWritersNews.com, which has gotten tens of millions of page views and still is raking in viewers like crazy after the election by continuing to push out insanely false stories with a pro-Trump narrative. Within just minutes of posting some of their articles, they get thousands of views and comments.

Here’s more from the article itself:

“Six months ago, Wade and his business partner, Ben Goldman, were unemployed restaurant workers. Now they’re at the helm of a website that gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone and say they are making so much money that they feel uncomfortable talking about it because they don’t want people to start asking for loans.

“Instead, Wade hums a hip-hop song and starts a new post as readers keep reading, sharing and sending in personal messages. One comes from a woman who frequently contacts his page. ‘YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE I TRUST TO REPORT THE TRUTH,’ is one of the things she has written, and Wade doesn’t need to look at her Facebook profile to have a clear sense of who she is. White. Working class. Midwestern. ‘And the economy screwed her.’

“He writes another headline, ‘THE TRUTH IS OUT! The Media Doesn’t Want You To See What Hillary Did After Losing… .’

‘Nothing in this article is anti-media, but I’ve used this headline a thousand times,’ he says. ‘Violence and chaos and aggressive wording is what people are attracted to.’

“Wade and Goldman have little else in their apartment aside from their laptops. ‘Our audience does not trust the mainstream media,’ Goldman, 26, says a little later as Wade keeps typing. ‘It’s definitely easier to hook them with that.’

“‘There’s not a ton of thought put into it,’ Wade says. ‘Other than it frames the story so it gets a click.’

“‘True,’ Goldman says.

“‘We’re the new yellow journalists,’ Wade will say after a day and night when the number of people following LibertyWritersNews on Facebook will swell by more than 20,000. ‘We’re the people on the side of the street yelling that the world is about to end.’

“‘There were some days where we were getting $13, $14 per 1,000 views.’ Between June and August, they say, when they had fewer than 150,000 Facebook followers, they made between $10,000 and $40,000 every month running advertisements that, among other things, promised acne solutions, Viagra alternatives, ways to remove lip lines, cracked feet, ‘deep fat,’ and ‘the 13 sexiest and most naked celebrity selfies.’ Then the political drama deepened, and their audience expanded fivefold, and now Goldman sometimes thinks that what he made in the last six months would have taken him 20 years waiting tables at his old job.

“Wade and Goldman now have a lawyer and an accountant, employ other writers and are expanding so quickly that they’re surprised to think the majority of their adult lives were spent scraping by. They graduated from the University of Tennessee — Wade in 2012 with an advertising degree and Goldman in 2013 with a business degree — but could only find unpaid internships and ended up working at a Mexican restaurant.”

They ended up moving to California and became writers on an alt-right Facebook page.

“He needed more writers, and in 2015 Wade and Goldman started doing stories and getting paid based on how many clicks they got. The first story Wade did aggregated a South Korean news report that claimed an anonymous source had said that a North Korean scientist had defected with data from human experiments. Wade knew he needed a picture to sell the story to readers. He searched online for an image of a human experiment that, as he describes it, would make people think, ‘What is that? I got to click.’ He found what he recalls was a ‘totally misleading’ photograph of a fleshy mass and made it the featured image. He wrote the headline, ‘[PROOF] N. Korea Experiments on Humans,’ published the story and made $120 off 10 minutes of work. It was, he says, a revelation: ‘You have to trick people into reading the news.'”

These are just two of many examples I could cite. I think you can see that neither of these are places where you should go to get a recommendation for dog food, much less get your daily news. These guys sit around all day and literally make up what they think you want to hear so that you’ll click on their articles and make them rich.

So how do you avoid these things? It’s actually not that hard. Here are a few tips:

1) Avoid any site that ends in “.com.co” such as AbcNews.com.co or ends in “lo” such as Newslo because these sites are known to take some real news story and alter or fake them up in alarming ways ways that can be difficult to detect.

2) Make sure the site you are reading is not satire or meant to only be funny. There are a lot of these, such as The Onion, which have printed ridiculous “news” but which have been taken seriously, even to the point of having them read on major news media and on the floor of Congress by gullible senators. The About page of most satire sites clearly states that they are a satire news website, but it’s not always obvious by the content of the stories.

3) If you see an article on a blog or website claiming to be a reputable news source, check it out with more mainstream media to see if they are talking about that story at all. This is not any kind of guarantee of truth, but odds are if it’s only site reporting that Donald Trump just suffered a heart attack and is being rushed to the hospital, it’s a good bet that didn’t really happen.

4) Odd domain names, poorly constructed websites, excessive use of capital letters in the text of the story, obvious spelling and grammatical errors and lack of the writer’s name on his or her story are all good signs you are not reading something true.

5) If the headline for the article is clickbait, it should be avoided. Actual examples are “Man Destroyed Trump’s Star on Hollywood. What Happened to Him After Made Trump Smile!” or “NASTY: What Obama Just Said to Trump WILL Make You BOIL with Rage!”

6) If you become really angry while reading a story, it’s a very good idea to step back from it and check its sources and corroborate its facts on other media sites. Many of the click bait fake news sites write articles that are purposefully meant to make their reads upset or angry.

7) Does the internet site or source you are getting this from run cheap, even skanky, ads for sex products, pseudoscience health cures or get-rich-quick schemes? That’s a pretty good sign you’re not looking at real news.

8) Stay vigilant and use your critical thinking skills. Did you read this story just because you wanted to believe it was true from the headline even though the facts reported in the story are not really very strong? Does the story give any actual facts and attribute its quotes and sources by name? What about the date of the article? Sometimes these alarming posts are just re-posts of something that happened four or five years ago and is not only old news, but completely inapplicable now. Check out other news stories on that same site and see if they are reputable sounding or look somewhat alarming or ridiculous.

9) Watch out for generalities or obviously biased statements like “”We all remember when President-Elect Donald Trump’s star was vandalized & utterly destroyed by a crazed, sledge-hammer wielding Liberal the day before election day.” Or how about this story leader: “Trump needs to give a big, fat boot to all the crooked politicians in Washington.” You may agree with that statement, but fact-based news isn’t written that way. At least, it sure shouldn’t be.

10) Before you share anything on social media, actually read the article first to make sure it looks legit. Don’t just see an alarming headline that agrees with your own cognitive bias about politics, health, nutrition, climate change or whatever and then hit the share button. Go past the headline and read the article. If it looks at all suspicious, take a minute or two to fact check it. You can check with PolitiFact.com, Snopes.com or FactCheck.org to see if they have put out any debunking on the article. You can also report the article as fake on social media sites such as Facebook to get them removed faster.

I highly recommend that you flag any and all of these fake news sites on your social media feeds so articles from these sites don’t even show up in your news feed.

And that folks is my show for this week. Thanks for sticking with me. I really hope you got something out of this no matter what your political, religious or cultural affiliation. Where we get our information and how we think about it and decide what is true or false is very important stuff. If you’re operating with bad data, it’s guaranteed your going to make poor decisions. Thanks very much for coming around and I’ll see you next week.

The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #66: 10 Amazing Ways You Can Prevent Click Bait and Fake News appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.