THE
PHENOMENON
NEWS
History, Distribution & Aesthetics
Merlin van Schaik
Studentnr: 10190465
Supervisor: dhr. dr. T. Pape
Date: 26 June 2017
merlinvanschaik@gmail.com
2
ndReader: dhr. dr. J.A. Teurlings Master Thesis
Table of Contents
Introduction
4
1. Traditional News
6
1.1
The Penny Press
6
1.2
Information versus Story
9
1.3
Radio and Television Take the Lead
10
2. Exploring the Boundaries of Journalism
15
2.1
Moving Away from Facts
16
2.1.1 The 24-‐hour News Cycle
16
2.1.2 The Blur between News and Entertainment
18
2.2
The Digitization of the News
21
2.2.1 Social Media and News
23
2.3
The Outcome: The Decline of ‘Traditional Journalism’
25
2.3.1 Fake News Made its Entrance
27
3. The Distribution of Fake News
30
3.1
Newsfeed
30
3.2
Click-‐Bait
32
3.3
Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers
34
4. The Aesthetics of Fake News
38
4.1
ABC News
38
4.1.1 Graphic Design
39
4.1.2 Rhetoric and Style
42
5. The Solutions
49
5.1
The Online Solutions
49
5.2
The Government Interferes
51
5.3
Journalists are Fighting Back
52
Conclusion
54
References
57
Introduction
In 2016, “Post-‐truth” became the English Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. A word that reflects on a world where objective facts have become less influential when it comes to news. Emotions are important in shaping public opinion, creating an environment in which lies and falsehoods appear more often (English Oxford Dictionaries n.pag.). News that should be impartial, objective and fact-‐based, now turns out to be biased and sometimes even fabricated (Newman 2017: 3). This spread of false and misleading information has become a huge problem in the last few years. During the 2016 elections in the United States, fake news turned into a trending topic when false stories about both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were spread via social media. The increase of fake content has caused much concern in society, as researchers suggest the influence of fake news on the political environment of the country. The scholar, Lisa Ellen Silvestri, stresses the impact of what fake news has on contemporary society. “Today facts and evidence lose truth-‐value as digital misinformation, ‘fake news,’ or ‘alternative facts,’ drown out veracity in public discourse” (Silvestri n.pag.). As untrue information is spread by the creators of fake news stories, the trust in journalism is decreasing. This results in a post-‐truth era, an era in which the distribution of false and misleading information has led to an situation in which many people don’t know what story to believe anymore. Society has changed into a world where it is harder to determine the truth; facts become less important than the representation of images, and feeling has become an important source when it comes to news reporting.
The misleading effect of fake news stories is of great concern all over the world. Many fake news stories were spread during the 2016 US elections, the Brexit-‐campaign, the Ukraine referendum, and the 2017 elections in France. With the upcoming elections in the United Kingdom and in Germany, the media and politicians are warning the public about the spread of fake stories as some of the producers of these stories will try to influence the politics in those countries. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is often linked to the phenomenon of fake news. Through his spreading of falsehoods and lies via social media and the news, he sells the idea that the truth has become irrelevant. With Trump as an important figure in the discussion on fake news and the fact that many fake news stories have a subject-‐matter that is related to events in the United States, the focus of this research will be on the phenomenon of fake news within the context of the United States. And though this focus may not do full justice to the numerous fake news ecologies that operate internationally, fake news has had such an
unignorable impact in the United States, that it will be a good example and starting point in this research.
This paper analyses the phenomenon of fake news, exploring how fake news works and its influence on contemporary society. Questions regarding the conditions that enable the rise of fake news will be explored and answered. What are the historical conditions that first created an environment in which fake news could grow? How is fake news distributed? What are the aesthetical characteristics of fake news? And what are the possible solutions for the problem of fake news? These questions will be answered by using a method of historical research in the field of media history in combination with an in-‐depth analysis of the distribution and close analysis of the aesthetical characteristics of the phenomenon.
The phenomenon of fake news will be analysed by focussing on the historical conditions, the distribution, the aesthetical characteristics and the possible solutions. The goal of this research is to offer a theoretical background in which to frame the debate on fake news and provide an analysis of how fake news works. This theoretical framework starts with a historical overview of the formation of journalistic standards in order to explain how journalism was first built on the values of objectivity and fact. The first chapter introduces how the journalistic standards arose in the 19th century, followed by the most important media, technological and journalistic developments that had an influence on the reporting of the news. The second chapter explores how these journalistic standards began to change within each news medium. How the acceleration of the news on television and the blur between information and entertainment influenced the journalistic values and how the arrival of the Internet changed the journalistic profession even more. The goal of this chapter is to show how the world of journalism transformed into an environment where fake news could easily gain a major role.
After the historical outline, a more detailed analysis of the phenomenon of fake news will be given. The third chapter discusses the question of how fake news is spread on the Internet. The distribution of fake news via social media platforms is analysed and connected to the dangers that emerge from the spread of fake news. The fourth chapter focuses on the aesthetical characteristics of the fake news stories. Explaining how journalism changed into an emotion-‐ based profession that focuses only on the preferences of the audience. In this chapter, a side by side analysis of a fake news website and a ‘real’ news website is performed, in order to realise to what extent fake news mimics the aesthetics of ‘real’ news. To complete the research into the phenomenon of fake news, the last chapter will propose possible solutions to the problem. Discussing the solutions made by the online environment, political solutions and the reaction of the journalistic field. This chapter will explore the solutions from a more international point of view, as fake news has become a worldwide problem that must be solved.
Traditional News
Truth, accuracy, independence, fairness, impartiality, humanity and accountability are the seven key principles of journalism. According to current debates about the phenomenon fake news, these journalistic standards are being threatened. When fact-‐based journalism is exposed to false and misleading news stories, the question about “what is news” is coming up. When answering the question whether or not something can be seen as news it is important to first explore and explain what news is and how the ethics, standards and values arose in the journalistic field.
The first steps towards the rise of the journalistic standards were taken at the beginning of the 19th century. The penny papers can be seen as the starting point of this historical research on the ideals of journalism because this period can be emphasised as the period in which the foundations for the journalistic standards were made (Schudson 60, Roggenkamp 2). Later on, with the arrival of New Journalism around 1890, the journalistic standards were further built into the model as we know it today (Roggenkamp xii – xiii). Within this period journalism formed itself as the producers and distributors of news that became available for the masses. Giving them both information and entertainment. The second transformation that formed journalism was the arrival of the mediums radio and television. Those mediums made the news available for an even wider audience, providing them with a higher amount of information, sound, and images. Something that made the news a more sense-‐based experience, as the people were able to hear and see the news through their radio stations and televisions.
Focussing on these developments in the environment of journalism, this chapter tries to make sense of how news can be understood within the broader forces that shaped the production of journalism. So, in order to understand the structures that shape contemporary journalism, it is necessary to trace back the most important transformations journalism has gone through, working towards journalism practices as we know them now.
1.1 The Penny Press
The penny papers expressed and built the culture of a democratic market society, a culture that had no place for social or intellectual deference. This was the groundwork on which a belief in facts and a distrust of the reality, or objectivity, of “values” could thrive (Schudson 60).
Journalism that became available for the masses started with the arrival of the penny press. Michael Emery and Edwin Emery argue in their book The Press and America: An Interpretative
History of the Mass Media that the penny paper came out in 1833 can be seen as the first
newspaper made in the United States for the common man (121). Compared to the existing papers this new paper was significantly cheaper -‐ as the name suggests the paper was sold for a penny -‐ therefore the common people could afford to buy the newspaper. The commercial and party papers that were produced before the penny press were sold for six cents an issue. Counting that the wages of the common man at that time was around 58 cents a day, these newspapers were too expensive for the common man and only available for the elites. Besides, the newspapers could not be bought per issue, they were sold only by subscription, making it even harder for the common man to buy newspapers (Schudson 15). Roggenkamp describes the penny papers as follows:
Fueled by new printing technologies and increasing literacy rates, the number of newspapers published in the middle decades of the nineteenth-‐century skyrocket. Shrewd newspaper editors recognised the untapped market of an urban readership and catered to the needs of this audience by selling exciting newspapers for one penny, thereby undercutting the efforts of older, more conservative, six-‐cent newspapers (1).
Thus, the penny papers was a paper that focused on reaching a wider and more diverse audience, through selling newspapers that were easy to read and financially accessible for everyone (Garcia 44).
This growth on the economic and social level of the common man, can be connected to the period in which Andrew Jackson was elected president (Emery and Emery 121, Schudson 43). When Andrew Jackson in 1828 was elected president, he presented himself as the president who cares about the ‘normal’ people. In this Jacksonian era, the labour class began to gain recognition and got finally noticed by the leading government, resulting in more influence on politics with their right to vote (Emery and Emery 121). “They argue that Jackson’s policies implemented this creed and that a democratic wave swept the country in the form of manhood, suffrage, informal manners, a cheap press, public schooling, and the advance of the religious sects most democratic in their governance” (Schudson 43). Within this democracy, people started to think differently about their role in government. The celebration of the individual became more important (Garcia 41). This new form of journalism was built on the communication with the masses, publishing stories that were interesting for a large segment of society and not for only a small target group (Emery and Emery 122).
Keeler, Brown and Tarpley, describe this extending of the market, when arguing about the commercialization of the newspapers. They argue that the editors changed view on newspapers from a more political-‐oriented view towards a commercial perspective. This
resulted in a change of the newspaper content. The New York Sun was one of the first penny papers that became widely successful. This paper, together with some other successful penny papers created a new form of journalism. The content in the papers was not based on the affairs of the elites, but on the activities of the whole society (Schudson 22-‐23). According to Keeler, Brown and Tarpley, objectivity started to make its entrance. “Objective reporting became more valued than editorial opinion and personal biases. Readers began to demand news stories that presented all sides of an issue and content that met their personal needs” (46). Examples of stories were court proceedings, police news, and human-‐interest stories. Bruce J. Evensen shares this opinion and argues that new techniques of interviewing and fact-‐finding were the first steps towards journalism techniques that later on would serve objectivity (261). According Hazel Dicken-‐Garcia argues that the papers started to focus more on the reporting of events instead of only presenting political views. Categories as sports, crime and sensationalism were added to the newspapers (42). From this moment on entertainment would also have a role in the newspaper next to the other news topics. Another aspect of the commercialization of the newspapers was the interest of advertisers. The Sun and other comparable newspapers demonstrated that providing the people with news via the newspapers they developed was a valuable commodity. This commodity attracted the interest of other parties, like advertisers. Advertisers saw new possibilities in this mass circulation of the newspaper. The advertisements they first made for the old newspapers, now would reach a more expansive audience (Emery and Emery 122).
The penny press can be seen as the first step in setting the standards of journalism. Developing a new form of journalism that not only reports about politics, but also focuses on personal interest and events. Norma Green describes concise the characteristics of the penny press:
The penny press, fueled by advertising revenue and street sales, was part of a continuous cycle of urban commerce dating from the 1830s. (…) They attempted to build a news habit among impulse buyers with multiple daily editions that updated the front page with fresh headlines, episodic stories, and often new illustrations throughout the day (35).
With this new news habit, journalism was moving towards a more structured environment of standards and ethics. However, the penny press did not yet articulate the ideal of journalism that is common now. According to Schudson, it would take until the end of the 19th century until the ideals of professional journalism could be identified (60). The next part will explore the development of the ideals at the end of the 19th century, exploring the further standardisations of journalism.
1.2 Information versus Story
The next important change in the journalistic environment came in the 1890s. In this period news moved from event-‐based news, towards story-‐based news. The most important role of the news was to deliver an ‘interesting’, and ‘sensational’ story to the reader (Garcia 89, 229). This new form of journalism is referred to as ‘New Journalism’, the journalism that focused more on the delivery of daily news in an editorial style. Entertaining features as scoops and gossip characterised the news (Keeler, Brown and Tarpley 49).
“The Real” as a concept, played an important role at the end of the nineteenth-‐century. Roggenkamp argues that the ideal of presenting the real, was something that echoed through the years at the end of this century (20). Reporting the reality of an event was an important occupational ideal, however, in the changing years in the 1890s, journalism split itself into two different directions (Schudson 88-‐89, Roggenkamp 21). “Story” and “information”, where the telling of a story focuses more on the aesthetic function of the newspaper and the information category concentrates on the delivery of pure information, based on unframed facts (Schudson 89). Trying to explore the emergence of the standards of contemporary journalism, this development into two different ways of presenting the news is interesting. Seeing already a division between ‘real’ news and entertaining news. This division developed itself further during the following years, where on the one hand facts became more and more important, followed up by papers that tried to entertain the public.
New journalism had a different way of presenting the news. Journalists would take their role as reporters seriously and immersed themselves into the events, to get the best and most truthful story. This focus on delivering the truth to the people arose after World War I. The production of the news fundamentally changed by the 1890s and early 1900. Within this period, the news shifted towards a more objective, rational and information form of presenting the news (Ryfe 72). During World War I a lot of propaganda was used in the news, so when the war was over the desire for fact increased. The rise of objective reporting was thus a reaction against the distrust created by the false facts that were spread during the war (Schudson 122, 144).
According to Marzolf, one of the new aspects of New Journalism were the different aesthetics the paper had. “The ‘new journalism’ made use of big headlines, showy illustrations and lively writing to attract large circulations, fat columns of advertisements and huge profits” (529). This was all done to attract a group of new, inexperienced readers, bringing them news that could inform, but most of all entertain. Roggenkamp stresses this entertaining purpose of the paper. The ideal of new journalism was entertainment; in their paper, the narrative function of the stories was the most important. They created dramatic and some fictional stories, alternated with more factual stories as reports (xii). The story gained the leading role within
New Journalism. Where first facts were presented in a more reported form, now journalists would get into a story and write an interesting and pleasurable article for the readers. Serious information topics were alternated with sensational and entertaining topic, in order to keep the audience interested in reading.
So, the nineteenth century can be seen as a time in which major changes in the press of the United States occurred. The press changed in reaction to shifts in society, developing standards that are still important in journalism. During this period questions about the press were stated: What can the press do? How and why should they do it? And what are the implications of that? Objectivity is the most important ideal that came out of this period of change. As John Pauly explains it: “Objectivity has been treated as the powerful, dominant norm that defines American journalists’ professional identity, and interpretation as the day-‐to-‐day challenge that calls that deep philosophical commitment to objectivity into existence” (592). The objective reporting in combination with the writing of an interesting story became the key interests of the journalists. Bringing the readers serious and entertaining content.
Much of what we now take for granted as the standards of journalism evolved in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The next section will explore the development of these standards during the next important changes of journalism and will look at how radio and television influenced the ideals of journalism.
1.3 Radio and Television Take the Lead
An important development in the field of mass communication is the appearance of radio and television. The first radio stations appeared in the 1920s. From then on the radio developed itself into a formally institutionalised medium. Radio as a new medium designated a step forward on the technological level, reaching the audience in a new way. As radio was a live medium that could reach millions of people without having to transport the media products all over the country, it created a new relationship with the audience. The audience received the information immediately via their radio. Providing the audience with access to knowledge about what was happening in their country more directly than was possible with print media. The rise of live news was one of the aspects of the radio that made it such a revolutionary invention (Cushion 33). The arrival of the new medium, radio, triggered strife between radio and newspapers. The newspapers were afraid that radio would take away advertising and sales profit (Larson 277). This resulted in a ‘Press-‐Radio War’, as Gary W. Larson explains it. It was a war about deciding who had the control on how the news would be distributed (277). The radio war would last from 1933-‐1939.
In the beginning, radio stations had the purpose of promoting newspapers. Most of the radio stations were owned or sponsored by newspapers, aiming to stimulate the newspaper sales (Emery and Emery 398). In the years that followed a discussion emerged between the newspapers and the radio stations about who had the right to bring the news. Eventually, this would result in two dominant press institutions, the United Press International and the Associated Press that provided the news for both the newspapers and the broadcasters. The news produced by these institutions would be read out loud during the radio program. Despite the rules that were set on who had the right to make and present the news on the radio stations, certain broadcasters tried to bypass these rules. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), were two of the broadcasters who managed to get around the rules about news broadcasting. In the competition between the radio stations to attract the widest audience possible, they all wanted to present the most recent and spectacular news to the audience (Emery and Emery 401).
As radio stations did not had to conform to certain regulations on the level of news content that must be based on the social and political agenda, they focused more on the entertaining level of their stories (Cushion 36). One of the most important methods to attract a wide audience to listen to the radio stations was the coverage of major news events (Emery and Emery 401). CBS and NBC created their own independent news divisions, where the coverage of those major news events and the coverage of breaking news was an important aspect. The news presented by these broadcasting stations was more concentrated on being entertaining for the audience. Stephen Cushion argues that this would set the foundations for the market-‐driven news environment that would later on transfer to television (36). The broadcasting radio stations, CBS and NBC and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) would develop itself as the leading broadcaster in radio and would, later on, move into the medium television, where they are still important in the reporting of daily news (Emery and Emery 404).
During World War II, the radio started to report stories about international crises and subsequent events. The broadcasting station CBS started broadcasting stories from reporters out of Europe and developed itself as a leading station in the era of modern news broadcasting (Larson 279). The reporting and commentary on international events did not only result in a bigger audience, it also changed the relation of those listeners to radio. According to Larson, by 1939 more than a quarter of the population had more confidence in the radio as their source of news than newspapers. They felt that radio presented the news more objectively than the newspapers did.
Besides the fact that the audience started to see the radio as a more objective dispenser of the news, it became also a personalised medium. “(…) news on the radio would be more than just a bare reporting of facts. It would be personality-‐driven and dependent on the prose story-‐
telling abilities of the commentators” (Larson 279). Radio became a medium that delivered the news in a commentary format. Personalities that reported and commented the news for the radio, started to become comforting voices for the audience.
It lasted until the 1950s till radio journalism started to take shape, as we know it in the contemporary environment. From then on with the arrival of FM, the radio started to focus more on music. The news did not play the leading role anymore. The newscasters and commentators that personalised the news before were replaced by disc jockeys, who entertained the listeners. The news was now presented in shorter newscasts between blocks of music, altered with commercial breaks (Larson 283).
With the arrival of television in the 1940s, there was an extra competitor added to the competition between newspapers and radio stations in the field of reporting news. Around 1939 big events as the speeches given by president Roosevelt (the first president that was seen on television), and sports events in baseball, football and boxing games were shown on television. However, the techniques were very primitive at that time, the segments that were shown of the events were short and the content was shot with a single camera. World War II put in 1941 a temporary freeze on this development of television and delayed the rise of the medium. This halt to the rise of television did not last long, from 1949 on the number of households that owned a television set grew. Around 1955, almost half of the American households had a television (Emery and Emery 405). So the rise of television took place in the years after the war, developing itself into becoming the dominant mass medium in the 1960s (Emery and Emery 492).
The three leading broadcasting stations of the radio, CBS, NBC and ABC made a transfer from radio to television, but their role on the radio remained important. On the television, these stations developed itself in becoming the leading networks in presenting the news (Emery and Emery 410). In the beginning years of television, the news was still second to the news that was presented on the radio stations. To step out of this second place in covering the news, television tried to distinguish itself from the way news was presented. Various visualisation techniques were used to keep the attention of the audience and to make the news more understandable for them.
Television journalism started as a blend between the qualities of radio speech and film newsreel. The newscast of the early years of television included an anchor that acted as the voice-‐over and the model they used was comparable to those of the newsreel. “Aspects of this model included ‘the fragmented succession of unrelated ‘stories’, the titles composed in the manner of front page headlines, and the practice of beginning each issue with the major news event of the day, followed by successively less important subject matter” (Allan 44). On radio stations the commentators and reporters could only be heard, however, on television the
anchors could also been seen. This brought a new layer to the medium, as images say more than words, the audience could now see what happened (Cushion 39).
The rise of television can be linked to the upcoming of consumerism in the United States. Lynn Spigel argues that the television set in that time could be related to the middle-‐class of America, in which consuming was one of the most important activities (32-‐33). “Television, in this sense, soon became part of the increasingly consumer-‐driven culture of American life” (Cushion 39). Allowing advertisers on the news was thus a logical step for the television broadcasters. As Cushion argues, the advertisers directed the television news in the United States. Advertisements were part of every newscast (Allan 43). The audience was not only seen as people who had to be informed about what was happening in the world, but they were also seen as consumers. According to Stuart Allan, to make the news more entertaining for the audience, but also more attractive to the advertisers, the news was most of the time based on pre-‐scheduled events (45). However, this influence from the advertiser on the news eventually would lead to discussions about the impartiality of the news. Television had to find a balance between their editorial purpose and the commercial side of the advertisers and tread carefully when deciding what was newsworthy or not. This discussion became important when television took over the leading role of radio in presenting the news. As a result of this discussion on impartiality, in 1949 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created a report on editorializing. This report set a couple of rules to ensure that the news covered public issues and that it showed these issues from different perspectives (Cushion 40). The FCC, in the following years, would have a lot of influence on regulating the news. According to Cushion: “Sharpening up its regulatory tools, under the authority of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1960s, the FCC provided perhaps the most sustained period of intervention into television journalism” (41). It pushed the commercial broadcasters towards producing content that was policed to cover news that should be educational to the audience (Cushion 41).
By 1976, television developed itself into the single most popular news medium. More and more Americans started to choose television instead of newspapers to get their daily news. According to Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, people started to believe television more than newspapers. One of the reasons for this trust in television journalism was the fact that television produced a much more centralised and nationalised environment of news (61). Another reason for this trust in television was the fact that television made everything visible. What only could be described on the radio, television could bring the viewers a close-‐up of the events that were broadcasted (Allan 46). The facts recorded by the cameras could not be ignored by the audience, resulting in an audience that trusted television more than other media.
Throughout the 1980s this system of a couple of leading broadcasters started to change. The arrival of new technological inventions, like the cable and later on satellite communication,
set the globalisation and commercialization of news in motion. The number of television channels increased and television moved into a multi-‐channel era. This had an influence on the leading roles the broadcasters, NBC, CBS and ABC fulfilled so far. They had to deal with the competition of many other broadcasters, who all wanted attention from the audience. The audience was pushed to watch more television than ever (Cushion 46). All these developments influenced the regulations that were set up by the FCC in the 1960s. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the deregulation was pushed into acceleration, caused by the commercial broadcasters that were becoming successful globally and the increase in channels on the television. New commercial programming could be created easily, concentrating on more consumer-‐based content (Cushion 46). Resulting eventually in the termination of the Fairness Doctrine – that should keep the balance in journalism on covering important issues in society – leaving the rules of impartiality behind (Cushion 47).
In this chapter I showed that the penny papers started with the first steps in building the journalistic standards by making the newspapers available for the masses. Penny paper journalists started to concentrate more on the reporting of events and using interview-‐ techniques to find out the facts. In the period of New Journalism these techniques were developed further. Journalists would take their reporter role seriously by immersing themselves in the stories. After the propaganda of World War I, people wanted fact-‐based news that they could trust, resulting in more objective reporting. The news became more centralised for the audience with the arrival of radio and television. In order to maintain objective reporting, both for the radio as television rules were made to watch the quality of the news, keeping the news fact-‐based and educational.
The next chapter focuses on journalism from the 80s until contemporary journalism. It reviews the emergence of entertaining news, explains more about the continual flow of news and explores how the Internet is affecting journalism.
Exploring the Boundaries of Journalism
The journalistic standards that were made over the course of the 19th century in order to guard and protect the production of the news were threatened by developments on the social, economical and technological level that occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Within these years of change, many critics argued that the quality of news decayed. This decay can be connected to four important developments. These four developments contributed to the construction of an environment in which fake news could evolve. The first development is the speeding up of the news with the arrival of the 24-‐hour news cycle. The second development is the blur between news and entertainment. The arrival of the Internet can be appointed to as the third development that changed the journalistic field. Lastly the arrival of social media contributed in the creation of the environment that fake news fitted into.
The speeding up of the news, the tabloidization of the content, the arrival of the Internet and the distribution via social media platforms all created a journalistic environment in which the production and consumption of news changed. In this changing media landscape, a phenomenon as fake news got the possibility to emerge and grow. Fake news is fake content that is presented as being ’real’ news, in order to provoke confusion. Allcott and Gentzkow give in their article the following definition of fake news: “We define ‘fake news’ as news stories that have no factual basis but are presented as facts, we mean stories that originated in social media or the news media” (5). The fake news stories that this research explores are the news stories that are produced on ‘fake news’ websites or social media platforms, are totally based on non-‐ facts and distributed via social media platforms to reach as many people as possible.
This chapter will focus on the question how fake news could gain a big share in the field of journalism. To be able to explain this reaction and place it into a broader context, it is first important to sketch the previous changes in the journalistic landscape. The broader historical context is used to show how fake news could emerge and put itself into a dominant position.
2
2.1 Moving Away From Facts
In the 1980s/1990s cable television and later on satellite communication would arrive (Cushion 45). These technologies caused on the one hand an increase in channels and on the other hand it made faster and easier international communication possible. The increase in a number of channels, led the television environment into a multi-‐channel era where news started to become more commercialised (Sparks 3). This had the result that journalists started to focus more on the quantity than on the quality of news, moving away from the values that were set for journalism in the years before. As Cushion recapitulates this phenomenon of change: ”News values are thus increasingly subject to renegotiation and reinterpretation and can be shaped externally by their relationship with rival news outlets and competing media” (Cushion 62). With the arrival of new ways of presenting the news as the 24-‐hour news cycle and the more entertaining form of news, the news started to become more opinion and emotion-‐based.
2.1.1 The 24-‐hour News Cycle
Economic, technological and audience-‐related pressures caused the continuous transformations of the news industry. The expectations on news profitability were increasing, the audience lost its interest in traditional news and new technologies widened the possibilities on the communicating level (Bucy, Ganz and Wang 143). To participate in the on-‐going competition in the delivering of news, news stations started to focus more on the amount of news they produced. The news stations started to introduce the news in a continuous flow, something that is often referred to as the 24-‐hour news cycle.
This on-‐going flow of news towards the audience started in the 1980s with the reporting of breaking news stories. Concentrating on the live aspect of presenting the news became a substantial aspect of television journalism. Where the leading broadcasters NBC, CBS and ABC concentrated at producing evening and night news shows, new news stations emerged that challenged these forms of news programming. Cable News Network (CNN) was one of these new stations that launched a news channel and contributed to the competition. The format they created was built on rolling news or 24-‐hour broadcasting. Stephanie Marriott describes it as, “television constitutes itself – particularly in an era of 24-‐hour broadcasting – as an apparently endless flow, always available and never pausing” (51).
Cushion argues that the 24-‐hour news channel environment had an intense and systematic impact on the values and conventions of television in the last decade (64). Journalists that worked in the 24-‐hour news environment were more focused on pace than on the condition of the news itself. However, this fast running environment to deliver the latest news is not new,
it only is accelerated by certain developments in the industry. Cushion points out the arrival of the Internet as one of the aspects that sped up the news.
The promotion of instant, rolling news has been accelerated since the birth of the Internet and the creation of multi-‐media newsrooms. With the technology at their fingertips to break news almost immediately, online – as much as 24-‐hour television news – journalists share the journalistic need for speed (…) (64).
Brighton and Foy mention the speed of the journalistic work as a negative effect of the continuous flow of news. With the focus on the quantity and fast presentation, journalists lost their accuracy on presenting a more in-‐depth story. The focus shifted from an in-‐depth, and fact-‐ checked story towards a story that got the most attention from the audience. The second point they refer to is the speculative and repetitive quality of the news (94). 24-‐hour news channels have enough time to explain the context around a story, but most of the time they only present the same headlines repeated after each other (Cushion 72). The contextual and analytical parts of the news are missing. As Cushion describes it: “And yet constrained by the values of immediacy they have adapted, 24-‐hour news channels appear unable to deliver more contextual or analytical journalism than conventional news bulletins” (72). The news is often filled with speculations about possible outcomes and the impact of the event. The short headlines that are based on facts are rotated with these long-‐lasting discussions on the few facts that are given (Brighton and Fay 94). So, with the urgency to bring the audience updated news with the focus on the speed and the quantity, the 24-‐hour news channels lost the opportunity to bring the viewers a more in depth and meaningful version of their news stories (Bernstein 24).
Another aspect that has changed with the arrival of the 24-‐hour news cycle is the reporting style. Within this fast running environment of delivering the news, the journalists have become less independent. After an incident, reporters used to go to the place of occurrence to report what happened and to create an in-‐depth story. In the 24-‐hour news environment, this traditional reporting style has changed. The reporters have become correspondents. With ‘breaking news’ stories the journalists are not going to the site as reporters, but tell the shortened version of the story in front of a camera as a correspondent (Cushion 75,82, Allan 198). This information is not independent and mostly is not as detailed as journalistic standards would require. “Most breaking news is neither live nor on location, with a limited range of sources used to interpret a story and a greater reliance on anchors reporting what the wires are sending into the studio” (Cushion 75). With the focus on the speed in making a news story the journalist will not go deep into the topic using their knowledge on specific topics, but “they make hasty judgements and deliver quick-‐fit judgements” (Cushion 83). The correspondents repeat the same story every hour. Besides the correspondents that support the news story also pundits got a supporting role within the news. They form a panel that comments on the news by giving
