Misinformation Outrage

A blog on Media Matters

"Radio stations across North America have repeatedly spreadfake news."

By: Alex Kaplan on March 9th, 2018.

Alex Kaplan is warning us to the misinformation and fake news problem that has grown immensely. He engages us by insisting that since the 2016 presidential election fake news is at an all time high. He tells us that certain platforms such as on-air and social media have largely escaped our scrutiny in the past but shouldn’t have. Kaplan points out that Media Matters where he does research at has encountered an extreme amount of fake news stories between December 2016 and February 2018. These stories were flagged by credited fact-checking websites such as Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and even mentioned in a Buzzed study of most viral fake stories of 2017 (a post focused on fake news articles specifically). These fake stories were spread by various radio stations- talk, sports and music. Kaplan informs us that the talk radio industry has had a misinformation problems for a while now but that the problem isn't limited to just talk radio. Music and sport stations are also trapped in made up content. 

Kaplan establishes his credibility by giving exact numbers of fake stories shared on North American and American on-air and social media platforms compared to Canadian platforms. He detects that out of 7,100 fake news stories shared that only about 9% of the cases were later issued acknowledgment of being misinformation. Kaplan includes over thirty imbedded links to fake news articles making it very hard to ignore the accusations he is reporting.

Media Matters is a left-leaning blog site. Kaplan's view is geared towards a liberal viewpoint. He states that most of the talk radio stations misinformation platforms are "popular with conservatives".

I agree with Kaplan that is has become a major problem. I feel that reporting stations have become lazy and lost integrity. It seems like one station airs false news and instead of researching the information before spreading it other stations jump on the wagon out of competition. Therefor, false news ends up spreading like wild fire and it could have all been avoided with a little research. These stations are to prideful to backtrack and honestly don’t mind spreading this misinformation because in their eyes it seems false information is better than no information. I feel like there is too much competition in our media and that is possibly a cause for the reason we are being so misguided. Kaplan has very realistic concerns in my opinion.