Should-Read: Why it's not just Facebook and Twitter that need to clean house. There are a great many organizations--the New York Times and the Washington Post and the networks high among them--that do not have "be a trustworthy information intermediary" anywhere on their mission statements:
Ben Thompson: Fake News: "Between 2001 and 2003, Judith Miller wrote a number of pieces in the New York Times asserting that Iraq had the capability and the ambition to produce weapons of mass destruction...
...It was fake news.... The same sources feeding Miller were well-connected with the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy team.... It meant something to have the New York Times backing them up.... Miller’s stories had a certain resonance by virtue of where they were published. It’s tempting to make a connection between the Miller fiasco and the current debate about Facebook’s fake news problem; the cautionary tale that “fake news is bad” writes itself. My takeaway, though, is the exact opposite: it matters less what is fake and more who decides what is news in the first place...
