In casting about for explanations for Hillary Clinton's historic and unprecedented loss, the media elites have seized upon a new villain - the Great Unwashed were the unwitting dupes of sinister propagandists who infiltrated the rubes' minds by means of The Book of Face. Vile Hillary untruths took root and overpowered the simplefolks formerly natural inclinations to accept spoonfeeding by established corporate news sources when determining for whom to cast their vote.

The impetus for this great revelation ironically enough also seems to have been propagated by Face Book among those wringing their hands over the hoi polloi's rejection of HRC. Despite the stamp of approval cast upon her election by virtually every newspaper in the country, all the cable channels (with one notable exception), all the pundits, all the political Party leadership of both parties (the Republicans by virtue of their faint praise or open condemnation of their own candidate) and all the polls, i.e. the entire power structure of the whole nation united against Donald Trump and yet the plebes went ahead and elected him anyway! The shock and horror of it all, how can it be explained?

While most of the egg-faced smarty-pants meritocracy focused on finger-pointing and circular firing squads for not noticing that the general populace had been stripped of their homes, jobs, wages and health, one obscure communications professor from a similarly uncelebrated grove of academe stepped forward with the obvious answer - Fake News was the culprit! When awful things happen, we can always rely on some helpful academic or pundit to 'splain it all to us, right?

Here is the article that provided comfort to our rejected betters:False Misleading Clickbait and Satirical "News Sources"

Notice anything missing? Yes, that's right the actual "sources" or list that is referenced in the title and cited by all the secondary commentary articles about her list is missing. And since apparently everyone writing about her list did the professional thing and linked to it, the fact that she has eliminated it means it has been vaporized in its original form. Why would she do that? Well apparently there are some people who object to one person determining arbitrarily what constitutes "fake" news and she got a boatload of pushback. (Note, I have always been willing to offer myself as the Empress of the Universe and make all sticky and difficult decisions for anyone not sure about who or what to believe, but as yet, no one has taken me up on it.)

The rest of her article offers up some decent but hardly earth-shattering advice about researching the history of any site offering information that someone may or may not choose to read/believe/ disseminate. The Daily Kos, Huffington Post and Fox News are called out for further scrutiny as they may practice "hyperbolic" or "problematic" pieces rotating with "legitimate" and "important"coverage. Let that be a warning to you, DK, Huff and Fox - we have our eyes on you!

Now here are the issues that some have raised about the professor's list, the "fake news" explanation for Hillary's demise and what corrective measures are necessary in order to get the nose rings back into the sheeps' nostrils:

This Professor's List of 'Fake News Sites' Goes Predictably Wrong
But Zimdars' list is awful. It includes not just fake or parody sites; it includes sites with heavily ideological slants like Breitbart, LewRockwell.com, Liberty Unyielding, and Red State. These are not "fake news" sites. They are blogs that—much like Reason—have a mix of opinion and news content designed to advance a particular point of view. Red State has linked to pieces from Reason on multiple occasions, and years ago I wrote a guest commentary for Breitbart attempting to make a conservative case to support gay marriage recognition.

So what happens if Facebook staff were to look at Zimdars' list and accept it and decide to censor the sharing of headlines from these sites? It's within Facebook's power and right to do so, but it would be a terrible decision on their end. They wouldn't just be preventing the spreading of factually incorrect, fabricated stories. They would be blocking a lot of opinionated analysis from sites on the basis of their ideologies. The company would face a backlash for such a decision that could impact their bottom line.

Note that Facebook is deciding as we speak exactly how to censor "unacceptable" content from Facebook newsfeed. I would post Zuckerberg's piece on it but that's an issue for another essay.

Now the Professor has offered up a second article using as her vehicle this time the stolid and always trusty (yes, that is snark) Washington Post:

My 'fake news list went viral . . .

It appears that she may have tumbled onto some of the issues her facile initial piece prompted for discussion:

Obviously, fake news is a major problem. We need to make sure people have the tools to detect it, and we need to understand why people may purposefully share news they know to be fake — maybe they’re being malicious, they think it’s funny or it aligns with what they want to be true. And we definitely need to find ways to discourage the production of non-comedy, non-satire fake news. We need to do all of this while making sure that alternative voices and robust exchange of information are not stifled.

Ah, there's the rub. How do we stifle alternate news sources without appearing to stifle them? I'm sure numerous think tanks are on it as we speak.

Why does "fake" news exist in the first place? Could it have anything to do with the giant consolidation and self-censorship practiced by most if not all of the "mainstream media" who have by and large abrogated their role as unbiased and objective watchdogs whose major motivation is educating and informing the American public? What happened to the the famous Fourth Estate? Ah, here's a guy with a clue, but only a clue, John Herrman in The New York Times ( I know, the irony)

Fixation of Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting

This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained. Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms. This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen.

You know what's interesting about that observation? Herrman was speaking about Trump's "euphoric inversion of rhetoric" against his critics. I read that paragraph and thought - that is EXACTLY the tool that was deployed by the Clinton campaign against Bernie supporters in the Bernie Bro campaign calling what to most observers would be the most liberal and progressive part of the Democratic electorate and telling them that they were comprised only of elite white sexist, racist males.

My point being that "fake news" is not some new righty Trumpy manipulation of the rubes in order to defeat Hillary that liberals and Democrats themselves eschewed in their own virtuous adherence to THE TRUTH - fake or slanted news and commentary has been around as long as there have been stories around campfires, tablets and chisels, printing presses and now the Internet. The challenge to those in power has always been how to silence the voices, seize the tablets, break the presses, and or bury the link.

Hey media - how about you try a really revolutionary concept - follow where the facts lead and write about it and try to build up TRUST and CREDIBILITY, the only currency that counts in driving public
opinion?

The whole concept of "fake news" is in itself fake - news that is factually incorrect is usually pretty easy to counter and disprove. What is harder to dismiss is uncovered news, news that is ignored, news that is inconvenient, news that doesn't support your goal, news that requires research, news that respects the intelligence of your readers, news that presents alternative interpretations, etc. This is the void that has been left by our establishment media and it is no wonder that readers and voters are deserting them in droves and seeking alternative sources of information and commentary.

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UPDATE
In reading more on this topic, I came upon this Mother Jones Article which is a reprint of an article originally published in PacificStandard:
This Critque Of Fake Election News Is A Must Read For All Democracy Lovers with the subtitle She’s doing the Lord’s work — or Mark Zuckerberg’s, depending on who you ask which I would have incorporated into this essay if I had found it earlier simply to add more and better context to understanding the motivation behind and rationale for creating the fake news list and the criteria employed for being named to the list.