Fake news or just careless reporting?

The phrase "fake news" suggests to me either satire, as with The Onion or Saturday Night Live, or propaganda, deliberate lies spread by governments, political candidates, big business or anyone else evil enough with money enough (not that money is still a requirement, thanks to Twitter and the Internet). As a former journalist, I am hesitant to apply the term to others in my profession. Not that I don't recognize the blatant errors that keep cropping up and that President Donald Trump uses to denigrate the press and network news.

Some of these errors have, in fact, been deliberate. A case in point is the photo a Washington Post reporter sent via Twitter showing a sparse crowd in an auditorium which the president had claimed was "packed to the rafters." He later admitted the photo had been taken long before the president spoke. Even though it was on Twitter, not the Washington Post, I think it can still be called fake news.

In most instances, however, I think the journalists in question think they were reporting the truth but are guilty of carelessness and/or wishful thinking.

The now rampant use of anonymous sources, especially in Washington, is an invitation to disaster. Sources who will not allow the use of their names are notoriously less dependable than those willing to stand behind what they say. Of course, leakers in the White House, the Department of Justice and so on are not likely to allow the use of their names. The challenge for reporters is to find ways to confirm the information. Careless reporters don't bother.

As for wishful thinking, I suspect most of us are more likely to believe positive things about those we like and negative things about those we don't like. When the president is victimized by errors, what he terms fake news, they are almost always the work of journalists who don't like him, who want to discover negative things to report about him and whose standards thus are lower than they might otherwise be.