Fake News

I was just thinking about this last night when I was taking a shower and thinking more about it when I was on the way to school today.

The notion of "fake news" or "alternative facts" has been gaining prominence in recent times and I am slightly bothered by it.
You see, "fake news" has been around since forever. Worse, if you are into critical discourse analysis and stuff, you know that news always carry a particular perspective and in a sense, if you expected them to be truly neutral, to be completely objective in order to be "true", then they are bound to be "fake" all the time.

Also, regarding news, there are opinion pieces and then there are the ones which attempt to just report on the proceedings of an event: happened, what was being said, etc., rather than to venture into: why is this important, why should you care, what implications this may have on you...

Given their perpetual existence, something must explain their nascent rise to prominence. I think that this can be rightly traced to the American election. Some of the liberals attributed their loss to the spreading of harmful, fake news which undermined the credibility of their candidate.

Whoever controls the news greatly influences and directs the perception of the public (or even the world) about what is important in the world today. Since this has recently become an area of concern to them, it has become an area of concern to us.

But really, let's not scare ourselves. It's not that fake news are on the rise or anything, it's just that we are now coming to realise that much of what we have regarded uncritically in the past is proving to be really shaky when placed under closer scrutiny now.