A day before the election, during a discussion on journalism and bias, one of my students showed me “proof” that mainstream news organizations are not just liberal, but conspiratorially so.
It was an image of a headline: “The fix is in: Newsweek already has an issue in print, boxed and ready to ship, declaring Hillary Clinton the winner.” The post came from a website called “D.C. Clothesline,” and the corresponding “article” came from a website found simply through an IP address, which is apparently the home of “World Class Investigative Truth” by Jim Stone, a self-identified " ‘deplorable’ freelance journalist.” On his site, Stone shows a screencap of a tweet by Milo Yiannopoulos, from Breitbart News, of a photograph of a Newsweek cover featuring Hillary Clinton with the headline “Madam President.” Stone captions the photo, in part, “They really are going to steal it,” implying that “the mainstream media” and Democrats were collaborating to rig the election just as Donald Trump had alleged throughout his campaign.
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Jerome Corgier for The Chronicle
A day before the election, during a discussion on journalism and bias, one of my students showed me “proof” that mainstream news organizations are not just liberal, but conspiratorially so.
It was an image of a headline: “The fix is in: Newsweek already has an issue in print, boxed and ready to ship, declaring Hillary Clinton the winner.” The post came from a website called “D.C. Clothesline,” and the corresponding “article” came from a website found simply through an IP address, which is apparently the home of “World Class Investigative Truth” by Jim Stone, a self-identified " ‘deplorable’ freelance journalist.” On his site, Stone shows a screencap of a tweet by Milo Yiannopoulos, from Breitbart News, of a photograph of a Newsweek cover featuring Hillary Clinton with the headline “Madam President.” Stone captions the photo, in part, “They really are going to steal it,” implying that “the mainstream media” and Democrats were collaborating to rig the election just as Donald Trump had alleged throughout his campaign.
The problem with this claim? Newsweek had produced two covers in advance, one saying “President Trump” and the other saying “Madam President,” to have either option ready post-election. The practice is not new. Yet the story became “evidence” of a conspiracy that quickly traveled across a maze of “truthy” and outright fake news websites.
“Post-truth—adjective; relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” So says Oxford Dictionaries, announcing their 2016 word of the year. If we really have entered a post-truth era, as so many have written, what does that mean for the scholar and the student? For the citizen and the state? In our special issue, we wrestle with these and other urgent questions.
For years, I have watched with mounting concern as my students cited dubious sources in their work and in class. This incident made me realize that I needed to help them navigate this increasingly confusing and cluttered media world. So I created a resource listing “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’ Sources.”
The original Google Doc included more than 100 websites, ranging from fake news sources, such as the ones created by teenagers in Macedonia, to those that are sometimes reliable but use sensational and misleading headlines (think The Daily Kos, UsUncut, The Blaze, or Red State). I also included several tips for analyzing sources of information. In class, we spoke about journalism and the differences between writing from a particular political perspective and deceptive propaganda.
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Though my students largely brushed it off, the Google Doc I had created was already going viral. In just two days, it was shared about 25,000 times on Facebook, gaining attention from The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, NPR, and dozens of other news organizations around the world.
As the document racked up shares, I worked to clarify its contents, adding links to more media-literacy resources, and wading through hundreds of emails with suggestions of websites to add and requests to evaluate favorite webpages. Librarians and journalists around the country sent me notes of thanks and encouragement, with some offering to help expand the Google Doc.
But the tenor of the emails soon changed. The messages became hateful and harassing. Some of the websites included in my resource, such as Infowars, Natural News, and 100PercentFedUp.com, began posting personal, exaggerated, and false information about me. I was denounced as a liberal snowflake, a kooky lefty, a “crybully” professor, a Communist infiltrator from China, a fascist, a government censor, an “illiterate bitch.”
Many of these websites also encouraged their readers to let me, as well as my colleagues and the president of Merrimack College, know how they felt. I started receiving emails saying that I should be shot or raped, and that my whole family deserved a slow and painful death. Some readers took it upon themselves to take out a classified sex ad on my behalf, and I somehow got signed up for multiple Ford F-150 test drives, plastic surgeries, and prescription-drug orders from Canada.
Some of this was amusing, especially the growing internet repository of Photoshopped images of me. But some of it I found to be genuinely scary. Campus security started maintaining a presence outside my office door, and our department administrator received dozens of threatening messages. At one point, an administrator offered to put me up in a hotel should I ever feel unsafe, and reiterated Merrimack’s support of academic freedom amid the phone calls and emails demanding that I be fired.
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Eventually the harassment dwindled from hundreds of such messages every hour to a handful a day. And the media coverage made my Google Doc much more interesting to my students. The disconnect between the defamatory articles and the person they knew proved why such websites belonged on my list in the first place.
Fake news has been around since the beginning of what we know as news, and neither fake news nor other false, misleading, or clickbait-y forms of news are going away anytime soon. Although these sites tried to make me go away, they have only emboldened me. I’m now collaborating with a group of computer programmers and librarians to come up with tools to help people assess information on the web, and assembling an interdisciplinary anthology titled Fake News.
In an era of students’ secretly filming classes, guns on campuses, and professor watchlists, it feels like a scary time to be a professor — which means it’s an important time to be a professor.
Melissa Zimdars is an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College.
Correction (1/17/2017, 11:50 a.m.): Because of an editing error, this essay originally misstated the author’s part in assembling an interdisciplinary anthology. She is doing so not with a group, but with just one other scholar. The text has been updated accordingly.
