The Facts in the Fiction: Fake News, Satire, and

Compartmentalized Labor

John Hendry

Summer 2017

Introduction: A Crisis of Epistemology

From February to November 2016, Craig Silverman, one of the founders of

Buzzfeed, tracked the Facebook engagement of news stories regarding the US election.

Many of these news articles came from familiar sources: The Washington Post, The

New York Times, and CNN. Other sources had unfamiliar but standard names like The

Denver Guardian. The only trouble is that there is no such newspaper as The Denver

Guardian. So when they published a headline that read, “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary

Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide,” some readers hunting for the

source of the story suspected that they were being duped.

Buzzfeed’s Silverman, one of these more astute readers, began investigating

what was being called “fake news” by major news organizations. As the election frenzy

continued, Silverman began tracking more fake news stories, noting that they received

more Facebook engagement than news stories from traditional media sources

(Silverman). The narrative surrounding the rise of fake news became muddled when

candidate Trump began using the term to refer to outlets like CNN that were critical of

his candidacy.

As the media and the Trump campaign began batting the term “fake news” back

and forth, a Washington DC pizza restaurant was dealing with the very real

consequences of fake news. Edgar Welch, a 28 year-old from North Carolina, had

travelled to DC with an AR-15 style rifle to investigate a pizza restaurant called Comet

Ping-Pong, which Welch believed was participating in a human trafficking operation.

Welch got this notion from a digitally-native conspiracy theory popularly referred to as

“Pizzagate,” which alleged that Comet Ping-Pong and its owner, longtime Clinton ally

James Alefantis, were involved in a pedophilic ring of high-powered Washinton elites.

The “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory was remarkable only in its visibility; the

sadistic pedophile elites and Da Vinci Code hidden-in-plain-sight schtick are present in

many other conspiracy narratives. The story’s visibility, due to Welch’s actions, elevated

the Pizzagate story to the level of national talking point for a couple of weeks in early

December of 2016. In the aftermath of Trump’s election, during which much had been

said about “fake news,” the Pizzagate story offered an opportunity for everyone to share

their opinion on the fake news phenomena.

Unfortunately, this muddied the waters on the phrase even further, and by

January of 2017, it seemed as though everything that could have been said about fake

news in the popular press and on cable news had been said. Perhaps President Trump

is now the greatest advocate of the phrase, using it as a thinly-veiled code for

opposition media like CNN. Though the popular press and cable news have dedicated

little time to discussing fake news in recent months, a series of articles published in

2017 point to the fact that the fake news phenomena is still in its gestating phase.

Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis’ white paper “Media Manipulation and

Disinformation Online” suggest that fake news may have contributed significantly to the

“agenda-setting” of the 2016 election, “particularly with regard to the type of coverage

each candidate received” (49). Another concern is raised by Jonathan Albright in the

journal Media and Communication, in regards to attempts to police fake news. He says,

“platforms policing content through opaque technologies adds yet another disruption in

the layer of trust that should be re-established directly between news organizations and

their audiences” (89).

But how are we to distinguish between fake news and merely hyper-partisan

content? Marwick and Lewis confirm my earlier analysis, saying “the term itself has

quickly become contentious and politically-motivated” (46). We need analyses that offer

tangible distinctions that separate fake news from other types of content spread across

social networks, so that these distinctions can be taken into account by industry and

regulatory actors who have the power to change the way information is disseminated.

These distinctions should be transparent and negotiable, to avoid the surfeit of trust that

Albright suggests may occur if opaque technological systems are implemented to

handle the fake news controversy.

For my part, I want to delineate how fake news can be distinguished from a

similar type of content—satirical news. On its face, the two are quite similar. Both

leverage existing generic conventions (those present in print journalism) to present

fictitious content in a believable format. The success or failure of both satire and fake

news relies upon the play between form, content, and the social structures that connect

the two. In this project, I am using a Media Industry Studies (MIS) approach to highlight

the industrial factors and labor practices that differ between fake news and satirical

news. This analysis will help illuminate some of the ideological differences between

creators of fake news and creators of satirical news. By drawing these distinctions,

industry actors and regulators can act with more precision and transparency when

combating dangerous misinformation.

MIS-oriented research combines “ethnographies...discursive analysis...and

regulatory debates” (Havens, Lotz, & Tinic 250) to capture “the logic of representational

practices” of companies which produce cultural artifacts. This research method

examines the “political, economic, and cultural dimensions of popular culture

production,” and I will leverage these three factors in my explanation of the industry

factors that separate fake news from satire. To supplement the MIS approach, I will also

be drawing upon new media studies for my inquiry. I believe this is appropriate

considering my object of study and the history of MIS.

Media industries have been a focal point for critical work since the Frankfurt

School first mounted a systematic critique of the “culture industries.” Since the vast

majority of MIS work has been directed at film and television, the theoretical and

philosophical toolkit of film and television studies has been central to that work. As MIS

scholars begin to study companies like Youtube or Netflix, some of the theoretical

notions of cinema and television scholars may be less applicable. Thankfully, New

Media scholars like Lev Manovich, Yonchai Benkler, and Jose Van Dijck have provided

a theoretical framework for understanding the internet’s media ecosystem, and these

tools can be used alongside film and television studies for a more complete MIS toolkit.

First, I will outline my methods and objects of study. Then, I will provide some

brief but crucial context regarding the history of fake and satirical news. Next, I will

discuss the the funding mandates and labor practices of the two types of organizations.

Finally, I will show how these labor practices and funding mandates infuse their content

with ideology that leads to the content being used and shared in particular ways.

Methods of Analysis and Objects of Study

For this project, I am using a MIS approach to study the difference in funding

mandates and labor practices in fake news organizations versus satirical news

organizations. Principally, I will be looking at The Onion, a company that produces

satirical news, and Disinfomedia, a company that explicitly produced fake news for the

2016 American election. I will tertiarily be drawing upon information regarding fake news

creators in Veles, Macedonia, but with little verifiable information available, that is a

risky well to draw from.

When looking at The Onion, I have pulled interviews with current and former

employees and their management staff regarding their workflow and funding mandates.

I am also using public information about their profitability and site traffic. For

Disinfomedia, I am using interviews with the owner, Jestin Coler, and what little public

information is available on the company. Disinfomedia was a company that operated

multiple fake news sites, one of which was The Denver Guardian. This site ran a very

popular story about a dead FBI agent, implicating the Clinton campaign in his death.

This story received a great deal of press attention as an exemplar of “fake news” during

the 2016 election cycle, and Disinfomedia was specifically targeted by Google as a

“fake news” site and had their Google AdSense account banned (Sydell)..

I am principally drawing upon two types of sources for this project: interviews in

press and publically available documents regarding corporate earnings and ownership.

To accommodate my MIS approach to this project, I will be using these interviews and

documents to glean insights about the relationships between regulation, funding

mandates, and labor practices at these companies. I will then show how these

relationships can be used to differentiate fake news from satire by looking at labor and

funding.

Fake News: A Brief History

Although the term “Fake News” has reached a new height of popularity since the

2016 election, the term and the sentiment behind it are certainly not new. As early as

1934, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had released a series of shorts called “Goofy Movies”

which included satirical newsreel footage. The advent of television news created a

spate of parody shows in the 1960s and 1970s, with the BBC’s That Was the Week

That Was (1962) and Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” (1975). These shows

created a precedent that was followed by programming like The Daily Show (1996) and

The Colbert Report (2005). Many of the alumni from these shows now have their own

parody news programming, with Samantha Bee and John Oliver being two of the most

popular.

Satirical news in print also has a long history in the American literary tradition.

Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was infamous for publishing satirical

news articles in the 1860s, and satirical news has been something of an American

literary tradition since then (Sanborn). For this project, I will be looking at the labor

practices and funding mandate of The Onion, perhaps the most well-known website that

parodies newspaper reporting. The Onion began as a physical newspaper in 1988, but

successfully made the transition from print to digital and has grown substantially in the

last two decades, adding popular pop-culture site The A.V. Club to their roster.

The Onion and entertainers like Jon Stewart have sparred with media

organizations and politicians over the years, but they have never inspired the visceral

reaction that reporters and politicians have had to the fake news phenomena of

2015-2017. The Denver Guardian does not read as parody, though statements from its

owner have been made to that effect (Sydell). If the Denver Guardian is fake news, but

The Onion is satire, where is the line? As I will show, productive distinctions between

the two can be made when we consider the divergent labor practices and funding

mandates of fake news versus satire.

The Onion and the Mandate of Satire

Embedded in the right-wing indictment of the “mainstream” media is an

understanding of bias. This critique has been honed to a sharp edge over the last 30

years, with conservative stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh denouncing organizations like

CNN and the New York Times for barely concealing a hard-left bias. The details of this

bias are often hazy, but the critique is repeated everywhere on talk radio and on Fox

News. This critique of major media organizations, along with generally low levels of trust

between the public and the media, allowed Donald Trump to exploit the media malaise

to great effect. The Trump campaign (and now White House) have pushed the “fake

news” meme and generally used it as a tool to discredit CNN and other media outlets.

The critique of the media has been constant, but disorganized and inconsistent.

This 2013 op-ed, ostensibly written by Meredith Artley, the “managing editor of

CNN.com,” offers a far more cogent critique:

“So, as managing editor of CNN.com, I want our readers to know this: All you are to us, and all you will ever be to us, are eyeballs. The more eyeballs on our content, the more cash we can ask for. Period. And if we’re able to get more eyeballs, that means I’ve done

my job, which gets me congratulations from my bosses, which encourages me to put up even more stupid bullshit on the homepage. I don’t hesitate to call it stupid bullshit because we all know it’s stupid bullshit. We know it and you know it. We also know that you are probably dumb enough, or bored enough, or both, to click on the stupid bullshit anyway, and that you will continue to do so as long as we keep putting it in front of your big, idiot faces. You want to know how many more page views the Miley Cyrus thing got than our article on the wildfires ravaging Yosemite? Like 6 gazillion more. That’s on you, not us” (“Let me Explain”).

This piece was published on the satire site The Onion on August 23rd, 2013. It

generated little controversy, and it certainly did not draw the concentrated ire of the

news industry. It was just one of the many satirical articles that The Onion publishes

every day. The website has all the trappings of a news aggregator like Huffington Post

or Drudge, but its identity as satire is well-known. As a result, The Onion drew no huge

criticism from CNN for posting this article. Perhaps more interestingly, in 2011, the New

York Times ran a story which included information from an Onion article. The retraction

printed the next day contained no anger, just an admission that the Times, “erroneously

included a parody...produced by the satiric newspaper The Onion” (Caramanica).

The New York Times example is an extreme one, but it raises an interesting

question. How can The Onion continue to operate without major criticism when even

journalists can be fooled by their satirical content? What attributes does The Onion

possess that the Denver Guardian did not? One crucial difference between the two is

how they fulfill their economic mandate, and I will show how this difference enables The

Onion to thrive while the Denver Guardian was added to Google’s naughty list.

The Onion originated as a weekly paper in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin, founded

by University of Wisconsin students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson. In 1996, The

Onion first appeared online. It evolved slowly over the years until a major redesign in

2013 brought The Onion to an all-digital web 2.0 format that looked similar to other

popular online news sites like The Huffington Post. Along with the site redesign came a

new funding mandate. The Onion wanted to keep editorial control as much as possible

while still appealing to outside advertisers, so they developed Onion Labs, an

advertising agency that works with brands to create on-message branding that fits

naturally within The Onion’s purview of content.

The mandate of this advertising system is to maintain the brand of The Onion

while partnering with potential advertisers. Two brief examples of this advertising

system are Ford Motor Company and Bacardi. Ford partnered with Onion Labs to

produce a series of sponsored articles on Clickhole, an Onion-owned site that publishes

fun clickbait articles. Onion Labs then commissioned a series of Clickhole articles like

“All The Seats In The Car...Ranked,” which included “travel content that included highly 

integrated ‘tongue in cheek’ native content with the brand in on the joke” (“Case Studies: 

Ford”). A partnered ad series with Bacardi included humourous drink recipes written by 

Onion writers. 

Onion Labs is responsible for as much as 81% of the company's revenue stream 

(Heller), so this is clearly the cornerstone of The Onion’s current funding mandate. The 

mandate is twofold. First, The Onion brand must remain reputable by avoiding 

controversy. This is accomplished through collaborative editorial practice, which i will 

discuss shortly. Second, their brand must be maintained at the level of generic content; 

the Onion is known for satire and sharp comedy, so their content must be consistent 

and on-brand. This dual mandate is reified and contextualized by labor practices, which 

focus on collaboration and brand awareness. 

The Labor of Satire 

As translations of economic mandates into lived routines, labor practices

engender habits and attitudes in their workforce. The ideological implications of The

Onion’s labor habits are reassuringly familiar. With only a few prestigious positions

available in the organization (Managing Editor, Senior Writer, etc.) The Onion attracts

talent on its way up and out. One example of this is Chris Kelly, who worked for The

Onion for nearly five years before being hired as a staff writer with Funny Or Die (Kelly).

Other ex-Onion writers have worked on projects like The Daily Show. This is a

comfortably familiar model, wherein working at a reliable comedy shop eventually gives

access to more prestigious opportunities. This is common in comedy; think of the

comedy stars that worked with Second City in Chicago or New York’s Upright Citizens

Brigade before coming into roles on TV and in film.

For writers currently at The Onion, their days are taken up by a grueling editorial

process. Writers come to the daily editorial meeting with a list of headlines, which are

then thrown around the room to see if they make the cut. “Nearly every word that

appears in print is conceived, refined, brainstormed and edited in committee, which calls

for near-bedsore-inflicting stretches of seat time in the writers' room” (Tower). Joe

Randazzo, a former editor, says “We find that the creative process works much better

when we function as a kind of collective mind.” This collaborative work process creates

a coherent brand, which allows Onion Labs to maximize their profit by offering reliable

content to pair with advertisers.

This workflow process and funding mandate exemplifies what Derek Johnson

describes in Media Franchising. As the media ecosystem of the internet allows more

and more companies to compete in the same economic space, Johnson suggests that a

new form of franchising is occurring, characterized by “collaborative partnerships that

put creative users situated across different production cultures into relations of

exchange” (235). Onion Labs is an excellent example of this cross-promotional

franchising work, since it capitalizes on the brand/content profile that The Onion has

managed to keep consistent through its recent period of growth. These funding

mandates and labor practices can be contrasted with fake news companies, which

reveals the deep rift between the two.

Denver Guardian and the Mandate of Fake News

Justin Coler, of Disinfomedia, sheds light on the ad revenue that keeps the fake

news industry going. His company ran a domain called the Denver Guardian that

published an exceptionally popular fake news story about an FBI agent dead at the

hands of the Clinton campaign. This story was shared on Facebook over half a million

times (Sydell), and those shares enabled Coler to bring users to the domain of the

Denver Guardian, his fictional newspaper. From there, users must have clicked on a lot

of ads, as Coler says that at the height of the fake news bonanza, he was making in the

“relative ballpark” of $10,000 to $30,000 a month in ad revenue.

Even as early as November of 2016, giants like Alphabet and Facebook were

implementing new rules to counter the bad publicity they were receiving for giving ad

revenue to businesses like Disinfomedia (Love, Cooke, & Reuters). Without

governmental regulation, however, Coler remains unworried about the viability of his

business. He says,

There are literally hundreds of ad networks. Literally hundreds. Last week my inbox was just filled everyday with people, because they knew that Google was cracking down — hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites. I kind of applaud Google for their steps, although I think what they're doing is kind of random. They don't really have a process in place for identifying these things.

Despite Google and Facebook attempting to stop the use of their ad networks for

the spread of fake news, they are not the only players on the scene. This sentiment is

shared by another type of fake news creator, exemplified by a young man calling

himself “Dimitri” to NBC reporters Alexander Smith and Vladamir Banic. Dimitri is a

Macedonian teenager, just 18 at the time of the interview, who runs a small fake news

empire with a few of his friends. When asked about Facebook and Google cracking

down on fake news ads, Dimitri said, “This business updates every hour, every ten

minutes, every minute. There are always news ideas, new types of generating new

visitors and that's the thing we all want" (Smith and Banic).

Ultimately, the advertising revenue is what drives the creators of this content,

even if they also have ideological stakes or see their work as a form of satirical art.

Despite platform-end regulation of a sort, there are plenty of other ad networks that are

willing to work with fake news companies. Even at Facebook and Google, there is a

sense that their commitment to stopping fake news only runs so deep, as there have

been multiple questions about the efficacy of their responses (Albright, Marwick &

Lewis).

Whereas The Onion maintains its brand by posting content, Disinfomedia

actually concealed its brand by operating under a number of different domains. Rather

than each click contributing to an overall brand or corporate message, Disinfomedia

spread its revenue across multiple sites in hopes that some of its articles would be

passed around on social media. By operating solely on clicks-for-cash, Disinfomedia

had no incentive to build a brand, instead relying on the long tail of content to cast a

wide net to bring in viewers.

What happens here is a twofold commitment to the extreme and unreliable

content of fake news. At the highest levels, the producers and owners of these

companies have a commitment to generating ad revenue, so they employ tactics to get

eyes on the page. This ranges from aesthetically mimicking traditional news (as in the

case of the Denver Guardian) to utilizing clickbait titles. On the consumer end, the

high-stakes headlines and incendiary content prompt clicks and responses from other

consumers. So the content producer profits exponentially from the sharing economy,

while consumers use the content to accumulate responses to increase post visibility.

While the singular goal of the content producers (ad revenue) is achieved, the

consumers utilize the content in their lifeworlds in a variety of ways. One user may see

a fake news story as confirming previous beliefs, and repost it. Another user may see

that post, which strongly opposes their own view, and repost it as an example of the

opposition’s faulty thinking. A third user may then see the post and repost it in a satirical

or ironic juxtaposition. This then spins out across diverse networks of association, until

the story has accumulated a plethora of meanings.

Labor in Fake News versus Satire

The differing mandates of satire and fake news also influence how labor is

utilized and culturally interpreted within organizations. Fake news organizations keep

their labor compartmentalized, while satire organizations take a more cooperative

approach to labor. This is reflected by the organizational practices of the labor force,

whose approaches show how they relate to their work differently.

For fake news organizations, contributors may not even know the names of other

contributors (Sydell, Coler), and pseudonyms within the organization do not even match

the public-facing pseudonyms attached to fake news stories. For satire organizations,

on the other hand, public-facing pseudonyms for stories correspond to a small group of

staff writers, whose names are publically available.

Whereas The Onion’s labor force engages in a familiar model for entertainment,

even in the digital age, the fake news industry is digitally-native and, consequently,

ideologically unfamiliar. As I have already discussed, the funding mandate of fake news

is quite different from that of The Onion. Both derive their revenue through advertising,

but they do it in divergent ways. As a result, fake news organizations attract different

labor with different practices. These practices indicate how the creators of fake news

see the type and scope of their work. This in turn provides a sketch of the ideological

relationships that exist between industry practice, organizational identity, and lived

experience.

Jestin Coler’s Disinfomedia was operating with very low overhead costs, which

consisted of just “monthly hosting fees and Facebook marketing” (Coler). The content

for his sites was written by “a team of contributors” who “submitted content for free.”

Coler has mentioned elsewhere that the group of writers was known “only

through...anonymous pen [names],” and that “privacy is something we take very

seriously in our writers group” (Sydell). This shows differences in both profit motive and

worker-product relationship that help to delineate between fake news and satire

organizations.

First, the profit motive of fake news and satire are different at the level of content

creator. At the management level, both types of organizations derive their money from

internet ad sales, but the profit motive of content producers is quite different. To return

to Coler’s Disinfomedia, he indicates that his content producers were not paid when he

first began producing fake news, but that as he began to receive ad revenue from his

sites, he switched to a different model. Coler describes this new model by saying,

“[One domain] implemented a business model where contributors were paid not through the corporation, but through their own Google AdSense accounts. Ads in-content were paid to the contributor, while ads under-content or on the sidebar went to the “house” to pay for things like hosting, images, development, marketing, legal, etc. “This method proved lucrative for both contributors and the corporation, as it provided incentive for contributors to push the envelope with regard to content and encouraged them to do their own promotion. Since editorial direction was bottom up, not top down, contributors had the freedom to write about topics that interested them and were given free rein to explore their own creativity—within reason” (Coler).

This model means that content creators had a great deal of discretion and did not

have to consult with anyone other than Coler before publishing a story. With “free reign”

to write about what they thought would boost traffic, Disinfomedia’s content creators

were actually encouraged to write these stories in bad faith. WIth the sole goal being

web traffic to boost ad revenue, content creators were never asked to abide by any

standards other than the explicit goal to drive traffic. This is contrasted with The Onion’s

model of catching talent on its way up and out; writers at The Onion are quite invested

in the company brand, as it may offer them more lucrative opportunities in the future.

Furthermore, with the identities of content creators at Disinfomedia doubly

concealed from the public, no one had to worry about reprisals or the legal

consequences of their actions. Though Jestin Coler, the owner of Disinfomedia, was

eventually outed to the public, the names of his contributors remained a secret because

even he didn’t know them (Sydell). This just further incentivizes content creators to be

extreme and unaccountable for their content, since there is no risk to their reputation

involved. Another case of fake news distributors reinforces the notion that they feel no

responsibility for their work.

For Dimitri, the Macedonian teen making fake news with his friends, his

relationship to the product is fraught with justifications. "I didn't force anyone to give me

money," he says. "People sell cigarettes, they sell alcohol. That's not illegal, why is my

business illegal? If you sell cigarettes, cigarettes kill people. I didn't kill anyone” (Smith

and Banic). The comparison to cigarettes is interesting here, as it implies that Dimitri

knows that what he is producing is harmful. Later in the same interview, he responds to

accusations that he is being used to spread propaganda by saying, "Maybe I don’t want

to find out, because if I find out maybe I’m going to feel bad. Right now I'm feeling OK."

Ideology and Self Representation

The way economic mandates and labor practices are self-represented is an

important factor in understanding the ideological formations at work within these

organizations. Once again, the differences between The Onion and Disinfomedia are

informative. The Onion’s employees place themselves squarely within the existing

media framework, whereas Jestin Coler sees himself as a part of something different

entirely.

Speaking on how he saw The Onion relating to other media, writer Dan Hanson

said, "I think maybe we made some people feel better, that there was this plucky little

voice dissenting in the media wilderness, but I don't think it's really affecting elections.

We were going after Bush right after 9/11. He still won in 2004" (Tower). Current

Editor-in-Chief Cole Bolton more explicitly tied The Onion to existing media structures in

a 2015 interview, saying “We always try to evolve in line with that other publications are

doing. The way we want to present our information is how other news outlets are

presenting their information. We have to adapt to what they're doing" (Heller).

This indicates that The Onion is very much aware of their place in the media

ecosystem as a satire producer. Bolton suggests that it is The Onion’s content that will

keep it afloat in a changing ecosystem, saying, “Ultimately, we see everything as

converging, and if you're a great content creator, your business will thrive” (Heller). The

key point of this convergence is Onion Labs, which maintains the tone and tenor of The

Onion while maximizing profit through ads co-created with advertising partners. This

allows The Onion to maintain a tenuous ideological bridge between being anti-media

satirists and simultaneously participating in the corporate world they mock.

Editor-in-Chief Cole Bolton perfectly encapsulates this strange ideological loop,

saying in the same interview both that, "We've had an anti-corporate rebellious streak

throughout our editorial history. If we start turning into what we've taken stances

against, I think that compromises what we do," and that "We only care about our

advertisers. We don't care about our readers at all. We want to optimize for advertisers

and give them whatever they want” (Heller). This blatant contradiction comes from the

head of a comedy shop, so take those remarks with a grain of salt. But perhaps

ideology shows itself best in the way we negotiate our contradictions.

Jestin Coler, also full of contradictions, shows that the self-representation of his

work relates to cable news and traditional journalism. "The whole idea from the start

was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish

blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and

point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says (Sydell). This justification provides

crucial context for understanding Coler’s relationship with traditional journalism, while

simultaneously showing a lack of understanding of the medium he is using.

Coler’s plan to “publicly denounce” the stories and “point out the fact that they

were fiction” makes sense if his disinformation campaign were being undertaken in print

or on broadcast or cable television, but this plan does not account for the culture and

technological affordances of the internet. While traditional news outlets pointed out

repeatedly instances of fake news, the internet ran with the stories without vigorous

fact-checking.

Conclusion: “There needs to be something done.”

Jestin Coler and Cole Bolton are both full of contradictions. Cole Bolton,

Editor-in-Chief of The Onion, maintains that he has a deep anti-corporate streak while

helping to create a new kind of advertainment that involves “training, not tricking” the

audience (Heller). Jestin Coler, owner of the now-defunct Disinfomedia, peddled

sensationalist fake news but maintains that, “We have a whole nation of media-illiterate

people. Really, there needs to be something done” (Sydell).

These contradictions are at the forefront of a new wave of media that blurs the

line between fact and fiction. As Albright has suggested, we live in the “era of fake

news,” and we had best get used to it (3). Furthermore, studies like the one conducted

by Marwick and Lewis suggest that we have only experienced the first wave of what

may have “potentially grave impacts on democracy and civic participation” (50). To

combat the spread of misinformation online, it is important to clearly and in a nuanced

fashion differentiate exactly what constitutes fake news.

This will require a great deal of energy on the part of scholars, industry leaders,

regulators, and consumers, but the safeguarding of a free and transparent press is vital

for a healthy democracy. Without clear social guidelines for how information is sourced

and distributed, we run the risk of making important social decisions without clear risks

and rewards. By differentiating fake news from other forms of content, we can begin to

repair the damaged trust between the media and the public.

I hope to have contributed to this project by delineating what separates fake

news from satirical news. By looking at how economic mandates and labor practices are

self-represented by the individuals that make up a media organization, we can begin to

differentiate more clearly what kinds of content may be harmful to civic discourse. It is

then up to regulators and industry actors to work with consumers to make the best

possible environment for open and transparent communication online. This problem is

not going to go away, and as long as there is profit to be made by spreading

disinformation, we must be vigilant.

Works Cited

Albright, Jonathan. "Welcome to the Era of Fake News." Media and Communication 5.2

(2017): 87-91. Web.

BBC Staff. "'I Write Fake News That Gets Shared on Facebook' - BBC Newsbeat." BBC

News. BBC, 15 Nov. 2016. Web. 25 July 2017.

Caramanica, Jon. "Tiger Beat: Still Squeaky Clean After All These Years." The New York

Times. The New York Times, 16 Apr. 2011. Web. 25 July 2017.

Coler, Jestin. "A Former Fake News Creator on Covering Fake News." Nieman Reports.

N.p., 1 May 2017. Web. 25 July 2017.

Dewey, Caitlin. "Facebook Fake-news Writer: ‘I Think Donald Trump Is in the White

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