The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism advocacy group, this week published an “index of unreliable news websites.”
It names several newsrooms that feature right-leaning commentary, including the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller, and, for a while it included the Washington Examiner.
The really curious thing here is not that a pro-journalism group’s blacklist would include right-leaning newsrooms, but that such an organization would produce a blacklist at all. There is something discordant about a group whose mission is to champion “freedom of expression, civil dialogue and compelling journalism” simultaneously being in the business of blacklisting real (albeit opinionated) news organizations as “unreliable.”
“Fake news is a business. Much of that business is ad-supported,” researcher Barrett Golding explains in the report published this week by Poynter. “Aside from journalists, researchers and news consumers, we hope that the index will be useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation.”
He adds, “Better data means better results for researchers, reporters and readers. So the International Fact-Checking Network built a more complete dataset: UnNews, an index of unreliable news sites.”
The index was created by curating “fake news” databases maintained by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, data designer Chris Herbert, Merrimack University, PolitiFact, and Snopes, Golding explains, adding that he was also careful to discard inactive sites named by these groups.
However, as with most attempts to compile “fake news” websites, the index relies on unreliable criteria. This has led to all sorts of absurd results, such as the lumping in of political commentary and parody websites and responsible (if politically influenced) newsrooms with actual click-farms that fabricate honest-to-goodness “fake news.”
The UnNews index includes, for example, ClickHole, Reductress, the Drudge Report, and Daily Kos. None of these entries make sense in terms of rooting out “fake news.”
Reductress and ClickHole are satirical websites – the latter being an offshoot of the Onion. The index even labels them as “satire,” which raises the questions: Why include them at all? The Drudge Report, meanwhile, merely aggregates headlines from other newsrooms. If Drudge, which the index labels as “bias,” links the New York Times, is the Times now biased? Lastly, Daily Kos, which is rated “clickbait,” is not even a news site. It is a site where progressives write commentary diaries and sometimes share news links.
Golding explains that Daily Kos was included as “fake news” because it was among several “sites we reviewed [that] had mostly false verdicts from fact-checking sites.” ClickHole and Reductress are on the list because they have been flagged by fact-checkers who worry readers won’t get the joke.
Meanwhile, certain “highly politicized” sites, including AlterNet and National Review, were spared inclusion on the “fake news” index because they were “mostly not fake.” I guess that is why the Huffington Post is also not on the list. But that does not explain how CNS News ended up on the list but NowThis News did not.
Also, as mentioned earlier, the Washington Examiner was initially included in the index. It has since been removed. Poynter added an editor’s note to its article, which reads, “After reviewing our methodology, we found that neither [the Washington Examiner nor FirstPost] met the criteria for inclusion, so both were removed.” Good on them for removing it. But the fact that these were included in the first place suggests extreme incompetence, malleable or inconsistent standards, or both. What, exactly, prompted the Washington Examiner’s inclusion on the list, and did it suddenly vanish when somebody called to complain?
The underlying problem is that “fake news” databases more often than not ensnare sites that do not deserve the tag. And on top of that, Poynter is misguided in getting into the business of blacklisting in the first place. Rather than tell readers what not to read, a pro-journalism and free speech group should focus instead on advising readers on what to read. Give readers the tools to learn and decide for themselves. Do more than just disparage satire websites and newspapers whose editorial lean is different from your own.
