On November 13, 2016, five days after the close of the bitterly contested
2016 US presidential election, the top link in Google presented readers
with the following story regarding the outcome of the vote:
To all the liberal loonies still rioting because you claim Trump
did not get the popular vote, get your meds now and prepare to
be shocked because the finals results are in. Trump got 306 Electoral College vote while Hillary Clinton got 232. For #PopularVote:
#Trump: 62,972,226 #Clinton: 62,277,750
1
Although the final popular vote was still being finalised on November
13, already at this stage, it was being reported by the mainstream media
that Hillary Clinton was on her way to winning that vote (the eventual
number was to be Clinton over 65 million, Trump slightly less than 63
million). What is most significant about this story is not necessarily its
content, provocative as that was, but the fact that a majority of people
searching for the term “final election result” would have almost certainly clicked on a link not to one of the major media organisations
covering the election assiduously, such as The New York Times, The
Washington Post, or CNN, but rather an anonymous WordPress blog at
70news.wordpress.com. Published under the headline “FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR (62.9 M
-62.2 M) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES (306-232)HEY
CHANGE.ORG, SCRAP YOUR LOONY PETITION NOW!”, certainly this “news” story had neither a particular concern with either
factual accuracy or the typical rhetorical conventions of news reporting.
Philip Bump, writing in The Washington Post on November 14, drew
attention to the position of the 70news story in Google, as well as the
supposed source for its figures – a tweet by @Koxinga8 and another
spurious site, USASupreme.com, with the repeated, pithy observation
on the content of these and other assertions, “That’s not true”.
2
In the
weeks following the surprise election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the role of fake news in the outcome of the
election became a source of considerable concern for a large number of
3 Zombie Media
Alt-Journalism, Fake News,
and Robot Editors
2016 US presidential election, the top link in Google presented readers
with the following story regarding the outcome of the vote:
To all the liberal loonies still rioting because you claim Trump
did not get the popular vote, get your meds now and prepare to
be shocked because the finals results are in. Trump got 306 Electoral College vote while Hillary Clinton got 232. For #PopularVote:
#Trump: 62,972,226 #Clinton: 62,277,750
1
Although the final popular vote was still being finalised on November
13, already at this stage, it was being reported by the mainstream media
that Hillary Clinton was on her way to winning that vote (the eventual
number was to be Clinton over 65 million, Trump slightly less than 63
million). What is most significant about this story is not necessarily its
content, provocative as that was, but the fact that a majority of people
searching for the term “final election result” would have almost certainly clicked on a link not to one of the major media organisations
covering the election assiduously, such as The New York Times, The
Washington Post, or CNN, but rather an anonymous WordPress blog at
70news.wordpress.com. Published under the headline “FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR (62.9 M
-62.2 M) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES (306-232)HEY
CHANGE.ORG, SCRAP YOUR LOONY PETITION NOW!”, certainly this “news” story had neither a particular concern with either
factual accuracy or the typical rhetorical conventions of news reporting.
Philip Bump, writing in The Washington Post on November 14, drew
attention to the position of the 70news story in Google, as well as the
supposed source for its figures – a tweet by @Koxinga8 and another
spurious site, USASupreme.com, with the repeated, pithy observation
on the content of these and other assertions, “That’s not true”.
2
In the
weeks following the surprise election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the role of fake news in the outcome of the
election became a source of considerable concern for a large number of
3 Zombie Media
Alt-Journalism, Fake News,
and Robot Editors