Y'all all know I'm addicted to NPR. You've probably guessed that I'm also a sucker for a beautifully written Washington Post, gut-wrenching Atlantic or quippy New Yorker column. But all of my media, including the most conservative channels got this election wrong. Not just a little wrong, bigly W-R-O-N-G. Or big league. Whatever.
Some people place the failure on the proliferation of fake news sites like these. One writer for one of these outlets even went as far as to say "I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me." Google and Facebook showed up a little bit late to the party, vowing to vet and monitor publishers' veracity a week after the election.
There are probably some of y'all out there saying "But Clair, you're a writer. You've written articles for The Media. You're part of it!" Yeah, well, I write about cocktails and I'm a fact-checker. That second part is what you should focus on: it means that I get to regularly pick apart articles to make sure that they're watertight. It, along with my physics background, means I really like numbers.
"But censorship!" you cry. When approximately 38 percent of the articles on these websites have been found by one survey to be a mixture of true and false or mostly false, it's damaging to the mere hope of any sort of civilized discourse. In comparison, the so-called mainstream media gets it right much, much more frequently, or about 90 percent of the time.
Here's the rub: It's likely that most people who read this post will be ideologically similar to me. It's conversations like this that must happen over the next four years. But with news sites like this on both sides of the aisle propagating what are literally different sets of facts, the talks are nearly impossible.
If you'd like to get a heads up when you're visiting a possible fake news site, download the Google Chrome extensions suggested here. To make things even cooler, another detector called FiB has been developed by college students and will hopefully be available very, very soon.