A cura di @Perodatrent.

Un articolo sulla Columbia Journalism Review riesamina la presunta influenza delle fake news sull’elezione di Trump.

Prima cita studi che dimostrerebbero come l’influenza delle fonti russe e della Alt-Right, per quanto reale, sia stata molto inferiore all’influenza dei media tradizionali.

Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) …. these 65,000 sentences were written not by Russian hackers, but overwhelmingly by professional journalists employed at mainstream news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Poi fa una nuova ricerca sugli articoli del New York Times, considerata come una fonte giornalistica affidabile, dimostrando che

in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential.

mentre il giornale non ha fatto abbastanza informazione sulle differenze fondamentali del programma tra i due candidati, per esempio sulla “Obamacare”, sulla quale

It is … shocking (if not surprising) how uninformed many Americans were about the mechanics of the law or how successful it had been.

La conclusione è che il risultato delle elezioni sarebbe stato influenzato molto di più dalla mancanza di professionalità dei media tradizionali che dalle fake news.

These were understandable mistakes, but they were still mistakes. Yet, rather than acknowledging the possible impact their collective failure of imagination could have had on the election outcome, the mainstream news community has instead focused its critical attention everywhere but on themselves: fake news, Russian hackers, technology companies, algorithmic ranking, the alt-right, even on the American public.

Immagine da White House.