American intellectuals and wannabe-journalists also worry about fake news and the effect on Americans.
I've sat and pondered this point a good bit. My German wife wants to hype fake news and that everyone believes fake news.
The problem for me, is that I grew up with this weekly magazine that was published from 1979 to 2007 called the Weekly World News. Basically, it was 100-percent fake news.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans read the magazine at various points and came to grasp the legacy of WWN (Weekly World News). Just because something is written down....does not make it a legitimate fact or a news item.
In a way, WWN trained me to be more observant of the real news, or the manipulated news, or the constructed-to-appear factual news. If someone said something....what did they not say? If the slant of an article went in only one single direction....what was missing? If the reporter seemed to constantly name unnamed sources....did they really exist? Who were they?
Germans? They don't have a vehicle like WWN. They are told over and over....journalists are clever, brilliant individuals, who only desire to deliver the facts. If they need to really win over the public....have a forum of five individuals, with four telling one story and only one telling the opposite story. It's an easy gimmick and you often see it in German public TV.
We are almost fifteen months now into the fake news era, and it's still brought up occasionally in Germany. My guess is that when Trump finally leaves DC....the fake news era will end. They will work day and night to convince people that the era ended and that you can now rest comfortably knowing that only real news exists in the world.
Even the World World News crowd couldn't make up a story like this.
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