But just as the term “urban legend” (which has a specific folkloric meaning) was long ago co-opted to broadly refer to any narrative that is false or questionable, so the term “fake news” is now being used so broadly as to blur important distinctions.
There is much bad news in the online world, but not all of it is “fake” (i.e., completely fabricated information that has little or no intersection with real-world events). There are also partisan political sites that take nuggets of real news and spin them into highly distorted, clickbait articles. There are sites that misleadingly repackage old news as if it were current information. There are sites that aggregate articles from a variety of dubious and questionable sources. There are sites (especially in the fields of health and science) that believe they’re presenting pertinent information but are woefully inaccurate in their information-gathering and reporting. These forms of news are all bad in one way or another, but broadly classifying all such information as “fake news” clouds an already confusing issue.
Even worse, the term “fake news” is now being so broadly applied as to refer to news outlets that evince a political slant (or, currently, those perceived as having “helped Donald Trump get elected”).
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