The whole "fake news" narrative is one I have been watching and which I find most concerning, though perhaps not for the reasons you might ex[ect.

As this election season unfolded, I became more and more aware of how skewed the reporting of the mainstream media is.  Not just a little bias, which we all know exists, but actively steering public perceptions in a very partisan way.  I started finding alternative sources for news.  It's rather a pain, because one has to really check out the sources -- one can no longer rely on the formerly reliable news sources to be accurate.  But when you wander off the beaten path, it's the Wild West.  There are unquestionably all kinds of fake news sites -- but there are also alternative news sources that are considerably better than mainstream media: Democracy Now and The Young Turks are two examples. I keep thinking how utterly ironic it is that we live in the information age, but have a harder time ascertaining the accuracy of news reports than in the era of Walter Cronkite.

Yes, there are fake news sites, and they were very, very active regarding the Presidential election, but the way the media is pushing the narrative, I feel like it is a way to muddy the waters to discredit the actual reliability of some alternative sources for news which are more accurate than the mainstream media.

I am thinking of Standing Rock, as just one example -- one I have been following since August and which has been going on since April.  I've seen dozens of live streams, many from people I know personally who went to the site, plus the alternative networks.  I have seen human rights abuses on the part of law enforcement to equal Selma and Birmingham in 1963.  And I have listened to the deafening silence of our major news sources, some of which have tossed in a brief bit the past few days since a young woman had part of her arm blown off this past Sunday (and another young woman, a Native American, had her retina detached) -- both due to police actions against unarmed water protectors.  What's going on out there right now is one of the biggest stories of this generation, but one must turn to alternative media to learn anything about it.

As librarians and information professionals, it falls to us to help patrons find the real news, to sort the reliable alternative sources from the fake news sites, but without being sucked into a manufactured narrative that paints all non-mainstream sources with the same muddy brush.

Karin