BBC sets up team to debunk fake news | Media | The Guardian
Phew!
BBC to the rescue against "fake news". The corporation – the one whose
purse strings are controlled by the British government and whose board
is stuffed with the great and the good of the British establishment – is
setting up a new department, called Reality Check, that will work with
Facebook to assess whether reports spread on social media are "fake
news".
As I have been arguing for a while now, this is the
backlash from the corporate media as social media has gradually eroded
their control over how information is used and given us a platform to
challenge and expose their own "fake news" (see my previous two posts
this morning for examples of corporate media fake news).
What
the BBC and Facebook are doing is beginning to create the infrastructure
necessary to reassert control over the public discourse. We have been
experiencing a brief and heady period of relative media freedom. It
won't last much longer unless we resist it every step of the way.
BBC news chief James Harding: ‘The BBC can’t edit the internet, but we won’t stand aside either.’
Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
