YOU know it as fake news but it is never called lies. It has been around for a while now but came to prominence during the US presidential elections last year which gave the United States and the world President Donald Trump.

Whether to manipulate people in politics or just for profit, fake news is an ongoing debate which the global media has to battle or lose their credibility.

The US media has since been doing fact checks since the early 2000s but that has not stemmed the tsunami of fake news, alternative facts or those just economical with the truth. 

More so in America where the conservatives and right wing say the US media is just playing it up, because they don’t like Trump. And because the 45th US president has used the term “fake news” on the media as well.

In US daily Washington Post, the newsroom floor now has three fact-checkers out of the 300-odd staffers at the headquarters in Washington DC to grade the news, the facts and the lies.

The unit for anything not factual is Pinocchio – the little wooden boy whose nose grew every time he uttered a lie. The maximum given for anything not factual is four Pinocchios. That, as fact-checker Glenn Kessler said, is for whoppers.

“Most US politicians on average uttered whoppers about 15% of the time during the US presidential elections last year. But Trump was above the average, say 65%,” Kessler told visiting journalists in Washington DC recently.

Is fact-checking Trump a challenge? he was asked.

“It is boring to fact check Donald Trump because it is so easy,” Kessler said, adding that it would not take more than five minutes.

The challenge is to fact check other news which his team does on a daily basis and publishes once a day. “We only fact check news, not opinions,” he added.

The newspaper’s fact-checking team was first deployed in the 2008 US polls but only became a regular feature since the last presidential elections, not just for politics but also for other news.

US political news site Politifact also has a grading system, which it benchmarks on the phrase pants on fire, with similar units to the Post’s Pinocchio.

Despite these heavy hitters checking facts, there are more sites that manipulate the news and their audience for reasons that go beyond just propaganda and money.

Respected US journalism academic Jeff Jarvis succinctly said in an article recently, “‘Fake news’ is merely a symptom of greater social ills”.

“Our real problems: trust and manipulation. Our untrusted – and untrustworthy – institutions are vulnerable to manipulation by a slough of bad guys, from trolls and ideologues to Russians and terrorists, all operating under varying motives but similar methods,” he wrote in the online platform Medium.

The US and other countries are looking at legislation and also media literacy to combat fake news but it is an uphill battle, and until then those who read news online and in print will have to rely on Pinocchios and pants on fire to know facts from lies. – June 27, 2017.

* Jahabar Sadiq was in the United States recently on a Foreign Press Center invite for a ‘Media Literacy and Press Freedom in the 21st Century’ tour.