Universal Information Services

In the past year, the term and use of “fake news” has definitely become more prevalent. If public relations’ professionals rely on the news media to amplify their messages, does Fake News have any impact on those messages?

A Bit of Perspective

To put it in perspective a little more, I conducted a quick google search of the phrase to see how the media was discussing it this week. I uncovered more than 50 cases of the term “fake news” being used in headlines of stories that appeared on what we would classify at Universal as “Tier 1” media outlet (fancy term for national media outlets). Just look at these headlines from the last several days to see how we are utterly consumed by the phrase:

• “Facebook undermines its own effort to fight fake news” – Politico, 9/7/2018.
• “Rush Limbaugh’s dangerous suggestion that Hurricane Irma is fake news” – The Washington Post, 9/6/2017.
• “Why fake news spreads like wildfire on Facebook” – Chicago Tribune, 9/3/2017. 

Here at Universal, we’ve seen the effects, too. We live, eat, sleep, and breath media coverage – so naturally, we’ve seen it and have absolutely heard of it. And of course, we’ve been following this trend since the beginning of the last presidential election when the phrase came to the forefront. We’ve helped clients find stories about their organization being related to fake news, we’ve helped measure the effect it has on them, and we’re constantly educating our clients on what the term means and how to identify fake news.

[To read this entire post, visit our page on Commpro.biz…]