One of the problems is who is the judge of whether it is fake news or not?
I have learned (and struggled with this as a human) that there are often two sides to every story. And even those two sides have varying levels of truth, lies, personal agendas, and life experience filtering. And then you add in personal, political, religious, cultural, societal, etc., etc., and you come up with personal stories that may contain bits of truth and or facts. The person/agency/etc. who makes the judgment would have to be able to discern how much truth is real and not fake and then declare the item as such.
And what do you do when a conglomeration of people with like ideas or goals, purchases and owns a dominant portion of the media and can control the group think message going forward? How can you combat the "fake news" pushed out by them when they control the news? As an example, someone put together of collection of 24 local news outlet broadcasts across the USA. They started out with one group of news anchors speaking and adding more and more so it became a combination of all of the audio tracks. These supposedly "local" news stations were all pushing the same message, almost word for word. So it seems that they were directed by higher ups to repeat the company line and not to stray from it. So much for local objectivity. Rules made for the urban city do not always work in the rural country and vice versa.
When I look for news, I look for news items from both sides and use several websites, some that support my personal views and some that do not support my personal view. That way I can try to be as objective as I can and try to see the points of view from both sides. The problem I am seeing lately is that there is a move towards group think and less and less objectivity and questioning authority.
I remember in my younger days seeing a bumper sticker that read "Question Authority" and I thought that it had a tone of anarchy about it. Now that I am older I see the wisdom in questioning authority. It doesn't say resist authority or fight authority, it says to question authority. If we do not question authority from time to time it can lead to tyrannical rule.
In cyber security, I am seeing a new trend of, when a breach happens, to lawyer up first and then try to release what happens. I understand it from the fact that we have become a litigious society, but delaying the truth sometimes makes the disaster recovery worse. In cyber, we also have to deal with the fact that too early of a release of information can cause the bad actors to rush to implement the vulnerability before a fix can be released. So if you are seeing some "fake news" in regards to cyber security, there could be some reasons behind it. Vendors often rush in, usually motivated by the desire to sell a fix for the problem.
