COM Faculty Analyze How Fake News Influences Real News

Michelle Amazeen, assistant professor of mass communication, advertising, and public relations and Lei Guo, assistant professor of emerging media studies

June 22, 2017
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COM Faculty Analyze How Fake News Influences Real News

Michelle Amazeen, assistant professor of mass communication, advertising, and public relations and Lei Guo, assistant professor of emerging media studies
Michelle Amazeen, assistant professor of mass communication, advertising, and public relations and Lei Guo, assistant professor of emerging media studies

“Faculty and students have been agonizing recently about the emergence of fake news—false information packaged to deceive the public into thinking it was produced by professionals with respect for truth,” notes Thomas Fiedler (COM’71), dean of the College of Communication, in his spring 2017 COMtalk column.

Another interested consumer of news—Barack Obama—described the new media landscape to New Yorker editor David Remnick last year: “Everything is true and nothing is true. An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”

And fake stories, like cockroaches, tend to keep coming back. As Jim Rutenberg put it in his New York Times “Mediator” column: “Fake news dies hard.”

What to do about it: educate the public, convene scholars and journalists, set out to systematically identify and refute fake news? Those questions are the talk of campuses, think tanks, and newsrooms around the globe.

Two COM professors are doing their part to find the answers. Michelle Amazeen, an assistant professor of mass communication, advertising, and public relations, and Lei Guo, an assistant professor of emerging media studies, along with corresponding author Chris J. Vargo, a University of Colorado Boulder College of Media, Communication and Information assistant professor of advertising, public relations, and media design, have analyzed three years of data on fake news and come up with some surprising findings.

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