Cooke, Duranty, and Laurence are three former journalists united by the condition of being Pulitzer Prize winners who later came under threat of having their Pulitzers revoked for creating invented or misleading stories. Cooke, writing for the Washington Post in 1980, wrote of a supposed eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy living in Washington D.C, basing the story on anonymous sources. Public reaction to the story led to a police search for Jimmy and to claims by the mayor that Jimmy had been placed in treatment and later died. Cooke received…

In its first season, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. focused on conflicts that fell within the background of the MCU. The enemies faced by the cast were small, localized, not the world-ending threats that the movies’ heroes went up against in each outing. However, in the second season and onward, AoS transitioned to plots with higher stakes, particularly as the entry of the Inhumans raised the villains and the agents themselves to levels of power beyond even some of the ‘proper’ heroes. The episode ‘What They Become’ is a clean break from…

Fake news is content created with the appearance of journalism but without the rigor of the journalistic process, created to draw attention to itself for purposes of driving web traffic for monetization, or to draw attention away from and to degrade public opinion of real news. Regardless of the goal, by contaminating the perception of news with content that is of lower quality, fake or junk news causes the entire sphere of journalism to be perceived as less trustworthy simply for containing or resembling junk news. Journalists can attempt to…