What is fake news?

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 defend against it by maintaining high standards of rigor in their own content, but as this was already an assumed goal of journalism it can only go so far in bettering perception of the media.

The more necessary defense against fake or junk news is for consumers of news to learn to differentiate between content produced with or without journalistic rigor, and not to take fake news at face value.

Qualities like source attribution and breadth of content, which are not so easily forged as the basic style and appearance of news, are those which readers and listeners must be trained to pick out as existing in real news more often than fake, after which the time and effort needed to fake the news will increase and thus decrease its desirability and effectiveness as a means of making money or contaminating public perceptions.