Fake News: How it's like American Vandal

  

We have all heard of fake news and it's pretty self-explanatory, but if you don't know what it is, let's connect it to a show, American Vandal. If you have not seen it, it is about Dylan, who was falsely accused of vandalism and expelled, so a filmmaking duo go and investigate who actually did it. 

Fake news is basically what caused Dylan to be expelled; it was a false rumor that many believed and we are the filmmaking duo, we have to find facts. Today, news can be very biased and based on other's interpretations as such, we have to sift through opinions and look for objective information, "real" news.  

Political news is a source where we have to find fact from fiction. As shown in the chart above, Democrats and Republicans view news in general in drastically different ways. A large chunk of Democrats believe that the news cares about people they report on (33%), admit their mistakes (47%), are moral (41%), and function to protect democracy (52%), while a majority of Republicans think the exact opposite; less than 20% of Republicans believe that news media meet those categories. 

But looking at the other half of the chart, "The news media you use most often," the percentage of Republican and Democrats who believe their source(s) meet those criteria are similar. Based on the image below, this is probably due to the fact that left-leaning people consume a larger range of new sources. Therefore leading to the belief that media, in general, are more supportive of democratic policies making Republicans believe that news, is unreliable. On the other hand, Republican use a niche amount of right-leaning sources to fuel their opinions while Democrats have a large range of left-leaning sources to chose from.