The Study of a Journalism Which Is almost 99% Fake

Abstract

With the rapid development of the media industry in China, fake news has become a severe problem. This paper identifies four types of fake news, with examples which include totally fake news, distorted fake news, fast news, and sensational journalism. The second part of the paper attempts to analyse the causes of fake news. The acceleration of the trend of media marketization, the loss of professional ethics by media practitioners, the influence of stakeholders, and the marketization of news value in university education, have all given rise to the emergence of fake news. The third part investigates the influence of fake news on society. Fake news can result in inappropriate policy making by the government. With the prevalence of fake news, public media literacy declines and social ethos becomes fickle. Finally, the paper attempts to explore possibly effective countermeasures, which involve establishing a fact-checking mechanism, calling for slow news instead of fast news, improving the public’s media literacy, and reforming the news paradigm, in order to resist fake news in future.