When it came to believing specific falsehoods, there was a correlation of which lies or truths people believed and their favorite news outlets. This is stating the obvious -- for instance, nearly half of Fox News fans believed that Hillary Clinton was involved in the death of a staffer for the Democratic National Committee or that Barack Obama faked his birth certificate.
Those whose favorite news sources were in the credible category were most likely to believe news reports that are real. Nearly half of respondents (46.3 percent) who listed BBC News as a favorite news outlet said they believed climate change was real, although the fact that the percentage is under 50 percent is depressing.
When we correlated belief in unfounded conspiracies with respondents' favorite news outlets, an interesting mix of outlets emerged. For instance, lovers of Fox News were most susceptible to trusting in the Obama birther belief, Sandy Hook hoax, and Clinton murder myths (though the network is currently embroiled in a lawsuit involving the specious Clinton story). Yet fans of BBC and PBS NewsHour were also among the most likely to believe these false stories -- perhaps an indication that these outlets resisted covering the conspiracies at all, let along debunking them. ...
As our results make clear, America's media cynicism is a double-edged sword. While it equips us to assess information critically, it also prevents us from broadening our perspectives beyond the sources we already entrust. Just as our findings show that we are willing to interrogate suspect claims, our suspicion of institutions fuels lingering myths, casting their debunking into doubt.
The most interesting statistic came from the perception of the White House as a source of fake news. In all, 58.5 percent of those polled said the news coming from the White House was false. It's no surprise that the reaction was partisan; 78.6 percent of Democrats thought the Trump administration was fake news central, while only 20.3 percent of Republicans doubted the "alternative facts" delivered by the Trump White House. In a generational breakdown, 61.3 percent of baby boomers, 60.9 percent of millennials, and 53.1 percent of Gen-Xers saw Trump speaking with a forked tongue.
That's why it should come as no surprise that multiple members of the Trump campaign regularly retweeted tweets from a fake Twitter account pushing Russian propaganda that purported to be an account of GOP officials in Tennessee. The account, @Ten_GOP, billed itself as the "Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans," but was operated from the Kremlin-backed "Russian troll farm," or Internet Research Agency, according to a report from The Daily Beast. The account's tweets regularly pushed falsehoods about voter fraud, outrage over Hillary Clinton's email, WikiLeaks material blaming the Obama administration for the release of CIA material, and other nonsense. It took Twitter 11 months to shut down the account, which finally closed in August, but it had some 136,000 followers during the election.
Of course, Republicans would probably just say that whole report was fake news, too.
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