Issues in Digital Media

      For my final project I chose to write an original fake news article.  I wanted to do expand on this prior project because I think it is extremely relevant to what's happening right now.  When I was looking for an article to use for the original assignment, it was so easy to find fake news stories.  A lot of them weren't very believable or well done, so using the methods of determining whether something was fake was easy.  This made me wonder how difficult it would be to create a news article that could fool the average person, even if they were actively trying to watch out for false information.

 

      I wanted to make my article as realistic as possible so I created my fake article on a fake Fox News website.  Most "watch out for fake news" warnings caution people about believing news that doesn't come from a known source or isn't connected to any real links, so I created a website that looks and feels real.  I tried to recreate the actual Fox News site as accurately as possible.  All the links go to real articles on the Fox News site and the advertisements are the ones that appear on the real site.  So, from the fake website, you can navigate to real the real Fox News, you just can't find the fake article from the real website.  To make to story even more credible, I used a real Fox News contributor as the writer of the article, with links to his bio and social media.

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      The site looks very similar to the real Fox News site, but some things are missing.  There isn't a comment section after the article, which, unless you were very familiar with the real website, isn't very noticeable.  Also, the URL isn't "foxnews.com/" so this is a dead giveaway if the reader notices it, but if you get to the article via a link or Facebook post, you might not even look at the web address.  I did purposefully change the Fox News logo at the top to read "Fake News", but that was just for effect.  I tried to design the article so that I might be fooled by it, and I think I would be, especially if the URL was something closer to the actual Fox News website address.

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      I wrote my article on Trump and the Republicans.  Since the news is often focused on them anyways, my article wouldn't seem out of place.  It's about how support for Trump and the Republicans has increased recently, which isn't true, but is a lie that is often peddled by supporters.  Because it contains sentiments that are often repeated by the people who believe things like this, it acts as a "real" source of this information that only further proves that stories like this are fact.