Snopes, formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source for both validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. The school is the owner of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper and the International Fact-Checking Network. It also operates PolitiFact.
The Online News Association (ONA), founded in 1999, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in Washington D.C., United States. It is the world's largest association of digital journalists, with more than 2,000 members. The founding members first convened in December 1999 in Chicago. The group included journalists from WSJ.com, Time.com, MSBN, TheStreet.com, and FT.com, among other outlets.
Benjamin Eli Smith is an American journalist who is the co-founder of Semafor, a global news organization he formed with Justin Smith in early 2022. He was previously a media columnist at The New York Times from 2020 to 2022. From 2011 to 2020, he was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.
The Daily Caller is a right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and political pundit Neil Patel in 2010. Launched as a "conservative answer to The Huffington Post", The Daily Caller quadrupled its audience and became profitable by 2012, surpassing several rival websites by 2013. In 2020, the site was described by The New York Times as having been "a pioneer in online conservative journalism". The Daily Caller is a member of the White House press pool.
The Mirror Awards are annual journalism awards recognizing the work of writers, reporters, editors and organizations who cover the media industry. The awards were established by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 2006.
Margaret M. Sullivan is an American journalist who is the former media columnist for The Washington Post. She was the fifth public editor of The New York Times and the first woman to hold the position. In that role, she reported directly to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. as the "readers' representative". She began her tenure on September 1, 2012, joining The New York Times from The Buffalo News, where she had been editor and vice-president. Her first column in The Washington Post ran on May 22, 2016. On Nov. 2, 2023, Sullivan was named the executive director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia Journalism School.
BuzzFeed News was an American news website published by BuzzFeed beginning in 2011. It ceased posting new hard news content in May 2023. It published a number of high-profile scoops, including the Steele dossier, for which it was strongly criticized, and the FinCEN Files. It won the George Polk Award, The Sidney Award, the National Magazine Award, the National Press Foundation award, and the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
The Western Journal, previously known as Western Journalism, is an American conservative news and politics website based in Phoenix, Arizona. It was founded by political consultant Floyd Brown in 2008.
Fake news websites are websites on the Internet that deliberately publish fake news—hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation purporting to be real news—often using social media to drive web traffic and amplify their effect. Unlike news satire, fake news websites deliberately seek to be perceived as legitimate and taken at face value, often for financial or political gain. Such sites have promoted political falsehoods in India, Germany, Indonesia and the Philippines, Sweden, Mexico, Myanmar, and the United States. Many sites originate in, or are promoted by, Russia, or North Macedonia among others. Some media analysts have seen them as a threat to democracy. In 2016, the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs passed a resolution warning that the Russian government was using "pseudo-news agencies" and Internet trolls as disinformation propaganda to weaken confidence in democratic values.
Fake news websites target United States audiences by using disinformation to create or inflame controversial topics such as the 2016 election. Most fake news websites target readers by impersonating or pretending to be real news organizations, which can lead to legitimate news organizations further spreading their message. Most notable in the media are the many websites that made completely false claims about political candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as part of a larger campaign to gain viewers and ad revenue or spread disinformation. Additionally, satire websites have received criticism for not properly notifying readers that they are publishing false or satirical content, since many readers have been duped by seemingly legitimate articles.
Kelly B. McBride is an American writer, teacher and commentator on media ethics.
World News Daily Report (WNDR) was a satirical fake news website purporting to be an American Jewish Zionist newspaper based in Tel Aviv and dedicated to covering biblical archeology news and other mysteries around the globe.
Mark Schoofs is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. He is also a visiting professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
The People's Voice is an American fake news website based in Los Angeles. The site was founded as Your News Wire in 2014 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and his husband, Sinclair Treadway. In November 2018, it rebranded itself as NewsPunch. Your News Wire was revived as a separate website in November 2020, and has continued publishing hoaxes similar to those in NewsPunch. In 2023, NewsPunch adopted its current name, The People's Voice.
The StopFake website is a project of Ukrainian media NGO Media Reforms Center. It was founded in March 2014 by Ukrainian professors and students with the stated purpose of refuting Russian propaganda and fake news. It began as a Russian- and English-language fact-checking organization, and has grown to include a TV show broadcast on 30 local channels, a weekly radio show, and a strong social media following.
Davey Alba is a technology reporter who covers Big Tech for Bloomberg News, after previously reporting on online disinformation for The New York Times.
True Pundit is a far-right fake news website known for publishing conspiracy theories. According to The Atlantic, True Pundit had "a well-known modus operandi, perfected during the 2016 U.S. election: running baseless stories and then asking leading questions". In 2021 True Pundit stopped publishing new content.
