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Mark Dice's Channel: Is It Better To Uncover Truth?

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YouTube is now the second most visited website in the world.1 YouTube’s growing prominence has led to a proliferation of independent news bloggers, many of whom are rapidly becoming extremely popular due to the dawn of the age of fake news. In this era of fake news, many people have become distrustful of the mainstream media and turned to other sources for analysis of big news events. There are now many channels exclusively on YouTube who are becoming people’s primary source of news, such as: Mark Dice, The Young Turks, and Alex Jones. Are these independent media channels worsening the problem of fake news, or helping to uncover the truth? Overall, are they a good alternative to watching the mainstream media? The independent news channels on …show more content…

He posts multiple videos a day analyzing the media, and exposing the mainstream media for their poor journalism. In many of his videos, Dice consistently confuses fake news with honest mistakes. The word “fake,” according to the Oxford Dictionary, means “to forge or counterfeit,”5 and the word counterfeit, according to the same dictionary, means “made in exact imitation of something valuable with the intention to deceive or defraud.” The key part of this definition, is that the faked thing must have the intention to deceive. By this definition, something that was accidentally erroneous cannot be considered fake, if it was truly accidental in how it was misleading. Much of what Dice is “exposing” are not intentional counterfeits intended to deceive, but rather honest mistakes that in most cases were quickly corrected. For example, he made a video on the much talked about tweet claiming the bust of MLK had been removed from the oval office, titled: “FAKE NEWS! - Trump Did NOT Remove Martin Luther King Bust from Oval Office - PROOF.” It was TIME’s reporter Zeke Miller who tweeted this, as he was unable to see the bust of MLK because someone was standing in front of it. Within minutes, the tweet was deleted and TIME issued a public apology.6 It is obvious Miller had no intention of intentionally deceiving his followers, he just made an honest mistake, and felt the harsh consequences of that mistake. And yes, there is a strong argument to be made here that this was bad journalism, because it was. However, this was not fake news, just an honest slip

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