KUDOs! This story is an excellent collage of (historical and current) media manipulation showing that we have NOT come a long way baby! It would not be too much of a stretch to assert that the term “journalistic ethics” (in news reporting) has been reduced to near-oxymoron status. Phrases used by Professor Love: “the new digital toolbox”, and “sleeker weapons and greater power to turn the authority of the press to their own ends” are KEYS. Tools do not provide information, they do work! Just as “polls” have morphed, from legitimate statistical analysis tools, to opinion and behavior modification and manipulation tools, so goes the news. In the words of Stephen Colbert, Professor Love has “Nailed It!” I would only take exception to one of Professor Love’s assertions, that being: “Today, people expect the news media to give them relevant, accurate information.” Personally, I have great feelings of trepidation that, as a collective society, such an “expectation” is not one of our norms (unless it is about Anna Nicole, Survivor, or American Idol). Perhaps Professor Long could follow up with an article about the consumer characteristics that enable the power of the fake news. I’m thinking of : sound-bite mentality; lemming characteristics of constituencies; on the part of journalists, the ease of accepting and repeating spoon-fed “briefings”. As I read the story, I could not stop myself from pulling one of my favorite books from shelf. In 1976 as a public speaking student in college, we used the text “The Art of Deception”(second edition)by Nicholas Capaldi. I’m sure that most journalists are familiar with the work. My feelings, ginned up by reading Before Jon Stewart ,are that all of Capaldi’s concepts have become tools of biblical proportion in today’s media, and they are in full implementation stage. Interestingly, I fairly recently purchased the New Revised Edition of The Art of Deception (1987). In the Second Edition, there was a whole chapter (4) specifically dedicated to and titled “Political Propaganda”. In the New Revised Edition, there is no chapter with that title, nor is “political” or “propaganda’ listed in the index. Go figure! The stakes are higher… the consequences of real fake news are more dire. The main reason the labels “conservative’ (good?), “liberal” (bad?) are faked into the news consumers mind like water-boarding, is that there are no levers in the voting booths with those labels!