Throughout the 2016 year and on, the population has been influenced by propaganda that may not have been true. The most extreme case of this is in politics and the election of 2016. According to a Buzzfeed investigation, the 20 most shared true election stories were outperformed by the 20 most shared false stories 8,711,000 to 7,367,000 about the election (Kurtz). This means that Americans were more exposed to information about candidates that was false than to information that was factual. Many stories about the election, similarly to McCarthy’s stories, were simply not true. Their content was provided to make a reader’s mind sway towards one side. Going even further into the analysis, 17 out of the 20 false stories were pro-Trump (Kurtz). Due to only one side benefiting from the “fake news”, it can be assumed that the election was influenced from the stories. This was a large enough problem that President Obama gave a speech about it (Kurtz). McCarthy would also make up stories that stretched the truth or were half true. The same is evident for the media. The hard part about finding and eliminating these stories were that they included real facts along with false information (Kurtz). The reader would also be easily swayed by these stories because if they read something that they know is true, the will be more likely to believe the rest of the article. McCarthy used this same idea to his advantage when stating his claims to the
Throughout the 2016 year and on, the population has been influenced by propaganda that may not have been true. The most extreme case of this is in politics and the election of 2016. According to a Buzzfeed investigation, the 20 most shared true election stories were outperformed by the 20 most shared false stories 8,711,000 to 7,367,000 about the election (Kurtz). This means that Americans were more exposed to information about candidates that was false than to information that was factual. Many stories about the election, similarly to McCarthy’s stories, were simply not true. Their content was provided to make a reader’s mind sway towards one side. Going even further into the analysis, 17 out of the 20 false stories were pro-Trump (Kurtz). Due to only one side benefiting from the “fake news”, it can be assumed that the election was influenced from the stories. This was a large enough problem that President Obama gave a speech about it (Kurtz). McCarthy would also make up stories that stretched the truth or were half true. The same is evident for the media. The hard part about finding and eliminating these stories were that they included real facts along with false information (Kurtz). The reader would also be easily swayed by these stories because if they read something that they know is true, the will be more likely to believe the rest of the article. McCarthy used this same idea to his advantage when stating his claims to the