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Sohn: Fox blurs the lines of ‘fake news’

News headlines scroll above the Fox News studios in the News Corporation headquarters building in New York, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017.  Fox contributor Rod Wheeler, who worked on the Seth Rich case, claims Fox News fabricated quotes implicating the murdered Democratic National Committee staffer in the Wikileaks scandal and that President Donald Trump pressured Fox to publish the story. He sued Fox for defamation on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
News headlines scroll above the Fox News studios in the News Corporation headquarters building in New York, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. Fox contributor Rod Wheeler, who worked on the Seth Rich case, claims Fox News fabricated quotes implicating the murdered Democratic National Committee staffer in the Wikileaks scandal and that President Donald Trump pressured Fox to publish the story. He sued Fox for defamation on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) News headlines scroll above the Fox News studios in the News Corporation headquarters building in New York, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. Fox contributor Rod Wheeler, who worked on the Seth Rich case, claims Fox News fabricated quotes implicating the murdered Democratic National Committee staffer in the Wikileaks scandal and that President Donald Trump pressured Fox to publish the story. He sued Fox for defamation on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

There’s fake news, and then there’s really fake news.

There’s fake news, which is what President Donald Trump and his conservative supporters call any news they don’t like.

Then there’s fake news like conservative-slanted Fox News.

And then there’s really fake news – like the Russian bots that shaped our election with online propaganda and that continue to generally dumb us down with worthless entertainment chatter, ads designed to promote fear and division. Now we even have robo-calls (robot computer-generated phone calls) like the one that announced itself in Alabama last week as a reporter from The Washington Post.

In the robo-call, an exaggerated Yankee-accented voice claims to be “Bernie Bernstein” and offers thousands of dollars for damaging information about Roy Moore, a man who a growing number of Alabama women say made unwanted sexual advances to them when they were teens and he was in his 30s. The call is a complete fake designed to make Alabamians doubt the news about Moore.