Fake news has come to mean a lot of things these days. But the definition that the right and the left can both agree on is sites that just make up things for money. NPR pursued the"godfather" of some of these fake news sites and discovered that he's a lefty who's doing this to undermine conservatives.
The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. That meant they were all likely owned by the same company.
“The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction,” Coler says.
So we've got sites hosted by a company run by the owner of the Washington Post which are run by a guy whose stated goal is to plant fake news stories to undermine the right.
NPR eats this up with a jumbo spoon, but the underlying admission is that the fake news problem has the same source as the mainstream media's fake news problem. Hostility to conservatives.
While the mainstream media pushes fake news to liberals, guys like this plant fake news on the right to sow chaos and undermine conservative news consumers. The fake news problem, from the top down, is a left-wing propaganda problem.