KELLYANNE CONWAY: You're saying it's a falsehood and they're giving, Sean Spicer our press secretary gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is ... CHUCK TODD: Wait a minute. Alternative facts? Alternative facts for the five facts he uttered ... KELLYANNE CONWAY: Hey Chuck, why, hey Chuck ... CHUCK TODD: ... the one thing he got right was Zig Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods. — ABC News 24, 23 January, 2017

Hello, I'm Paul Barry, welcome to Media Watch and to the Alice-in-Wonderland world where reality is whatever you want it to be.

Once upon a time facts were facts and news was news.

But now we have Alternative Facts and Fake News.

And it's all so bizarre it merits a special program to make sense of it all.

And no prizes for guessing who's at the heart of the battle, as he is with so many others.

JIM ACOSTA: Since you're attacking us, can you give us a question? Mr President-elect, Mr President-elect, since you're attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance? DONALD TRUMP: Go ahead. Go ahead JIM ACOSTA: you are attacking our news organization can you give us a chance to ask a question sir? Sir can you state categorically ... DONALD TRUMP: No. Not you. Not you. Your organization is terrible. Your organization is terrible. Let's go. Go ahead. Quiet. Quiet. Go ahead. She's asking a question, don't be rude. JIM ACOSTA: President elect, can you give us a question. DONALD TRUMP: Don't be rude JIM ACOSTA: You are attacking us. Can you give us a question? DONALD TRUMP: Don't be rude. Don't be rude. No I'm not going to give you a question. I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news — ABC News (US), 11 January, 2017

That fiery exchange with a CNN reporter was three weeks ago, but since then the war has been hotting up.

First, Trump's press secretary boasted his Inauguration had attracted the biggest crowd in history. False cried the media and produced the pictures, but he didn't back down.

Then Trump insisted without any evidence that fraud had robbed him of a popular vote victory-because 3 to 5 million people had voted illegally for Clinton.

That was a lie said the New York Times on its page one.

While the city's raucous tabloid the Daily News, rolled out its front page to broaden the attack.

WAR ON TRUTH Facts are Fiction The Don-ning of a new age of deception — NY Daily News, 23 January, 2017

But it's not just America where truth is under attack.

The Czech Republic is setting up a unit to fight the fake news threat.

The German government is calling for a unit to do the same.

Britain's BBC is setting up its own team to debunk fake news.

And the European Union is raising the alarm.

Meanwhile, in Australia the Macquarie Dictionary has chosen fake news as its word of the year, with editor Susan Butler commenting.

There has come a point with fake news where people are beginning to believe what they want to believe, whether or not the news story is actually true. — Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January, 2017

And, as Macquarie's editor notes, crying fake news has become the easy way for people to cast doubt on stories they don't like.

Fake news is being used quite broadly as a smear, it's very hard to refute it, all you can do is produce factual evidence in a world where factual evidence doesn't seem to matter that much. — Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January, 2017

Before Christmas, resources minister Matt Canavan dismissed reports of an Indian tax probe into coal miner Adani, which is being promised Australian taxpayer funds for its Queensland mine, by telling the ABC:

SENATOR MATT CANAVAN: ... I have been very disappointed in the ABC's coverage of this issue in the past week. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Just your reports have been nothing but fake news. — ABC AM, 22 December, 2016

More recently, One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts has levelled the same charge at Buzzfeed, for disputing his boast about scoring tickets to Trump's inauguration.

Your whole #fakenews story is based on being 'invited'. Trump was right about BuzzFeed — Twitter, @SenatorMRoberts, 18 January, 2017

And what does President Trump think of Buzzfeed?

Here's his reaction to its scandalous and unsubstantiated claims that he romped with Russian prostitutes.

Buzzfeed, which is a failing pile of garbage ... It's all fake news it's phoney stuff. It didn't happen. Fake news Fake news Fake news — ABC News (US), 11 January, 2017

So what exactly is fake news?

Well, it's a story that's untrue.

And deliberately so, which is designed either to make money or to win political advantage.

And it came to the fore in the US election - with stories like these.

WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS... Then Drops Another BOMBSHELL! — Political Insider, 4 August, 2016

FBI Insider: Clinton Emails Linked to Political Pedophile Sex Ring — YourNewsWire.com, 31 October, 2016

Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement — WTOE 5, 10 July, 2016

The crazy claim that the Pope was backing Trump reached an audience of almost 1 million people.

And an IPSOS survey for Buzzfeed showed that two out of three who remembered the story believed it to be true.

Meanwhile, this claim by the Christian Times Newspaper of massive vote rigging also went viral.

BREAKING: 'Tens of thousands' of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse — Christian Times Newspaper, 30 September, 2016

Ohio was a state Trump needed to win.

But he'd warned voters it could be snatched from him by fraud.

And this story on a genuine-looking news site offered proof: boxes full of bogus votes for Hillary, before polling had even began.

... the Clinton campaign's likely goal was to slip the fake ballot boxes in with the real ballot boxes ... stealing the state on election day — Christian Times Newspaper, 30 September, 2016

News of that Ohio fraud reached 6 million people.

But it was a pack of lies, as the New York Times showed last month in unmasking its manufacturer, a 23-year-old Republican activist called Cameron Harris.

From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece — New York Times, 18 January, 2017

The photo of the ballot boxes was lifted from a 2015 story in Britain's Birmingham Mail and the fraud claimed by the Christian Times Newspaper was 100% fiction, as were most of the other stories on its website.

Hillary Clinton blames "racism" for Cincinnati gorilla's death — Christian Times Newspaper, 2 June, 2016

BREAKING: Hillary Clinton charged with MURDER for Benghazi deaths — Christian Times Newspaper, 8 August, 2016

BREAKING: Hillary has tongue cancer, doctor admits — Christian Times Newspaper, 1 August, 2016

So why did an avid Republican fake these stories?

Maybe it's obvious. But New York Times reporter Scott Shane was not so sure, telling Media Watch:

Most of the site's content was anti-Clinton stuff, made up and clearly designed to hurt reputation, so I thought Harris's motivation was partly political. But he argued persuasively that his overwhelming motivation was financial, and I don't have any way to prove it. — Scott Shane Reporter, New York Times, 24 January, 2017

Whether Harris was driven by politics or money-and he picked up US$23,000 in ad revenue from his site which cost just $5 to set up-Harris wasn't the only one to cash in on tall Trump tales.

How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News — Buzzfeed, 4 November, 2016

Last November Buzzfeed identified more than 100 websites in Macedonia such as Trump Vision 365, World Politic US, and US Conservative Today, who were pushing crazy pro-Trump or anti-Clinton stories.

Almost all were plagiarised from right-wing blogs or fringe sites in the USA.

And the ones that received most clicks and generated most revenue were the outright fakes.

The most successful stories from these sites were nearly all false or misleading. Four of the five most successful posts ... (were) false. — Buzzfeed, 4 November, 2016

Buzzfeed's media editor Craig Silverman found the same when he analysed American websites, with fake news again beating real news hands down in the last 3 months of the campaign.

So why do people like Fake News so much?

CRAIG SILVERMAN: We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. ... So that's why the false misleading stuff does really well is because it's highly emotion-driven. It tells people exactly what they want to hear. It makes them feel very comforted and it gets them to react on the platform. And the platform sees that content does really well and Facebook feeds more of it to more people. — NPR, 14 December, 2016

Fake news is hardly a new phenomenon.

Nor is believing stuff that defies all evidence.

But in a world where anyone can set up a website and so many are on social media it can spread like wildfire.

Almost 2 billion people log onto Facebook every month.

And Facebook works by giving them the news they want.

On Facebook, you know, the more you interact with certain types of content, the more its algorithms are going to feed you more of that content ... And that's, again, one of the really big takeaways, I think, from this election ... ... the fake stuff performed better on Facebook. And if you weren't doing some stuff that was misleading or fake, you were going to get beat by people who were. — NPR, 14 December, 2016

But it's not just with Trump that fake news thrives. As you can see with this story from Breitbart, the new president's favourite right-wing website, visited by 37 million people every month.

Revealed: 1,000-Man Mob Attack Police, Set Germany's Oldest Church Alight on New Year's Eve — Breitbart, 3 January, 2017

Breitbart's headline didn't say the mob was Muslim, but it claimed the 1000 men chanted 'Allahu Akhbar' as they set fire the German church. So was it true?

It was every God-fearing Christian's worst nightmare about Muslim refugees. The only problem: Police say that's not what happened that night in the western city of Dortmund. — Washington Post, 6 January, 2017

Yes, at best, it was a shocking beat up. At worst, deliberate lies.

According to Ruhr Nachrichten, Breitbart and a right-wing Austrian website--who had no reporters at the scene--took local news reports out of context and distorted them:

To produce "fake news, hate and propaganda." — DW, 6 January, 2017

A video of Dortmund's New Years Eve celebrations, posted on Ruhr Nachrichten, shows a big and boisterous crowd letting off fireworks in the main square.

And, some 50 Syrian refugees celebrating the Aleppo ceasefire in another part of the city.

But no 1000-man mob attacking the police, and no torching of the church which is not the oldest in Germany. And police say it was a quiet night.

As Ruhr Nachrichten's Dennis Werner told Media Watch:

I rub my eyes reading commentaries by some people. ... There is a big church in Dortmund, still standing, it has not burned yet, but people ... want to believe the church has burned. The incident was a really little fire on a scaffold. A plastic tarpaulin took fire probably because of a firework-rocket that accidently flew against the scaffold. — Dennis Werner, Editor, Ruhr Nachrichten, 27 January, 2017

Total damage, 200 Euros.

Now what makes this shocking story even worse is that Breitbart's boss until recently was Steve Bannon, who was picked last August to run Donald Trump's US election campaign.

Bannon is now in the White House as Trump's chief strategist and he was reportedly chief architect of the ban on immigrants from 7 mainly-Muslim countries.

Breitbart is currently expanding in Europe to cover the French and German elections, and it's worth asking what effect fake news like the Muslim mob might have.

Ruhr Nachrichten's Dennis Werner told Media Watch:

Some readers ... mistrust the established news. They tend to believe in "news" that fits better in their views of the world ... and extremist or populist parties profit from this situation. That personally leaves me in despair. We as journalists have to raise our voice and do what we do best ... research the facts, explain things and detect "alternative facts" as what they really are: lies. — Dennis Werner, Editor, Ruhr Nachrichten, 27 January, 2017

So how do we do that? Well, since social media is what turbocharges it all, it would help if Facebook flagged fake news and misleading stories to its users.

And slowed their spread.

And it has promised to do just that, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling his Facebook followers in December.

"While we don't write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize we're more than just a distributor of news. We're a new kind of platform for public discourse - and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations ... and be informed" — Mark Zuckerberg CEO Facebook, 15 December, 2016

The plan is for users to alert Facebook to dodgy stories so that it can get fact checking websites like Snopes and FactCheck to rule on whether they're OK.

But while it sounds promising, there's little sign of any action so far.

Google is also trying by cutting off revenue to fake news sites.

Google put the Christian Times Newspaper out of business in November by starving it of ads. And it claims to have cut the flow to 200 others.

But hundreds of other sites remain, and the Christian Times Newspaper story is still out there, live and kicking

And even if you could shut them all down, is that really what you want to do?

Australia's The Shovel, for example, is certainly fake news, but it's also satire:

Trump Watches Prostitutes Urinate On Oval Office, In Traditional Presidential Handover — The Shovel, 22 January, 2017

And so is America's famous fake news site, The Onion ...

Trump insists that now, more than ever, Americans must stand strong in the face of empathy — The Onion,30 January, 2017

Surely you don't want to put satirical sites like that out of business?

Nor surely do you want to stamp out memes which make people believe Donald Trump is even more wacky than he really is.

I have to confess that for a moment I thought that one might be real.

And manipulating images like that gets more sophisticated every day.

Here's a researcher at Stanford University making another famous politician copy facial expressions in real time.

It's scary stuff, and it will doubtless get harder to tell the fake from the real thing.

So is there a magic answer? Sadly not.

Ultimately we have to rely on genuine media to expose fake news and lies, as we try to do at Media Watch.

But, as Professor Charlie Beckett from the London School of Economics says, they need to do a much better job

Fake news is a real problem. Not just because it gives people rubbish information but, you know, because it undermines the idea that anything is true and I think it's a real challenge in the sense that mainstream media has been too complacent. You know, you're looking for stuff that you could call fake news, that's been in some so called reputable media, so there is a real challenge there for journalists to get their act together basically because I think that in a world of lies, truth is actually quite a good selling point for journalists. — Charlie Beckett, Professor of Media, London School of Economics,26 January, 2017

Yes fake news could be an opportunity for mainstream media rather than its death knell.

The media you can trust not to lie, distort and make things up.

But the sad truth is that lies are powerful.

Fake and misleading stories can be shared 10 times more than articles that debunk them.

And falsehoods live on because people want to believe them.

Or as one authority in the subject, Adolf Hitler, once wrote in Mein Kampf:

The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. — Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler

And you can read more about tonight's stories on our Facebook page or our website, where you can get a transcript and download the program.

You can also catch up with us on iview and contact me or Media Watch on Twitter.

But for now until next week, that is all from us. Goodbye.