This could be the most self-serving sentence to ever appear on the illustrious pages of The Australian Financial Review, but with the truth defence ready to roll, here goes.
The post-US election fuss over the abundance of fake news on Facebook highlights more than ever that only the ongoing survival of trusted, independent news organisations can properly feed informed public discourse.
Earlier this week Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg felt it necessary to come out and publicly defend his site against the charge that fake news stories about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, which proliferated on its pages before the election, had had a huge effect on the way people voted.
In stark terms, the narrative of the election for millions of voters was a fantasy, and the world's biggest online platform showed that its open nature left it wide open to the rampant spread of misinformation.
Facebook, and also Google in its search results, showed that they were either unaware or careless about the explosion of websites that exist purely to lure in social media users with pretend and often outlandish news stories.
Sites such as National Report, World News Daily Report, World Politicus and USConservativeToday.com are dressed up to look legitimate, with the sole purpose of cashing in on the clickbait-driven ad revenue.
Some are run by notorious US online fake media baron Paul Horner, and bizarrely it has emerged that a big cluster of these websites originated in a single Macedonian town of Veles, where entrepreneurial teens are among the creators of around 140 US "political news" sites.
They admit to not caring about US politics at all, and worked out that if they created headlines to excite Trump supporters, then the advertising dollars would roll in.
Stories saying the Pope had forbidden Catholics from voting for Clinton, that Clinton had previously urged Trump to run for office, that a Bill Clinton sex tape had been leaked and that an FBI Agent involved in the Clinton email leaks had been killed in suspicious circumstances, were shared hundreds of thousands of times each on social media.
These numbers dwarfed the social media performance of some of the biggest genuine scoops from legitimate media titles.
These are not satirical websites in the vein of The Onion or Australia's Betoota Advocate, which run comedy fake news. They are taking the place of reputable news outlets in the mind of readers who believe they are finally getting "the real story".
'People are Dumb!'
Speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday, Horner claimed responsibility for Trump's win, and showed disdain for the hundreds of thousands sharing his stories.
"Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore – I mean, that's how Trump got elected."
"My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don't fact-check anything – they'll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a [anti-Trump] protester getting paid $3500 as fact. I made that up."
The stories were shared because readers thought they were true, and the sites profited off the many who believe anything that looks like news and which conforms to their world view.
Zuckerberg's indignant words were backed up by actions days later when Facebook and Google announced they were changing their rules to try and ensure that fake news websites wouldn't be able to generate ad revenue through their services.
Believe it or not
Most people will tell you jokingly that they don't believe a word that they read on the internet but evidently this isn't true.
Earlier this year, US-based Pew Research Center released a study showing that 44 per cent of the general US population gets its news from Facebook, whereas 10 per cent get it from Google-owned YouTube and 9 per cent from Twitter.
Neither Facebook or Google describe themselves as media companies. They don't employ journalists to hunt out or investigate stories – they merely curate content or enable their users to as one facet of their swelling empires.
Yet they have undeniably moved in to completely usurp even the biggest content-creating outlets in terms of being the biggest conduits for information … taking the lion's share of media buyers' advertising budgets into the bargain.
Galling as this is for media companies, the issue in terms of the public good is quality control or, more importantly, the complete lack of it.
Facebook and Google have taken the spoils of media ownership, without exercising any of the journalistic rigour that is supposed to underpin it. This is not good for a healthy society, despite what you may think of the mainstream media and its perceived agendas.
Twitter and Facebook can be echo chambers for people of a like-mind, but we really can't just shrug our shoulders and accept this kind of misinformation as the reality of a free, open internet.
We must hope that Facebook and Google's efforts to police news content are genuine, as there is little that can or should be done to force the issue from a regulatory perspective.
The idea of fake news is nothing new, of course: propaganda has always been a powerful tool, and concerns about the power of modern technology to subvert public opinion have increased over more than a decade.
US election campaigning has been shrouded in stories about Barack Obama's birthplace for the previous two terms, and back in 2004 Democrat John Kerry's run towards the White House against George W Bush hit a speed bump when a faked picture of him attending an anti-Vietnam war rally with actress Jane Fonda in 1970 bolstered a view among voters that he was anti-military.
The reason this election was particularly worrying was that the situation is clearly getting worse. The low barrier for entry into mass dissemination through Facebook is now being exploited on an almost industrial scale, and there is little that can be done about it by anyone except the companies themselves.
Facebook has been actively tweaking its algorithms in recent times to prevent established media outlet posts about their stories from dominating users' news feeds (you have to pay for that privilege) and you are therefore much more likely to see stories that have been shared by your friends.
Surround yourself electronically with rabid Trump or Clinton supporters and the stories they share will dominate your screens, regardless of their veracity.
The only solution is for proper independent journalism to somehow survive and thrive in an indifferent world that Facebook has created. Realistically its dominance as a platform is not ending any time soon, and the onus is still on the news companies to find their voices in the new order.
It is obviously much more expensive and time-consuming for professional journalists to dig out genuine scoops than it is for a kid to bash out a mildly convincing fabrication, but we can only hope that enough people care to spot the difference.
In a sense Facebook is now having to find a way to police its content in a fashion that goes against its reason for being. It is successful partly because it allows anyone to communicate with the world with ease, not because it controls what they say.
Given the sole motive of the fake news sites is money, starving them of ad revenue seems like a top plan – it remains to be seen if they can pull it off though.
