To say that the media is plagued with wide-ranging accusations is an understatement. The media gets a lot more credit than they deserve sometimes.

Media-driven myths and dubious or apocryphal tales connoting pseudo-reality, stories that often promote misleading interpretations of media power and influence have been exploited by questionable characters to spread fake news.

The media sometimes get it wrong, and the 2016 election is not an anomaly. But the media hardly propagate false news.

On the coverage of Katrina, a hurricane that made landfall causing tremendous destruction, much of what was reported came from the local administration, the mayor’s office and allegations of rape and mayhem are contentious to this day.

Some images of distressed citizens of New Orleans during the disaster were presented in a particular light, to portray one group of people struggling to survive as finding food, while others said to be breaking the law, were described as looters.

The Yahoo photo-report stirred a lot of controversy as to whether the two photos, one by an AP reporter and the other by AFP/Getty Images, feed the narrative that the media portray different races differently.

Say the name Iraq and all of a sudden, there is talk about how the war was sold to the public on factual errors and the press was more concerned about patriotism than presenting the facts.

The Iraq war started without exhausting United Nation inspections. It was as if Otto Von Bismark was relevant once more, rearing his head saying, “the great issues of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by blood and iron,” A.J.P. Taylor. Bismark The Man and Stateman( 2005)

We went to war in Iraq and found no weapons of mass destruction as was told to the public. I have read reports that suggest back then, even The New York Times applied self-censorship during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The media have to at all times tell the truth and the myth that they make the news is just not correct. They are only messengers that always want to get it right. Getting it wrong can have tremendous consequences.

So how do you tell the fake from real news? One has to be media literate. That is, the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. To not understand the distinction reduces capacity to contribute to any debate.