I honestly think it ' s hard to compare the two . From NPR ' s interview with the Sam Wineburg , the Professor at Stanford who conducted the study you are mentioning We showed them a picture of daisies that looked like they were deformed . There was a claim on a website that they were the result of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima district in Japan . The photograph had no attribution . There was nothing that indicated that it was from anywhere . And we asked students , is does this photograph provide proof that the kind of nuclear disaster caused these aberrations in nature ? And we found that over 80 percent of the high school students that we gave this to them had an extremely difficult time making that determination . They didn ' t ask where it came from . They didn ' t verify it . They simply accepted the picture as fact . I ' ll admit that if I saw a news story with that photo , I probably wouldn ' t second guess it given my lack of scientific understanding on how nuclear energy affects biology and the belief that nuclear disasters fuck up biology . I would likely look at comments to see if scientists could confirm the veracity , especially if it was highly deformed . And I almost always double check the source of the article . However , for something political like the ones that came out during the election , such as Pope Endorses Trump or FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead , it would be so damning that I ' d be suspicious of such headlines if they didn ' t come from a reputable source andor I ' d search to find other news stories corroborating the finding . Also if you read the Buzzfeed News article about the teenage Macedonians who created a shit ton of fake news for the purpose of ad revenue , they found that proBernieproClinton articles were not even close to being as lucrative as proTrump articles which eventually guided their strategy .