By Cory Vaillancourt • Fake News Editor | It’s the most wonderful time of the year! That’s right, it’s time for our annual installment of the Fake News Freakout, in which we take stories that sprout from a small grain of truth, harvest them, and then process them into a multi-layered cake of mockery and silliness frosted with fraud. 

This is my third Christmas as a member of The Smoky Mountain News staff, and this is also the third installment of the FAKE NEWS FREAKOUT. Conspiracy? No. Coincidence? Likely. 

But since there seems to be some lingering confusion over what fake news is not (stuff you don’t agree with) and what fake news actually is (the stories below), submitted herewith for your amusement are a number of genuine fake news stories gathered from around the region this past year. Co-conspirators Holly Kays and Jessi Stone contributed to this fake news report, which is fake. 

By Norman Hoffman • Guest Columnist

It is truly amusing to see an apparent “conservative” say that liberals are out of touch with reality because they don’t watch Fox News. I tend to watch several networks and frequently have found that what Fox talking heads are saying does not match the facts. Not only do they tend to have a strong bias to saying what conservative want to hear, their “facts” are often wrong or distorted. 

Last year it was still just a quaint, silly little term — fake news.

In keeping with the theme of The Smoky Mountain News spoof awards in this week’s edition, I thought now might be a good time to talk to you about fake news.