Fake news, deniable fake news (misdirection), and coincidences that can look like fake news

The blogster loves the current Fake News debate because it brings out the best and the worst in journalists and pundits.

It* does not feel like restating what more astute minds have already said.  Instead, the blogster will try to show how easily the lines become blurred between 'fake news', 'misdirection creating a deniable fake news effect', and 'coincidence potentially misinterpreted as fake news'.

1968 - Invasion of Czechoslovakia
A recent German and Czech study on the events of the Prague Spring and the way these were handled by the then West German foreign intelligence agency BND can be found on the website of the BND itself here. [Update 4/13/2018: golly, the document was disappeared and you get a 404, praise the power of screenshots!]

One of the historic documents in the study deals with press coverage of the events showing the BND in a good light, in a not so good one - and how the BND fixed the negative coverage.

For those of you who do not know German, the first part tells us which publications covered BND activities favorably. Then the letter goes: The negative comments in [redacted] of 23 and 24 August 1968 are explained by the fact that our [redacted] is currently on vacation. [redacted] was informed of this unpleasant publication and has since managed to get a positive piece on the work of the BND published in the [redacted]. Clippings will be provided later.

The blogster would call this fake news because influence was used to manage public perception, not to correct factual errors.

2015 - Shootdown of a Russian jet in the vicinity of the Turkey-Syria border
We simply link to Wikipedia for a description. The website of German tabloid BILD ran with this propaganda-like news headline:

It is a brilliant piece of misdirection. The text, the imagery, and the large "Putin attacks Turkey" all steer the reader to expect a military attack on Turkey while - at the same time - allowing BILD to proclaim innocently 'no, we mean verbally attacks Turkey, which he did, right'.

John Le Carre's description of a modern British spy and the coincidental resume of the Syrian White Helmets founder
Der Spiegel ran an interview recently with famous British ex-spy and spy novel author John Le Carre. The very nice interview contains one sentence in which Le Carre describes the hypothetical modern British spy. That person "would speak Arabic, have had training in the military special forces and be a former mercenary".
According to Wikipedia and this website, the founder of the Syrian 'White Helmets', James Le Mesurier, was a British Army Officer and a security consultant.
It would be easy to present what appears to be a coincidence as 'news'. As it is, all we have are a few unrelated factoids. All that's needed to turn this into a piece of 'fake news' would be to remove the "coincidental" from the paragraph headline.

Let's take another example, not from such a high profile, emotionally charged series of events. We know that missionaries have sometimes been spies, too. The blogster personally knows a former officer who became a missionary in New Guinea.
Juxtaposition is powerful, isn't it?

And no, the officer turned missionary did not moonlight as a spy.


* Gender neutral. 
** Der britische Spion der Gegenwart, gäbe es ihn denn, spreche Arabisch, habe in Sondereinheiten des Militärs trainiert, sei ehemaliger Söldner.