December 12, 2016
Source: Bigstock
Last week, suspected lesbian, part-time exotic jungle dancer, and two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waddled like a postmenopausal penguin into DC and urged a captive crowd of lawmakers to beware of “fake news“:
The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year”it’s now clear that so-called fake news can have real world consequences. This isn”t about politics or bipartisanship. Lives are at risk.
OK, Madame Secretary, I think I”m pickin” up what you”re throwin” down here”disseminating false information can kill people, is that about it?
Would this include the time you voted for a war based on a lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and about five thousand American soldiers died as a result of such fake news. Would it also include your fake story”widely disseminated at first by a fawning, gullible media”that a video caused four American deaths in Benghazi?
Still, many journalists have joined with Ms. Clinton in decrying this horrid recent shit-tsunami of fake-ass news. Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather warned about “completely false things” that “go viral and worldwide.” (It bears noting that Rather’s journalistic career suffered irreparable harm after it was revealed that he pushed a set of documents attempting to discredit George W. Bush that turned out to be “blatant forgeries.”)
On his new MSNBC show, Brian Williams stated, without a shred of supporting evidence, that “Fake news played a role in this election and continues to find a wide audience.” (It bears noting that Williams no longer hosts NBC’s Nightly News after it was publicized that he”d completely fabricated numerous items about himself and his journalism career.)
This sudden recent moral panic about “fake news” was ramped up by a November 24 Washington Post article called “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.”
(The Washington Post is a highly esteemed American journalistic institution. Along with achieving notoriety when one of its reporters won a Pulitzer Prize for a completely fake story about an eight-year-old black heroin addict, its reporters were also members of the 2008 “JournoList“ cabal that privately colluded to help elect Barack Obama. Proving that it is indeed an objective and trustworthy news outlet rather than a DNC mouthpiece, the Post recently hired twenty reporters to dig up dirt on Donald Trump during the presidential campaign and apparently zero reporters to investigate Hillary Clinton.)
In their recent attempt at a hard-hitting “fake news” exposé”which The Hill described as “perhaps the shoddiest piece of feature writing since Rolling Stone published its blatantly false story about a campus rape at the University of Virginia” and which Rolling Stone called “Shameful and Disgusting””predictably geeky-looking writer Craig Timberg cites an anonymous group calling itself PropOrNot, allegedly comprised of “nonpartisan” researchers who just so happen to have an axe to grind with “muthafuckin” fascists.” The group has compiled a blacklist of 200 or so websites they accuse of being either actively complicit with, or “useful idiots” of, Russian propagandists. No evidence is offered for how or why any of the content that these sites publish would qualify as Russian propaganda, just as none of PropOrNot’s members are identified or their credentials scrutinized. Still, many other MSM outlets ran with the Post‘s story like the dupes they are and were apparently born to be.
The venerable New York Times is also up in arms about the “Threat of Fake News“ that may, as serial murderer Hillary Clinton suggested, lead to the loss of human lives.
(The New York Times is a highly regarded American daily newspaper. While Joseph Stalin was purposely starving millions of Ukrainians to death, a Times reporter won a Pulitzer for denying that it was happening. More recently, the paper was forced to fire a reporter for “routinely“ fabricating his articles. And during the presidential campaign, a Times scribe wondered out loud about whether reporters should dispense with normal constraints such as “objectivity“ when dealing with the Rising Orange Monster Named Donald Trump.)
It’s hard to believe that any of these major news outlets care that lives are at risk when their blind pursuit of ideology at the expense of facts has helped push the country to the brink of a violent race war. I lived through the LA Riots of 1992 in which 55 people died, but it wasn”t until a few years ago that I learned Rodney King had two accomplices with him on the fateful night he was beaten. They obeyed police orders to remain on the ground and didn”t get pummeled. If the mainstream media had even dared to mention this fact, the riots might never have occurred.
The lie that Trayvon Martin was an innocent choco-cherub who was only buying Skittles”rather than a thug-in-training who was bashing “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman’s skull into the ground the moment he got shot”led to a wave of violent cross-country revenge attacks against whites. The lie that Michael Brown had his hands up and was pleading with a white cop not to shoot”rather than the fact that he”d just robbed a convenience store and was attacking the cop who eventually shot him”led to months of rioting and violence in Ferguson, MO, and other cities across America. And there are the much more recent serial lies about a mostly fake epidemic of pro-Trump hate crimes and the concomitant silence about actual violent crimes committed against Trump supporters. You blind field mice have gullibly swallowed every hate-crime hoax from Tawana Brawley to Duke Lacrosse to the Phantom Klansman of Mizzou“fabricated mass hysteria which has severely damaged American race relations, if you”re actually concerned about such things”and suddenly you”re worried about “fake news”?
