I think a lot of us are getting tired of hearing about fake news. The president calls anything he doesn't like "fake news." Russian President Putin denies his nation has had a hand in creating and disseminating fake news to influence voters here and our president takes him at his word.
Fake news continues to exist and it continues to shape opinions, mainly of hard-core conservatives who rely on and believe what they see on FOX and Breitbart and similar sites, as well as powerful conservative talk radio programs.
It is a very sad commentary on the current state of the administration that many of us doubt what we hear from the president and the White House. With slightly differing stories of the meeting between the president and Putin, I must admit, crazy as it seems, that I tend to put a bit more credibility in Putin's account of the meeting than in what our own Secretary of State reported. I heard similar admissions from some news commentators as well.
I recently saw a few accounts of how fake news stories began and how they spread. I think it bears repeating. This is from a source that is definitely NOT fake news.. The New York Times.
Jack Posobiec is someone known for pro-Trump tweets and spreading dubious conspiracy theories including the crazy “pizzagate” hoax that claimed Hillary Clinton was at the heart of a kidnapping and sexual slavery ring operating out of a pizza parlor in D.C.
After the Comey hearings where the former FBI director testified, Posobiec tweeted that Comey had testified that Trump never asked him to halt any investigation. In fact, that is not true. Comey did not say that.
But truth seems to matter little to Posobiec nor to the many other widely-followed right-wing media and social media, who reported the tweet as fact and even expanded the falsehood. This included, within a few hours of the initial false tweet, Brietbart News, followed by GotNews.com, a site that has frequently misrepresented media reports to put the president in a favorable light. A day later, the false news appeared on InfoWars, the site by Alex Jones who has called the 9/11 attacks “an inside job” and also questioned whether the 2012 attack that killed dozens of children at Sandy Hook in Connecticut really happened.
It eventually made it into commentary, repeated a few times, by Sean Hannity on FOX News.
For those who rely solely on conservative media, they have no way of knowing that the fake news is fake. And the repeated attacks by the White House on legitimate media like the networks and credible papers like The Times and The Washington Post encourage these folks from reading or believing reports that counter or correct intentionally false news reports.
So yes, there still is fake news… lots of it. But it’s not coming from the major media who work hard to uphold standards of good and honest journalism. It’s coming from unscrupulous sources who bend and twist and outright lie about news to further their own agenda. Repeat it enough, it seems, with encouragement from a president whose own credibility is dubious at best, and you can see how so many people can be misinformed and misled.
The legitimate media allowed much of this to happen during the campaign when they didn’t question the Republican candidate as he continuously lied and contradicted himself. Now that he is president, they are doing their job – asking questions and pointing out contradictions and lies. And now, for doing their job, the president of this country is calling them fake.
We, as intelligent people, need to look at what is really fake and what’s not. Before it’s too late.