Examples of how the New York Times bestseller list is fake news

In the Federalist, Sean Davis gives some examples here.

The most egregious fake news stories of 2018

In the Daily Caller, Amber Athey has compiled a report listing the most egregious fake news stories of 2018. There are 31, and she explains why each is fake here.

2018 Fraudster of the Year

Ace of Spades has the story of a man to whom CNN awarded its 2014 Journalist of the Year prize. He has most recently been working for Der Spiegel in Germany, where they have discovered that he makes up stories out of whole cloth. Read about this fraudster here.

Today's news conference highlight

Acosta: "A question from CNN..."

Trump: "CNN is fake news. I don't take questions from CNN. John Roberts of Fox. Lets go to a real network."

Acosta: "But we're a real network too..."
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— Benny (@bennyjohnson) July 13, 2018

Follow the money!

Sharyl Attkisson has been researching the issue of fake news. How Google and Facebook joined the propaganda campaign.

Then, Trump started to talk about "fake news." Then, the Washington Post wrote, "It's time to retire the term "fake news." Trump had done a hostile takeover of the term!

When everybody in the media is on the same page, it might be the result of an organized campaign!

"Media Literacy" is trying to get into our schools in order to tell students what to believe.

President Trump reveals winners of his Fake News awards

At Fox News, Paulina Dedaj reports the winners of President Trump's Fake News awards.

1) The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claiming markets would ‘never’ recover from a Trump presidency

2) ABC News' Brian Ross’ bungled report on former national security adviser Michael Flynn

3) CNN falsely reporting the Trump campaign had early access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks

4) TIME report that Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office

5) The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel tweeting that Trump’s December rally in Pensacola, Florida, wasn’t packed with supporters

6) CNN’s video suggesting Trump overfed fish during a visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

7) CNN’s retracted report claiming Anthony Scaramucci-Russia ties

8) Newsweek report that Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda did not shake Trump’s hand

9) CNN report that former FBI Director James Comey would dispute President Trump’s claim he was told he was not under investigation

10) The New York Times report that the Trump administration had hidden a climate-change study

11) In Trump’s words, "‘RUSSIA COLLUSION!’ Russian collusion is perhaps the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people. THERE IS NO COLLUSION!”

CNN should heed this suggestion!

At PowerLine, John Hinderaker suggests that CNN

should abandon all of its television programming, and simply fill the screen with a sign that says, “We hate President Trump.” That would save a lot of trouble, and avoid quite a few factual errors.

...CNN, in its daily effort to discredit President Trump, hastily published a leak from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee that turned out to be false. CNN initially claimed that someone emailed Donald Trump, Jr. a link to a Wikileaks DNC dump on September 4, 2016. CNN said this information was based on “accounts from two sources who had seen the email.” Those sources obviously were Democrat committee members or staffers; Donald Jr. testified about the email before the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

CNN attributed significance to the email because it allegedly was dated September 4, nine days before the Wikileaks documents in question were made public. But–oops–the Democrats misinformed CNN. The email is actually dated September 14, the day after the documents were released. So a Trump supporter was simply trying to call the Trump campaign’s attention to publicly-available documents.

Read more here.

What did you do for Thanksgiving? We cooked up some fake news!

How hard would it be to create totally fake news? Ask these two! Paul Farhi reports for the Washington Post,

The hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” did the usual day-after Thanksgiving kibitzing on the air on Friday morning, telling viewers about their turkey dinners and mentioning the big football game the night before.

One problem: None of those things had actually happened at the time Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Co. started talking about them. The program that aired Friday morning was taped Wednesday, but made to look and sound as if it was airing live.

“Morning Joe” airs live on MSNBC five days a week. It features discussions of breaking or very recent news events.

Friday’s program had all the earmarks of a typical “Morning Joe” and few viewers seemed to notice that it wasn’t happening in real time. MSNBC offered no announcement or statement to viewers that it was a taped program. The only indirect clue was at the bottom of the screen: The “Live” graphic that normally appears was removed.

The rest was cooked up to appear as if it was happening in real time.

Read more here.

The era of fake news

David Greenfield writes at Front Page,

...The media’s fake news infrastructure relies heavily on anonymous sources. And anonymous sources are the media’s way of saying, “Just trust us.”

...The Washington Post's "Trump fired Comey because he's taller" could easily have come from Saturday Night Live, The Onion or the Daily Show.

The truly damning epitaph of American journalism is that there isn't much of a difference. Saturday Night Live isn’t doing comedy and the Washington Post isn’t doing journalism. They’re both manufacturing viral Trump attacks.

Getting your news from the Washington Post is as worthless as getting it from Saturday Night Live.

...But it’s the media that is reckless and corrosive to democracy. It has eroded its credibility with fake news. Factually accurate reporting has become too difficult and unrewarding. The idea of waiting months or years for an investigation to pay off is alien to the nanosecond news cycle. That’s why every fake Trump scandal is the new Watergate. And fake news is constantly being manufactured.

Read more here.

When you are the subject of a fake news story

Scott Adams reports on a fake news story on him by Bloomberg. He explained

sixteen intentionally-biased or incorrect components in one story.

By the way, Bloomberg did have a third-party do fact-checking on the article by running a bunch of questions by me for verification. That is standard practice for the big publications. None of the things I mentioned here were in the fact checking. The fact-checkers don’t check the writer’s own eye-witness accounts for accuracy, and they don’t check for missing context.

When normal citizens read the news, they think it is mostly accurate. But when you are the subject of reporting, you can see the fake news all over it. I thought I would share this view with you so you can increase your skepticism when you see this sort of thing presented as truth.

Read more here.

Leftist fake news journalist arrested for phoning bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers

Ben Shapiro at The Daily Wire and Ace at Ace of Spades both have stories about the leftist fake news reporter who phoned in bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers. Here he is.

CNN loses first round of lawsuit for peddling fake news

At Ace of Spades, Oregon Muse reports that CNN has lost the first round of a defamation case for peddling fake news. Read more here.

"Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse"

At The Federalist Daniel Payne documents the epidemic of fake news.

It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.

It is worth cataloging at least a small sampling of the hysteria so far. Only when we fully assess the extent of the media’s collapse into ignominious ineptitude can we truly begin to reckon with it.

Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates
November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory
December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball
January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’
January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy
January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter
January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department
January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair
January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax
January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake
February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico
February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions
February 2: Renaming Black History Month
February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures

Payne goes into detail to describe each of these fake stories, each of which generated thousands of additional tweets and other viral social media clicks. He concludes,

Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this point?

Perhaps the answer is: “We’ve let it.” The media will not stop behaving in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.

No one single person can fix this problem. It has to be a cultural change, a kind of shifting of priorities industry-wide. Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.

Most of us are hoping devoutly for the former. But not even a month into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the outlook is dim.

Read more here.

No such club ever existed

In today's Chapter One of Fake News, The New York Post and the Daily Mail both have egg on their faces. The Daily Mail reported, "DailyMail.com reveals how Gorsuch set up a club called 'Fascism Forever' at his prep school outside D.C. in protest at staff's left-wing tendencies. The New York Post then piggybacked on the story. Ed Whelan reports at National Review, that the high school states that no such club ever existed.

Earth to newspaper reporters: High-school yearbook editors sometimes have a sophomoric sense of humor. I am reliably informed that no such club ever existed and that there was instead an inside joke among friends in the senior class that parodied political debates happening at the school. A contemporary of Gorsuch’s at the school also tells me that yearbook editors added stuff to student blurbs without their permission. All of this also leads me to doubt the yearbook’s claim that Gorsuch was a “Believer in The World According to Ward.” Update: Gorsuch’s high school confirms what should have been obvious to everyone: that no such club ever existed and that the yearbook blurb was tongue-in-cheek.

Read more here.

"The creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public"

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

No one has described the methodology of fake news better than Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama and brother of the president of CBS News, David Rhodes. Ben Rhodes cynically bragged about how the Obama administration had sold the dubious Iran deal through misinformation picked up by an adolescent but sympathetic media (for which Rhodes had only contempt). As Rhodes put it, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Translated, that meant that Rhodes and his team fed false narratives about the Iran Deal to a sympathetic but ignorant media, which used its received authority to report those narratives as “truth”—at least long enough for the agreement to be passed before its multitudinous falsehoods and side-agreements collapsed under their own weight. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes bragged to the New York Times: “They [reporters] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Obama’s healthcare advisor Jonathan Gruber likewise saw the virtues of fake news in pushing a political agenda. Gruber assumed that the public, not just the media, was stupid and easily conned: “Lack of transparency,” he said, “is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever.”

Again, the term “fake news” is best applied to mainstream media reporting of fantasies as facts that are demonstrably not true—and are probably known to be not true, but are thought to help advance a desired progressive political or cultural agenda.

...What unites these fake news narratives and gives them greater media resonance than other fables and urban myths is again their progressive resonance. Fake news can become a means to advance supposedly noble ends of racial, gender, class, or environmental justice—such as the need for new sexual assault protocols on campuses. Those larger aims supersede bothersome and inconvenient factual details. The larger “truth” of fake news lives on even after its facts have been utterly debunked.

...And indeed, the fake news mindset ultimately can be traced back to the campus. Academic postmodernism derides facts and absolutes, and insists that there are only narratives and interpretations that gain credence, depending on the power of the story-teller.

In sum, fake news is journalism’s popular version of the nihilism of campus postmodernism. To progressive journalists, advancing a leftwing political agenda is important enough to justify the creation of misleading narratives and outright falsehoods to deceive the public—to justify, in other words, the creation of fake but otherwise useful news.

Read more here.

Lies we've been told

Washington Post fake news

At Powerline Steven Hayward is furious about a piece in the Washington Post. Hayward calls for both the author and the headline writer to be fired. The Washington Post article is here. Hayward's blog post is here.

Trump a dope? I don't think so!

At the American Spectator, Ben Stein writes about the press. Watergate?

The Battle of Watergate was won in the network and newspaper editorial offices. There, “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” as Bill Safire brilliantly put it, launched a media putsch that panicked a nation into the delusion that a microscopic dabble in an insanely pointless burglary required the execution of the most effective statesman in U.S. history, Richard Nixon.

A handful of contemptuous nabobs of negativism basically seized control of the leading organs of the press and launched an attack that led to genocide in Cambodia among other disasters.

This was, as the genius Edith Efron put it, “news from nowhere,” a tale of sound and fury signifying the left’s capture of the media as The Bard might say.

Now they’re trying the same thing on Trump. To break him down by endless attacks on him as a racist and a bully and a dope.

In a way it’s pitiful. John Lewis, d. Ga. Still nursing a head wound from 1966 or ’67. Saying Trump is not a legitimate President because the Russians uncovered that the DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Crazy. So Trump fires back that Lewis is a loser. That’s schoolyard nothings except for the following.

The almighty New York Times calls Trump a racist for defending himself against a smear. A black reporter at the Times writes an angry article about Trump as racist… not one fact in it. But no one cares. That’s the news. That leads. No one cares.

The NYT does not call the tune any longer. Voters get their news from a jillion sources on the Internet. The Times is a voice and a big voice. But there are a billion other voices now. And about half of the nation just does not believe Big Media any longer. They don’t buy the vicious lie that white people are all racists. They know that the Black Caucus and Black Lives Matter are real racists. They know Joe Sixpack isn’t and anyway, they don’t care.

They’re sick of being pushed around. They elected a tough guy who won’t be pushed around. He’s a shtarker and he cannot be broken in spirit by the thugs and bullies of the media.

The left will beat and beat and huff and puff. But it’s a different world now. Again… The people who elected Trump don’t remotely believe he’s a racist and they’re sick of hearing it anyway.

This Trump guy. He’s not a sensitive soul like Nixon. He knows how pitifully jealous the media people are. He owes them nothing. He sneers at them. He’s moving them out of the White House. It’s brilliant. He’s making real the truth of now. The media are not good guys by and large. They’re jealous snobs. They are not running the show any longer. One tweet from Trump blows their 5,000 word stories to bits. This battle over Trump’s legitimacy is done. In Trump’s mind and in his legions’ minds, he’s legitimate and the media isn’t. He knows how the world works. It really is a reality TV show now. He’s some dope.

Extinct!

hat tip American Power

fake news

h/t 90 Miles from Tyranny