Fake news. Left liberals like to think they’re not part of it – to be specific, of the whole website-publishing-fake-political-stories-that-go-viral thing. The Double Standard for instance has this morning published a piece by “a fake news writer” claiming (to The Sub-Standard’s obvious delight) that “leftie / liberal fake news [sites are] much rarer” because “it just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.”
Perhaps a simpler explanation is that the liberal left don’t need to set up fake news coming from sites in Macedonia and elsewhere because they have them coming out already in the mainstream media from places like the Clinton News Network and Times Square. (Not to mention Tony Blair’s entire media army, from which milieu the very term “spin doctor” emerged.)
This is neither new, nor trivial. They have peddled fake news that has literally changed the world. Consider for example how the New York Times helped to save, then lionise, the “anti-communist” Castro (“Fidel Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution’” wrote the Times’s Herbert Matthews over the sound of Castro’s firing squads, “but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist.”) And to actively cover up Stalin’s many infamies ("Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” wrote the Times’s Walter Duranty while the corpses were being piled high around him.) Not to mention how even today its senior staff gather each week in the Times office to “craft the narrative” for the week, or even year, ahead – and have all-but admitted post-election that it publishes advocacy instead of news.
The Times being just one among hundreds, and still the most influential mainstream outlet among them, why on earth would you need to start fake liberal-left news sites when the mainstream ones are already doing the job for you?
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1 comment:
The MSM the world over are left leaning and to say there is no fake news from the left is hogwash. The whole American election was covered by fake news and New Zealand's media were complicit. That's why everyone was so surprised when Trump first won the Republican primaries when we were assured he had no hope and then when he won the presidential election when the media reported that Clinton was a shoe in. The media has learned nothing. They are doubling down and already reporting Trump's policies in a negative light when he is still only the president elect and has no concrete policies in place. The most important thing to remember is that the media is not a reflection of reality.
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