“By all means: Let’s confront and defeat the menace of Fake News. But to do so, it’s critical that one not be selective in which type one denounces, and it is particularly important that one not sanction Fake News when it promotes one’s own political objectives. Most important of all is that those who want to lead the cause of denouncing Fake News not convert themselves into its most prolific disseminators whenever the claims of a Fake News account are pleasing or self-affirming."
~ Glenn Greenwald from ‘The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False’ [hat tip Christian Wernstedt]“’We lost because the Russians hacked into our computers’ is in effect an admission: ‘we were hiding something that was true and that people ought not to have known.’
“Previously, the voters were ‘deplorable’ but now they are decent. However, they have been fooled by Fake News. So decent ... but stupid…
“The champions of faking it -- faking science, faking economics, and revealing secretly taped banter have now created a new label -- Fake News. And a new cool war---foreign governments must be blamed, but Saudi Arabia should be appointed to head up the UN Council on women's rights. Consistency, anyone? …
“Perhaps, in the future, everything that is anti-Government will be termed "Fake News." I hope not.
“You may have just realised that you have Stasi friends in the GOP, too. And therein lies the great danger. Truth will be become fake, and propaganda will be sold as true.”
~ Vinay Kolhatkar from ‘Russians or Fake News, Which is It?’.
3 comments:
Fake news has always been with us, and it always will be, but I like to think people are getting more skeptical. It used to be that people generally accepted what they read in the paper or saw on the evening news as true. Thanks to the internet research and fact checking are easier now and most of us are aware, at least on some level, that not everything we're told is true. There are credulous and stupid people out there, yes, and people who just like to avoid information that challenges their worldview, but that's nothing new either.
Isn't fake news just another term for propaganda.? Those that seek to exert control over the rest of us have been using propaganda for ages.
What gets me is that when the Right denounces fake news they're insane reactionary morons, but when the Let denounces fake news they're heroic and fighting for freedom and justice and the American way! When the Right points out that TV news is almost entirely the plaything of the Left they're trying to hide from reality; when the Left literally tries to dictate what news people see, it's merely trying to protect democracy!
This is nothing more than an extension of Obama's fight against Fox News when he was first elected: attempts to control the media, so they can control the nation.
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