More Fake News from CNN

This is all over conservative outlets, but we’ll repeat it here in order to keep a complete trail of fake news from the anti-Trump mainstream media. From Greenwald in The Intercept:

CNN, Credibly Accused of Lying to its Audience About a Key Claim in its Blockbuster Cohen Story, Refuses to Comment

Photo: YouTube/CNN CNN’S BLOCKBUSTER July 26 story – that Michael Cohen intended to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he was present when Donald Trump was told in advance about his son’s Trump Tower meeting with various Russians – includes a key statement about its sourcing that credible reporting now suggests was designed to have misled its audience. Yet CNN simply refuses to address the serious ethical and journalistic questions raised about its conduct.

The substance of the CNN story itself regarding Cohen – which made headline news all over all the world and which CNN hyped as a “bombshell” – has now been retracted by other news outlets that originally purported to “confirm” CNN’s story. That’s because the anonymous source for this confirmation, Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis, now admits that, in essence, his “confirmation” was false. As a result, both the Washington Post and the NY Post outed Davis as their anonymous source and then effectively retracted their stories “confirming” parts of CNN’s report.

CNN, however, has retracted nothing. All inquiries to the network are directed to a corporate spokesperson, who simply says: “We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it.” A newsletter sent Sunday night from CNN’s two media reporters, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, contained the same corporate language, but addressed none of the questions raised about CNN’s report.

It’s certainly possible that CNN had other sources for this story besides Davis, who now repudiates it. It’s hard to see how CNN’s story could be true given that Davis, Cohen’s own lawyer, explicitly says that Cohen has no information that Trump had prior knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting, that Cohen cannot and will not tell Mueller that this happened, and that Davis’ prior claims about Cohen’s knowledge and intentions are false.

But that’s not the part that indicates CNN’s dishonesty.

But there’s an entirely separate, and more significant, question about CNN’s behavior here; namely, the very specific claim they made about their sourcing for that blockbuster story. Last night, BuzzFeed reported that Davis explicitly confessed that he was one of the anonymous sources for CNN’s July 26 story, just as he was for the stories from the Washington Post and the New York Post. Last week, CNN put Davis on the air with Anderson Cooper to deny that he was the source for that CNN story – a denial Cooper did not contest – but Davis now admits he was one of CNN’s sources, if not their main source.

Yet remarkably, CNN, in its July 26 story, specificaly claimed that Davis refused to talk to CNN about the story or provide any comment whatsoever.

Only one of two things can be true here, and either is extremely significant: (1) CNN deliberately lied to its audience about Davis refusing to comment on the story when, in fact, Davis was one of the anonymous sources on which the CNN report depended, and CNN claimed Davis refused to comment in order to hide Davis’ identity as one of their anonymous sources; or (2) Davis is lying now to BuzzFeed when he confessed to having been one of CNN’s sources for the story.

How can CNN possibly justify refusing to address these questions, and refrain from informing the public about these critical matters on a story that they themselves hyped for days as a “blockbuster,” one of the most significant stories yet in the Trump/Russia saga?

The media have long had a liberal bias. But the bias against Donald Trump exceeds anything in modern history. Trump himself eggs it on by his attacks on the media, which have the effect of causing them to abandon journalists standards. Which in turn plays into Trump’s hand.

More Fake News

We have chronicled the massive parade of bogus anti-Trump stories in multiple blog posts.

More Fake News About Donald Trump: A Compliation

From the blog of Sharyl Attkisson, a post titled “52 Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List.” A “mistake” might imply normal human fallibility, but the overwhelming majority of the mistakes are in an anti-Trump direction. They are not random incompetence. They are the result of a pervasive bias against Donald Trump.

We can’t repeat them all here (please read the entire list), but we can mention a few of the most serious ones.

1. Aug. 2016-Nov. 2016:
The New York Post published modeling photos of Trump’s wife Melania and reported they were taken in 1995. Various news outlets relied on that date to imply that Melania—an immigrant—had violated her visa status. But the media got the date wrong. Politico was among the news agencies that later issued a photo date correction.

7. Jan. 20, 2017:
Zeke Miller of TIME reported that President Trump had removed the bust statue of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. The news went viral. It was false.

8. Jan. 26, 2017:
Josh Rogin of the Washington Post reported that the State Department’s “entire senior administrative team” had resigned in protest of Trump. A number of media outlets ranging from politically left to right, including liberal-leaning Vox, stated that claim was misleading or wrong.

12. Feb. 2, 2017:
AP reported that Trump had threatened the president of Mexico with invasion to get rid of “bad hombres.” Numerous publications followed suit. The White House said it wasn’t true and the Washington Post removed the AP info that “could not be independently confirmed.”

14. Feb. 14, 2017:
The New York Times’ Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo reported about supposed contacts between Trump campaign staff and “senior Russian intelligence officials.” Comey later testified “In the main, [the article] was not true.”

15. Feb. 22, 2017:
ProPublica’s Raymond Bonner reported CIA official Gina Haspel—Trump’s later pick for CIA Director—was in charge of a secret CIA prison where Islamic extremist terrorist Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, and that she mocked the prisoner’s suffering. More than a year later, ProPublica retracted the claim, stating that “Neither of these assertions is correct…Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended.”

17. May 10, 2017:
Multiple outlets including Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, AP, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported the same leaked information: that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey shortly after Comey requested additional resources to investigate Russian interference in the election. [. . .] The Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said the media reports were untrue and McCabe added that the FBI’s Russia investigation was “adequately resourced.”

18. June 4, 2017:
NBC News reported in a Tweet that Russian President Vladimir Putin told TV host Megan Kelly that he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite: that he did not have compromising information on Trump.

22. June 22, 2017:
CNN’s Thomas Frank reported that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” The report was later retracted. Frank and two other CNN employees resigned in the fallout.

23. December 2, 2017:
ABC News’ Brian Ross reported that former Trump official Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was going to testify that candidate Trump had directed him to contact “the Russians.” Even though such contact would not be in of itself a violation of law, the news was treated as an explosive indictment of Trump in the Russia collusion narrative, and the stock market fell on the news. ABC later corrected the report to reflect that Trump had already been elected when he reportedly asked Flynn to contact the Russians about working together to fight ISIS and other issues. Ross was suspended.

27. Sept. 5, 2017:
CNN’s Chris Cillizza and other news outlets declared Trump “lied” when he stated that Trump Tower had been wiretapped, although there’s no way any reporter independently knew the truth of the matter—only what intel officials claimed. It later turned out there were numerous wiretaps involving Trump Tower, including a meeting of Trump officials with a foreign dignitary. At least two Trump associates who had offices in or frequented Trump Tower were also wiretapped.

29. Nov. 6, 2017:
CNN’s Daniel Shane edited excerpts from a Trump event to make it seem as though Trump didn’t realize Japan builds cars in the U.S. However, Trump’s entire statement made clear that he does.

35. Dec. 8, 2017:
CNN’s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb reported that Donald Trump Jr. conspired with WikiLeaks in advance of the publication of damaging Democrat party and Clinton campaign emails. Many other publications followed suit. They had the date wrong: WikiLeaks and Trump Junior were in contact after the emails were published.

40. March 8, 2018:
The New York Times’ Jan Rosen reported on a hypothetical family whose tax bill would rise nearly $4,000 under Trump’s tax plan. It turns out the calculations were off: the couple’s taxes would go actually go down $43; not up $4,000.

44. April 30, 2018:
AP reported that the NRA had banned guns during Trump and Pence speeches at the NRA’s annual meeting. AP later corrected the information because the ban had been put in place by Secret Service.

46. May 7, 2018:
CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger reported that Trump’s personal lawyer, Cohen, paid $1 million in fines related to unauthorized cars in his taxi business, had been barred from managing taxi medallions, had transferred $60 million offshore to avoid paying debts, and is awaiting trial on charges of failing to pay millions in taxes. A later correction stated that none of that was true.

47. May 16, 2018:
The New York Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis, AP, CNN’s Oliver Darcy and others excerpted a Trump comment as if he had referred to immigrants or illegal immigrants generally as “animals.” Most outlets corrected their reports later to note that Trump had specifically referred to members of the murderous criminal gang MS-13.

48. May 28, 2018
The New York Times’ Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein and CNN’s Hadas Gold shared a story with photos of immigrant children in cages as if they were new photos taken under the Trump administration. The article and photos were actually taken in 2014 under the Obama administration.

49. May 29, 2018
The New York Times’ Julie Davis reported the estimated size of a Trump rally to be 1,000 people. There were actually 5,500 people or more in attendance.

51. June 21, 2018
Time magazine and others used a photo of a crying Honduran child to illustrate a supposed Trump administration policy separating illegal immigrant parents and children. The child’s father later reported that agents had never separated her from her mother; the mother had taken her to the US without his knowledge and separated herself from her other children, whom she left behind.

Conclusion

A few of the items on Attkisson’s list are fairly trivial, such as 16. (“An article bylined by the New York Times’ graphic editors Karen Yourish and Troy Griggs referred to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, as Trump’s wife.”)

One or two others represent honest assessments that turned out to be wrong, for example 3. (“In a Washington Post piece not labelled opinion or analysis, Stuart Rothenberg reported that Trump’s path to an electoral college victory was ‘nonexistent.’”). Rothenberg, a relatively sober analyst, was probably fairly describing the data he had at the time.

But the vast majority of examples Attkisson cites are not random errors, the result of the fact that journalists are fallible. They are evidence of a mainstream media keen to find, and disinclined to check out, anything that reflects badly on Donald Trump.

Fake News: Associated Press Publishes Falsehoods About Our Case

It just appeared on the Washington Times website (and many other places, doubtless): a story about our suit against Marquette University from the Associated Press.

As has happened before, the reporter (Ivan Moreno) appears to have accepted at face value claims made by Marquette, and pretty much blown off statements from our lawyer (Rick Esenberg) whom Moreno talked to, but apparently paid little attention to.

Doxing Claim

Moreno repeats the claim by Marquette that we “doxed” graduate instructor Cheryl Abbate. Readers of this blog will remember that Abbate told an undergraduate that expressing opposition to gay marriage would not be allowed, since it would be “homophobic” and might “offend” any gay students in the class. We put up a blog post about this. Moreno explains that “Doxing is the practice of publicizing someone’s personal identifying information online to subject them to harassment.”

Moreno claimed:

The post included the student-teacher’s name, a link to her personal website and her email address, and it led to a flood of hateful messages and threats against her.

Moreno quotes Esenberg stating that “all McAdams did was link to publicly available information.”

Had Moreno bothered to get the facts straight, he would have learned that we linked to no contact information at all. Rather, we linked to Abbate’s toxic feminist essay “Yes All Men… Contribute to the Prevalence of Rape,” published on her blog. If somebody dug around her blog, they could have found her e-mail address.

We did absolutely nothing to encourage people to send her any e-mails at all (much less abusive ones) unless merely exposing misconduct amounts to such.

The Washington Post, which published the same “doxing” claim in a column by Kathleen Parker, has now retracted it. From the Post:

Correction: An earlier version of this op-ed incorrectly reported that Marquette University professor John McAdams posted the contact information for a graduate student-teacher online. He posted a link to her personal blog.

Journalistic Norms

Any casual reader of the media will know that when journalists expose misconduct, they name the miscreant. This is certainly the case if a teacher says something racist to a class, or if a coach sexually molests athletes.

We can’t imagine Marquette would have gotten upset if we had exposed a white instructor who said something racist to a black student, or a male instructor who sexually harassed a female student.

Further, Marquette did nothing about the abuse of the undergraduate Abbate insulted and bullied. Indeed, in internal communications, they derided him.

It seems that abuses from politically correct leftists are not merely to be ignored by Marquette, but exposing them should be punished.

Abbate Received No Threats

Moreno repeats Marquette’s claim that Abbate received threats.

The post included the student-teacher’s name, a link to her personal website and her email address, and it led to a flood of hateful messages and threats against her. The threats were bad enough that the university posted a security officer outside of her classroom and she noticeably lost weight.

In fact, Abbate received no threats, as she admitted on her personal blog.

Why Abbate Left Marquette

Moreno, accepting Marquette’s claims, implies that Abbate had to leave Marquette because of our blog post.

The graduate student McAdams named in his blog eventually moved to another university, where she had to repeat three semesters and revise her PhD thesis.

He ignores the fact that Abbate left a Marquette program ranked barely in the top 100 nationally for one (at Colorado) ranked in the top 40.

Further, Marquette Associate Arts and Science Dean (a Philosophy faculty member intimately familiar with the situation) explained other relevant factors. In an e-mail to Dean Rick Holz, he explained:

Friday, December 5, 2014 5:11 PM

Rick,

It’s complicated, but the short version is Cheryl is planning to leave Marquette and go to a different Ph.D. Program, which has offered her significant financial aid and is reputationally superior to MU. She’s working on a letter to Nancy [Snow] about this, which she is also going to send to Jeanne.

We can talk more on Monday. But several programs reached out to her and offered her aid and [she] finds MU to be very uncomfortable and toxic. She walks around afraid for her safety and feels unsupported by the senior faculty of the department.

James

South gave more information in another e-mail to Holz:

Hi Rick,

If you have a few minutes, could we talk about this tomorrow? Cheryl is not just leaving because of McAdams, but because she did not feel comfortable in the department — for several reasons, not least because of how [Department Chair] Nancy [Snow] treated her, her research area, and her mentor, Susanne [Foster].

Moreno throws in a few other claims from Marquette, such as “McAdams had been advised previously, in 2011, not to mention a student’s name on his blog.” In fact, Provost John Pauly demanded we not blog about undergraduate students. We only blog about highly visible political activism among undergraduates, so Pauly’s demand was absurd, and we ignored it. We were never disciplined in any way by Pauly.

Conclusion

What we have here, from Moreno, is a fairly typical example of a journalist who accepts uncritically what Marquette says, and largely ignores facts inconsistent with Marquette’s version.

Any journalist who is familiar with contemporary higher education would know to be skeptical of what university bureaucrats say. Particularly when those bureaucrats are pandering to the forces of political correctness on their campus.

Fake News About Donald Trump: A Compliation

Donald Trump says outrageous things, and attacks the media. That might seem to be a hugely dysfunctional presidential style. But in fact he has driven the media bonkers, causing them to publish a flurry of badly sourced and easily debunked stories about Trump, thus validating his attacks. If Trump were intentionally trying to trap them, this would be a brilliant strategy. He’s not, or course. He’s just being Donald Trump.

First, from The Federalist:

13 More Major Fake News Stories In Just Five Months Of Trump’s Presidency

You can read all the details here, but this is the list.

• January 22: The Trump-Comey Bromance
• February 1: Neil Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever’ Club
• February 17: The Mobilization of the National Guard
• February 25: Kuwait’s Pay-to-Play at Trump Hotel
• April 11: The Jeff Sessions ‘Filth’ Scandal
• May 1: Ghosts of Billboards Past
• May 3: The DOJ Prosecutes a Woman for Laughing
• May 4: The Nonexistent Beer Party
• May 4: ‘Rape Is a Preexisting Condition’
• May 4: The Football Analogy Fiasco
• May 10: The Fake Rosenstein Resignation Scandal
• May 10: Comey’s Russian Probe Resource Request
• May 20: The ‘Ivanka Charity’ Insanity

This article in The Federalist is a follow-up to an earlier one titled “16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won.” That’s right: getting called out on a whole bunch of earlier bogus stories has not seemed to engender any journalistic integrity in the media.

Yet More Fake News

One might think that the above list of thirteen bogus stories (added to the earlier sixteen reported by The Federalist) would pretty much exhaust the universe of such blunders by major “mainstream” outlets. Alas, this is what fighter pilots call a “target rich environment,” and the Daily Caller had no trouble coming up with “7 Times CNN Botched The News In 2017.” That’s right: just CNN.

• Comey Testimony
• CNN Smears Scaramucci
• CNN Spreads Fake News…About Fake News!
• Republican Donor Did (Not) Fund The Dossier
• Fake (Fish) News
• Trump Is (Not) Ignorant Of Japanese Cars
• CNN Botches Another ‘Bombshell’

The “bombshell” was from this last Friday.

Perhaps the most jarring error in the CNN report is the date on which members of the Trump Organization, including Donald Trump and Trump Jr., were sent the email. The network reported that a person named Mike Erickson sent the email on Sept. 4, 2016, with a link to Wikileaks documents as well as a decryption key to access them.

Yes! Collusion!

Except that the actual date on the e-mail was September 14, after WikiLeaks had publicly announced the availability of the documents, and published the decryption key. In short, somebody simply e-mailed Trump, Jr. with publicly available information. Some scandal.

CNN still has the story online, with a weaselly “correction.”

CNN originally reported the email was released September 4 — 10 days earlier — based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email. The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information. The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.

No, not “less significant.” Utterly meaningless.

Three in One Week

Yes, Axios reports three media screw-ups in one week, only one of which duplicates something above:

• Flynn’s testimony: Last Friday, ABC News reported that former national security advisor Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that President Trump, while still a candidate, directed him to contact Russian officials. But later in the day, the network issued a “clarification” that the direction came when Trump was president-elect. That changed the impact of the story entirely as it’s a common occurrence for presidential transition teams to reach out to foreign governments.
• Deutsche Bank subpoena: Reuters and Bloomberg both reported on Tuesday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for information on accounts relating to President Trump and his family members — seemingly confirming that Mueller had expanded his probe to investigate the president’s financial dealings. The WSJ defused that bombshell in a follow-up report stating that the subpoenas actually dealt with “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.”
• WikiLeaks emails: CNN reported this morning that senior Trump campaign officials, including Trump himself, received an email from an unknown sender on September 4, 2016 that linked them to what could have been unreleased WikiLeaks documents. WaPo issued their own report later in the afternoon that the email was actually sent on September 14 — and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier.

Conclusion

As Peggy Noonan has noted “Trump Has Been Lucky in His Enemies.” The subhead reads: “Cursing pols, screeching students and intolerant abortion advocates have become the face of the left.” Mainstream media types may be a bit less strident (on average), but they have also made themselves into enemies Trump is lucky to have.

Driving Your Adversaries Crazy: More Anti-Trump Media Blunders

First, the supposed “17 agencies” of the U.S. government who agreed that the Russians had interfered with the 2016 presidential election.

The New York Times and Associated Press this week quietly issued major retractions in stories concerning alleged Russian interference in last year’s presidential election.

For months, Democrats have tried to connect President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to Russia’s alleged interference in last year’s election. The most prominent narrative has accused Trump of “collusion” with the Russians, although no concrete evidence has proved the claims correct.

One of the other prominent claims, one touted by many Democrats, has been to say all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed that Russia attempted to interfere in the election.

Last Sunday, the Times ran a report titled, “Trump’s Deflections and Denials on Russia Frustrate Even His Allies,” and claimed that “all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community” had confirmed Russia orchestrated cyberattacks to interfere in the election.

The Associated Press made similar claims in stories on April 6, June 2, June 26 and June 29.

Losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even made the claim during a debate last October and fact-checking website PolitiFact ruled Clinton’s claim to be completely true.

However, as fate would have it, not all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies made that claim nor had they confirmed it. In fact, only four agencies did: the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the office of the director of national intelligence.

That fact forced the Times and the AP to issue retractions and corrections.

The Times wrote in a correction on Thursday: “A White House Memo article on Monday about President Trump’s deflections and denials about Russia referred incorrectly to the source of an intelligence assessment that said Russia orchestrated hacking attacks during last year’s presidential election. The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

While the AP wrote in a similar correction on Friday: “In stories published April 6, June 2, June 26 and June 29, The Associated Press reported that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump. That assessment was based on information collected by three agencies – the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency – and published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which represents all U.S. intelligence agencies. Not all 17 intelligence agencies were involved in reaching the assessment.”

Trump reacted to all this by asking:

Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2017

By the way, if Russia was working so hard on the 2016 Election, it all took place during the Obama Admin. Why didn't they stop them?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2017

The Meeting That Didn’t Happen

From Brietbart:

A Breitbart News investigation has led to the correction by the Associated Press–which originally resisted–of the fake news it printed as deeper questions of responsibility, accountability, and journalistic ethics consume the AP heading into Fourth of July weekend.

This time, the Associated Press invented an imaginary meeting between EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, and then alleged that some kind of impropriety happened as a result.

Under the headline “EPA chief met with Dow CEO before deciding on pesticide ban,” the AP’s Michael Biesecker alleged that some super-secret covert meeting occurred between Pruitt and Liveris—and that awful things came as a result of that meeting.

The problem with Biesecker’s piece, which ran over the Associated Press wires on Wednesday evening, is that as Breitbart News has confirmed from both sides: No meeting ever occurred, despite one appearing on Pruitt’s schedule. Sure, both were at the conference and briefly shook hands when introduced, but they never had a “meeting” because of scheduling conflicts.

“Administrator Scott Pruitt did not meet privately with Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow,” Liz Bowman, the EPA’s spokeswoman, told Breitbart News. “The AP article is inaccurate and misleading. Despite multiple attempts to provide the Associated Press with the facts, this article has not been corrected.”

Lies? Fake News?

So we have an out and out epidemic of bogus stories from the Mainstream Media, all tending to discredit the election of Donald Trump and his Administration. We have documented more here and here.

Is this “fake news?”

The concept was invented by the liberal media during the 2016 election season to claim that fake news was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. And it was deployed to attack all conservative media.

But soon enough the tables were turned and conservatives, along with Trump himself, flung that epithet at the Mainstream Media.

Poetic justice.

But genuine fake news is stories that are known to be false by the people who write them. They are intentional frauds, in other words. Classic example: the story that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump.

In fact, what we have from the Mainstream Media is not intentional lies but rather a radical lowering of journalistic standards, fueled by the loathing media people feel toward Trump. Since they so badly want stories reflecting badly on Trump to be true, they fail to show the skepticism and careful sourcing good journalism requires.

And of course, Trump’s excoriation of the media simply reinforces the loathing, and leads to more journalistic blunders, which gives Trump more material which which to attack the media.

It could be seen as a brilliant strategy on Trump’s part to discredit his critics. Except we don’t think the terms “Donald Trump” and “strategy” fit together. Trump is not Machiavelli. In terms of strategizing, he’s not even your average cribbage player. But when he pops off, it drives his adversaries crazy.

That is a political asset. It’s not the one we’d most like to see in a president, but it’s not a trivial one.

Media: Then and Now

Fake News from the Anti-Trump Media

From The Federalist, a list of stories, virtually all negative about Donald Trump, from mainstream outlets that have turned out to be bogus. We will just list them, and you can read about them as you wish:

• 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
• January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie
• 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

The concept “fake news” came into currency during last year’s election, mostly used by liberal media to condemn stories that favored Donald Trump. And a good number of genuinely fake stories, apparently intended a click bait, did appear.

But the cudgel has been turned on the liberal media, and the alternative conservative media (such as The Federalist) has scrutinized the liberal outlets.

One of Donald Trump’s “achievements” (if you want to call it that) is to excite such hostility and even rage in the liberal mainstream media that they create stories as wild and irresponsible as Trump’s own worst pronouncements.

Conspiracy Theories

The Fake Attack on “Fake News”

From Frontpage Mag:

Remember when Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory? The fake news media which predicted it in order to depress pro-Trump voter turnout certainly does. And so they’re out to fight “fake news.”

By fake news, they don’t mean their own raging torrent of misinformation and lies.

The media has gone to war against Facebook. While various supporters have blamed Hillary’s loss on everything from the FBI to internalized misogyny, the media has decided that Facebook is to blame.

Why Facebook?

Cable news is dying. Newspapers struggle online and offline. The mainstream media’s profitability lives and dies by social media. But the essence of social media is that it allows communities to shape what they see. That’s a terrifying idea if you’re a media conglomerate that depends on its megaphone.

But it’s also scary if you’re a leftist running for office in a country that doesn’t agree with your views.

Obama blamed “messaging” for the election results. But messaging requires being able to reach people. And that means clearing competitive voices out of the social media space by banning conservatives.

The war on conservative media is being conducted under the guise of banishing “fake news” from Facebook. But the fake news devil is in the details. Fake news can mean satire sites like the Onion or the Daily Currant. It can mean foreign clickbait sites that invent fake news. But it can also mean sites from outside the mainstream media whose stories are contested by the left for partisan reason.

The war on fake news is a smoke screen for a campaign against conservative media. And it’s easy to see that it’s conservative sites that are the real target of the Facebook book burners.

Buzzfeed, which depends heavily on Facebook traffic, has fed the “fake news” hysteria. Its list of “fake news” sites includes “hyperpartisan” sites. Its story contrasting “legitimate” mainstream media outlets, a category that somehow includes the Huffington Post, with a variety of right-leaning sites is a major piece of supporting evidence used in the fake news crusade.

Considering BuzzFeed’s history of fake news stories that fit its political narrative, it has no credibility fact checking anyone else. Examinations of BuzzFeed’s own methodology for its fake news article tore it into tiny little shreds. Its claim that fake news outperformed real news turned out to be… fake.

But what’s more important is how quickly the goal posts have been moved from fake news to conservative news, from fraudulent sites to fighting “clickbait” or “hyperpartisan” sites. And it’s clear that these are largely a euphemism for sites on the right that are outperforming the media.

USA Today and the Los Angeles Times promoted a list of “fake news” sites that included a variety of mainstream conservative sites including RedState, IJR and the Blaze. BuzzFeed targeted RightWingNews.

Fake news, like fact checking, has very obviously become a euphemism for attacking the politics that the left disagrees with by dressing up partisan agendas in fake concerns about journalism and civic virtue.

This goes far beyond namecalling. The goal is to ban conservative sites from social media. Or at least to penalize them in ways that will make it difficult for them to compete with the mainstream media.

There are obvious ideological and financial motives behind this war on “fake news.” The financial motives are grossly blatant. The loudest media voices in this war, BuzzFeed, HuffPo and Vox, depend heavily on social media traffic for their own hyperpartisan factually challenged clickbait.

Read the entire article.

The Washington Examiner gave some examples of what the Buzzfeed “study” considered the top “real news” stories:

Here’s the top “Real News” stories: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” As the headline suggests, this is a liberal opinion piece, complaining that the media doesn’t report enough on Trump’s scandals.

No. 2 is “Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton.” This is a rambling screed claiming that people only dislike Clinton because she is a woman.

The No. 3 “Real News” story is “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos From Racy Shoot Revealed,” published at the New York Post.

To be clear, the journalists gnashing their teeth about “Fake Election News” winning would have been less concerned if “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos” had received more clicks.

If this study shows something it’s that the biggest fake news stories get a ton of Facebook engagement — maybe more than the biggest real election stories. (I say “maybe,” because maybe there were stories with more engagement at places like AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, Yahoo News, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Houston Chronicle, or any of the thousand other news sources not included in the BuzzFeed study.)

Three conclusions can be drawn from all this. First, liberals are seeking a rationalization for why their candidate lost. They cannot admit that Clinton was a terribly flawed candidate. They cannot admit that their snobbish elitism was recognized, and rejected, by voters. If this evil fake news could have been controlled, the obviously correct candidate would have won, they believe.

Second, the Mainstream Media, and liberals generally, long for the bygone days when a few gatekeepers decided what was news, and what was true, and how events should be understood. They hate having to complete with alternative conservative sources over these issues, and hate that ordinary citizens on social media can entirely undermine the mainstream narrative.

Finally, this is an example of the ugly authoritarianism of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, it is significant that liberals will not call themselves “liberals,” since they have abandoned, in huge numbers, the central doctrine of classical liberalism. As propounded by Jefferson: “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Liberals increasing insist they need not tolerate error.  And they believe themselves authorized to decide what is in error.