On 12/07/2016 11:01 AM, jim bell wrote:
*From:* Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@rushpost.com>
On 12/06/2016 10:46 PM, Razer wrote:
The folks at Weather.com have asked Breitbart to kindly stop using their data to create #FakeNews.
https://weather.com/news/news/breitbart-misleads-americans-climate-change
ROTF!
Good for them. We need more real news, and less fake news.
We could agree with THAT, but I happen to believe that the main American sources of fake news are ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, and many others, called the "MSM".
Oh absolutely. #FakeNews is called Government Press Releases, and Official Stories (from often un-named sources) which the media can parrot fully indemnified because News REPORTING requires no obligation to fact-check those sorts of official items. Like fact check to see if that CWD lab outside Saddam's 'palace' is really what it's claimed to be "By Official Sources". Journalists and Critics are tasked with that, and they ARE obstructed at every turn. There's WAY more 'reporting' than investigative journalism and critics are often bought off. Rr
We saw in the recent election season that these organizations were tending to avoid covering things that were negative to Hillary Clinton. This was particularly true once the Wikileaks leaks became heavy, a couple of months before the election, especially. Sure, there's the "fake news" meme, but I don't recall a single email that came from the DNC/Podesta/Weiner camp that was claimed to have been "fake": By and large, eventually the MSM simply refused to publicize them.
That's one big reason I blame the MSM itself for the "fake news" phenomenon. In prior election cycles, generally all the outlets covered all the stories...with a different slant and spin, of course. An average person would have a good clue that a given story was fake if it came solely from a given source, or 'side'. But in 2016 the public observed that the MSM was studiously limiting its coverage on those issues that happened to be negative to Hillary. I'm not saying that they entirely avoided them, but I think most people would agree that their coverage was completely stilted.
As a consequence, it became virtually "normal" for there to be apparently-quite-legitimate stories on one 'side', and not another. This meant that ordinary people no longer had this as a clue to tell them which thing to believe, and which not to.
Jim Bell