The war on ‘fake news’ is all about censoring real news, by Karol Markowicz.
Scrambling for an explanation for Donald Trump’s victory, many in the media and on the left have settled on the idea that his supporters were consumers of “fake news” — gullible rubes living in an alternate reality made Trump president.
To be sure, there is such a thing as actual fake news: made-up stories built to get Facebook traction before they can be debunked. But that’s not what’s really going on here.
What the left is trying to do is designate anything outside its ideological bubble as suspect on its face.
It’s just another attempt by the PC crew to censor news it does not like, just like its “fact checking” and “hate speech” strategies.
In an interview with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone last week, Obama said again that “The biggest challenge that I think we have right now in terms of this divide is that the country receives information from completely different sources.” Uh-oh.
Seemingly with a straight face, Obama then told Wenner: “Good journalism continues to this day. There’s great work done in Rolling Stone.” Rolling Stone, of course, ran a sensational, and false, story last year about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity that was thoroughly discredited. The magazine was forced to pay a university administrator it defamed $3 million in damages, and there may be more lawsuits in store. “Good journalism” and Rolling Stone do not go hand in hand.
And then Obama removed all doubt. He blamed Trump’s win in part on “Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country.”
PC is a deliberate distortion of the truth for political advantage, so of course the PC crew hate non-compliant news sources.
An echo chamber … is much more of a problem in news consumption than inaccurate information. The more “curated” the media becomes, the less likely we are to hear opposing viewpoints and to have ours challenged. That’s a bug, not a feature.