Moore: The Real Purveyors of “Fake News”
Monday, January 09, 2017
There’s all this talk about “fake news” led largely by the legacy media--The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc--in an attempt to explain away Donald Trump’s stunning victory in last year’s Presidential election.
As you would expect, it’s all a bunch of nonsensical scapegoating, and an attempt to scare people away from the alternative media sources, which are, and should be becoming people’s main sources of acquiring news in America and elsewhere. We shouldn’t be surprised that the desperate mainstream media will do everything in its power to maintain its prestige and declining profits.
But what’s most ironic about the mainstream media decrying “fake news” is the fact that they’re the biggest purveyors of fake news in the history of the world. They do it on a daily basis.
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How can anyone forget how the mainstream media types were the ones who rallied around Brian Williams and defended him and talked about how “talented” he was when he came under fire for lying about all the things he did while on assignment.
Williams’ brand of “fake news” was actually harmless and worthy of a chuckle, however.
The real dangers of fake news come from the lazy reporters who just take whatever government officials tell them, fail to demand proof, and then write it down as if they were stenographers instead of rationally minded individuals who know that government officials and politicians have their own agendas. And this may come as a shock, but often, those agendas conflict with what's best for the general public.
Not to be overly dramatic, but it's safe to say that the mainstream media’s brand of “fake news” helped cost tens of thousands of people their lives, hundreds of billions of US tax dollars, and destabilized The Middle East for a generation.
Of course, I'm referring to the “fake news” that dominated endless news cycles from the second half of 2002 until March of 2003 in the run up to the Iraq war.
We were told by every major media outlet, but especially the New York Times (one of the very news outlets now leading the charge against“fake news”), that Sadaam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was planning on using them against Americans and our allies.
Fake News Started a War
It was complete bunk.
Nobody can know for certain whether or not President George W. Bush would’ve commanded US forces to invade Iraq if the mainstream media didn’t uncritically trumpet whatever the intelligence community told them--without seeing any proof of such assertions. But it would’ve been a much tougher sell to the American people if the press didn’t merely report what the government was telling them without seeing any actual proof.
For a local example of “fake news being reported, we don’t have to look back further than a few weeks ago for a major example.
Raimondo’s Fake News
The Raimondo administration recently held a press conference last month and announced that the 195 Wexford project would create 1,000 permanent new jobs here in Rhode Island. The state will be subsidizing the project to the tune of $32 million.
It all made for some very nice headlines for the Governor. That whole 1,000 jobs has a nice ring to it.
The problem is that, as a GoLocal investigation uncovered, we will be lucky if the project yields us 100 jobs.
The Raimondo administration is using accounting standards that would make an Enron executive blush to arrive at their thousand jobs number--relying on tenant jobs and jobs that already exist here in Rhode Island.
And we know that the Raimondo administration is doing it for political reasons. That’s why it’s incumbent upon the media to dig into the government’s claims and find out if they’re actually true or not.
Media Should be Vigilant, Adversarial, Skeptical
That’s the real reason most people hate the media. It’s not because they’re too aggressive. It’s because they’re not aggressive at all.
Thank God the media is becoming decentralized and we have an outlet like GoLocal (on the state level) to get beyond the press release and the press conference and find out if the announcements are actually true.
When there’s not an objective, adversarial media, we end up with situations like in 2002. In other words, we have “fake news” dominating the landscape.
Fortunately, the writing's on the wall, the mainstream media’s days are numbered, and alternative media sources will continue bringing the truth to the general public.
That's a good thing. Otherwise, we’d continue being bombarded with “fake news”.
{image_2)Russell J. Moore has worked on both sides of the desk in Rhode Island media, both for newspapers and on political campaigns. Send him email @[email protected]. Follow him on twitter @russmoore713.
Related Slideshow: Changing Newspaper Industry
In a column entitled, The smartest guys in media give up on print, Alan Mutter, the former editor of San Francisco Chronicle, writes "For all the corporate-speak accompanying the dramatic restructurings of Twenty-First Century Fox, Time Warner and Tribune Co., the simple reason these diversified media giants are jettisoning their publishing assets is that their leaders fear for the future of print."
Throughout New England and across the country there is a dramatic decline in the print newspaper business.
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