The Mainstream Media Has Only Itself to Blame for the ‘Fake News’ Epidemic, by Stephen Miller

For any “fake news” sites out there that want to perfect their fake-news generating capabilities, they can go to school on the mainstream media, which has been doing it for a long time and is quite good at it. From Stephen Miller at heatst.com:

The mainstream media continues to freak out over the spread of “fake news” on Facebook and other social media platforms such as Twitter and reddit. Hillary Clinton’s late campaign thinks this is a problem.

The Democrat party seems to think people with Facebook accounts are to blame for Hillary’s decision to ignore crucial swing states in the final weeks of the campaign, that likely cost her the election.

But the media hasn’t bothered to ask why such sites gained traction. Our media has cultivated false news for years. Understandably, people stopped caring about the “journalistic ethics” the media claim to possess.

The CBS morning show, hosted by Charlie Rose, recently ran a segment on the rise of fake news, based on a story posted on BuzzFeed. The website claimed that Facebook users shared more “fake” news stories than “real” news stories by the end of the election.

Was the story true? Timothy Carney from the Washington Examiner found holes in Buzzfeed’s model which thus complicated the narrative BuzzFeed was trying to present. On examination, Buzzfeed had ignored real statistics to present their own version of a narrative, not the facts.

On the same CBS show, Charlie Rose interviewed former “fake news” pundit and left-wing icon Jon Stewart about the election. During his Daily Show years, Stewart styled himself as both a serious pundit and a comedian, allowing him to walk the line between fake news and satire.

The show’s set, and Stewart’s demeanor, mirrored that of a network news program. His cast did on-location interviews, which were often heavily edited to present their own liberal point of view. But long after Stewart’s show ended, he is still being propped up as an important voice in journalism.

Shortly before Stewart filmed his final Daily Show segment in August 2015, the Washington Post published a piece lamenting that “many millennials are about to lose their most-trusted news source.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter has made exposing fake news sites a bit of a pet project. He should start with his own network, along with its mainstream competitors. Stelter himself recently discussed the election with disgraced former CBS New anchor Dan Rather, who was forced to resign after presenting forged documents about George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard as legitimate news.

CNN has run segments suggesting that asteroids cause climate change, and black holes can materialize in Earth’s atmosphere and swallow 747 passenger planes . A CNN panel led by left wing commentator Sally Kohn declared their “hearts are out there marching” with protestors in Ferguson as they all raised their hands to mimic the Black Lives Matter protest mantra — “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” — echoing an alleged gesture during a police shooting that was declared one of the year’s biggest lies (ironically) by the Washington Post.

NBC Nightly News, hosted by Lester Holt, featured a report about “fake news” this past Tuesday, apparently with zero self awareness about how Holt came to host the show. He replaced the disgraced Brian Williams after it was revealed that Williams had fabricated a number of self-aggrandizing anecdotes about his broadcasting career.

How were Williams’ fabrications discovered? Not by NBC’s asleep-at-the-wheel standards executives, and not by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN or even Fox News. They came to light after a soldier on Facebook called Williams out for exaggerating a story about covering the Iraq War. Williams continues to make millions of dollars working for NBC as a late night MSNBC host.

To continue reading: The Mainstream Media Has Only Itself to Blame for the ‘Fake News’ Epidemic