Big money as ever fuels fake news

En Garde in the bunker…

Daniel Greenfield strikes again! The Batman of the Right from the David Horowitz flagship FrontPageMagazine, daring to go where angels fear to tread with “pull no punches” journalism, is in a class by himself when it comes to exposing fraud, exploding political correctness, big money, and speaking truth to power.

His latest column coming up is so timely, especially after my yesterday post on the collusion between Obama and Russia going back to December 2014, while the entire big money Big Media conglomerates insist on fabricating fake news stories in an effort to bring down President Trump before he’s barely settled into office.

A flavor of the content of his latest piece coming up:

“The brand of journalism once embodied by Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, of making up stuff so you don’t get fired, is now the modus operandi of the entire Washington Post. Make up stuff or the lefty subscribers convinced that the Post will pull off another Watergate will go back to Salon or DailyKos. If the Post doesn’t pander to their paranoia and conspiracy theories, some other clickbait site will.”

“The Post’s business strategy is the false promise of Watergate. We’ll bring down Trump just like we brought down Nixon. The paper is selling readers a lie. And it’s trying to make the lie happen with fake news. The Washington Post is bad for democracy, it’s bad for journalism and it’s bad for America.”

“But it’s great for the bottom line. And not just at the Post.”[end]

As truebearing expressed it on one of the threads: Considering that ‘big money’ Jeff Bezos has owned the WAPO since October of 2013, just imagine that if he conspired to sell counterfeit products, or illegal drugs on Amazon, he would face stiff penalties, but he faces none for implementing a strategy to sell big money fake news to Americans — fake news intended to nullify a presidential election. Why don’t we have laws that punish media fraud when we know that the media has immense power to influence citizens and even determine the outcome of elections?

Anyone who uses his big money to intentionally defraud the public with a steady diet of lies should be arrested, his media outlet shut down, and be sentenced to a prison term commensurate with the damage inflicted upon the public and the nation.

In the case of Jeff Bezos, media racketeering and sedition should get him the same penalty as he would for committing treason.

Some would get anxious that this appears to be attacking the “free press” or perhaps the 1st amendment, but they would be wrong. The press today isn’t at all free, since it is held hostage by ruthless big money tyrants who want to overthrow the nation while making millions on the propaganda they manufacture. That dear friends, is a mercenary and oppressive press, not a free one.

The 1st amendment doesn’t protect a conspiracy to lie.

Remember that counter to what the Left expects, the big money media is not a sacred cow. It hasn’t functioned ethically for decades, so defending an institution that has the ethics of a pimp selling underage children is utter folly. The media has become a weapon the Left uses to destroy our culture, economy, and form of governance. It desperately needs to be purged of the criminal control that is threatening the very foundations of this nation, and the perpetrators (whoever they are) need to be severely punished, including fines in the multi-billions.

On to Daniel and his opener:

 

Daniel Greenfield…

Fake news is profitable.

The New York Times hit piece on the Comey memo earned the paper its most concurrent readers per second. Pretty good for a piece about a piece of paper that the leftist paper had never even seen and which was, supposedly, described to it by one of Comey’s associates.

But that didn’t stop it from racking up over 6 million views.

Media fake news isn’t just an agenda. It’s enormously profitable. Hit pieces powered by anonymous sources bring in over 100,000 readers in an age when live is king. For individual reporters, finding a source, real or fake, that can back up the left’s Trump conspiracy theories can put them on the map.

The Comey story comes from Michael Schmidt who made a name by supposedly finding documents relating to media claims of a “Haditha Massacre” in a Baghdad junkyard where “an attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.” It was dashing and also very convenient.

…. It’s no coincidence that many of the big vital hit pieces aimed at President Trump have come out of the Washington Post. At the end of last year, the paper owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos went on a hiring spree. The goal was “quick turnaround investigative reporting”.

Washington Post editor Marty Baron explained, “We are creating a rapid response investigative team to do investigative stories more quickly, using a lot of the digital tools that are available to us now. We hugely value the longer, deeper investigations as well, but we want to supplement that with quicker investigations that can have an impact almost immediately.”

How do you do “quicker investigations”? How can you predict that an investigation will pay off rapidly? The best way to make sure that your investigation will quickly deliver a major story is to fake it.

Those quick investigative stories haven’t been coming from digital tools. They are based on anonymous sources. Real investigative reporting takes time. But a fake news story full of innuendo backed by a bunch of anonymous sources that repeat what “everyone” in the media already knows is true, is quick.

That’s what having “an impact almost immediately” means. You don’t do the hard work. You fake it.

Brian Williams, one of the first visible fake news proponents…

The underlying concern of course, is that none of this “fakery” seems to matter to the players in the media; the editors, segment producers, and of course, the idiot TV anchors, most of whom in retrospect, make the Ted Baxter character (of The Mary Tyler Moore Show fame), seem authoritative. Except that Ted Baxter wasn’t nasty, and this bunch is and deliberately so, because they’re speaking to an audience that applauds their malice.

Clearly, the Left in this country is in the midst of an unprecedented hypocritical breakdown. Moreover, the fact that this hysteria is in part a consequence of Hillary Clinton’s debilitating defeat is even more troubling. Imagine – Hillary Clinton, universally regarded even by her supporters as duplicitous – was their standard bearer.

The fact that their hopes rested on such a person suggests an intellectual and ethical bankruptcy that many on the Left, at least privately, found disconcerting.

But it is finally, from that sense of bankruptcy, and the compromises they made to mitigate its consequences, that their animosity springs – and Donald Trump is just the person to inflame that frustration.

For full Greenfield article simply click on the Logo…