As IF Times

Source: The 7 Worst Examples of Fake News From the Mainstream Media – John Hawkins

The current rage over the preponderance and influence of ‘fake news’ is amusing because I’ve been writing about this stuff for many, many years.  From the smallest of manufactured news items concerning some straw man issue to the grand scale concoctions regarding Global Warming, fantasy narratives have been common reportage in the mainstream media for a long time. What seems to have turned the zeitgeist from tolerance to outrage is that now, fake news is widely blamed for causing the election loss of the candidate from the left.

Not to be deterred, the fake news business is turning its guns against Donald Trump, attempting to discredit his creds even before he puts his hand on the swearing in bible.  We’ve alluded many times to one of the biggest ironies in modern culture and that is,  historically, people’s access to information has never been better, yet they are as likely to be uninformed, or more correctly, misinformed as ever.

We can blame to some degree, the internet business model.  Many ‘news’ sites have been created over the past decade to compete somewhat with the established oligarchy of news outlets.  With free access notionally provided by the internet news sites, whose revenue models are based on clicks instead of subscriptions,  people increasingly defer to them as information sources rather than read more in depth coverage.  Who hasn’t turned on their browser and scanned through Google News or MSN News?

While this may give an overview of the headlines of the day, nobody makes money on headlines, so the tactic is to make people click further on the page.  The standard model is to create an attention grabbing headline such as “Dog has sex with man” and then follows up with clickbait such as “12 reasons why this can ruin your marriage“.  Internet users have to navigate a minefield of “What celebrity X looks like today is amazing” stories in order to get to legitimate news stories.  How else to explain the ubiquity of Kim Kardashian stories if not for their ability to attract clicks from people desperate to catch up on her most recent adventures? When stories such as “10 things that Trump did in Moscow” come to light, the line between fake and reality truly disappears.  (I mean, who doesn’t want to know at least what 5 of those things were?)

They’ve dumbed down the news business to emulate the format pioneered by Cosmopolitan magazine, famous for cover stories such as ” 6 best ways to keep your man” and “7 ways to a sexier butt“.  With the ascension of Donald Trump to the Presidency, we can expect at least 4 years of fanciful news from some of the more hysterical partisan news websites.  But that’s not the root of the issue; the real threat is the proliferation of fake journalists.  While it’s easy to disregard anything from sites with names such as TMZ, MTV, or Rolling Stone, there is more and more evidence that stories from outlets such as CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, are nakedly partisan and often fanciful in their telling.

One of these days, Donald Trump will actually do something shocking… and we won’t know if it’s true.

Source: Barack Obama Says He Would Have Beaten Donald Trump | Politics | US News

There’s a famous scene in the classic 1975 movie, Monty Python And The Holy Grail, in which the heroes encounter the Black Knight in the forest. After a series of mortal wounds suffered in a fight including loss of limbs, the Knight insists that he can still win if only by biting his antagonist.

This scene pops to mind when you hear the braggadocio by the outgoing President on what would have occurred in the recent election had he been allowed to run again.  The delusion displayed by this opinion is perhaps the most apt summary of the worldview prevailing during his entire term in office.  The disconnect from observable reality has been a defining characteristic of the Democratic party and more extremely so in the past generation. The reality of course is the wholesale rejection of the Democratic worldview, demonstrated not only by the loss of the Presidency and both houses of Congress in the latest vote, but also manifest by the over 1000 federal, state and municipal seats lost by Democrats during the 8 year term of the sitting President.

Seventy six year old Nancy Pelosi was re-affirmed to lead the Minority house even after the massive rejection of Democratic candidates by voters under her watch.  Her re-instatement prompted her to conclude that “the party doesn’t want a new direction”, again invoking the Black Knight.  As odious a person as they portray Donald Trump to be, the voters chose him instead of them.  What does that tell you?

Usually, the bubbles of delusion are burst when they fall upon the unyielding pins of reality. The abstract world of reality is an unfriendly place for much of the left these days, due in large part to the echo chamber in which they exist.  When the closed intellectual ecosystems of academia, media and ideological thought constantly reinforces a paradigm, it’s easy to believe that this represents reality.

This explains the abject horror and disbelief displayed when their candidate didn’t prevail in the last election.  From the non-stop wailing and moaning, you’d think that Justin Bieber announced his retirement in front of 12 year old girls.  In fact, the puerile antics of many grieving drama queens are just as juvenile in their displays of petulance.

For his part, the new President-elect Trump has signaled that he will move to dismantle many of the glass houses built over the past few generations such as the EPA and that many sacred cows, (like the U.N.) may be sacrificed.  Not only will he repudiate many of the ideological goose chases by the last President, he vows to rid the country of deep rooted rot in its institutions.  This is the mandate he was given; to push back and fight for rational policies; instead of riding unicorns battling straw men.