Someone tell Hillary ‘Fake News’ was fake news
ON Thursday Hillary Clinton emerged from self-imposed exile to tell us all that “so-called fake news” was responsible for her electoral failure. Not to take responsibility for her atrocious behavior and inability to lead, but to invent yet another conspiracy theory about why the world hates her.
Apparently wherever she was hiding did not have the internet. The role of “fake news” has been credibly debunked by a host of sources including very liberal sources like The New Yorker magazine. Just as anything that disagrees with progressive-white-suburbanite politics is ironically deemed racist, now it seems that any media that does not strictly carry the leftist narrative is ironically is deemed propaganda.
The source of the “fake news” accusation was a website run anonymously called PropOrNot. Its methodology was so poor that when pushed as to why Drudge Report was included they could only respond lamely “They act as a repeater to a significant extent, in that they refer audiences to sort of Russian stuff.” Russian media debunker Alexey Kovalev suggested it might in fact be Ukrainian propagandists pushing their own agenda.
The Washington Post, an outlet which has become notorious for its bias and echochamber mentality, has been in damage control ever since it did exactly what it accused others of doing – posting fake news without fact checking. Its November 24th article about Russian spies spreading fake news on social media now has a nice big disclaimer at the start, and a lengthy apology (of sorts) was sent to TruthDig, another site falsely accused.
Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept labeled WaPo’s story as shoddy journalism and McCarthyism. He also points out that the story only managed to get legs at all because the Washington Post does not hyperlink its references, if it had then anyone could have taken the ten seconds to follow the source and discover something not worth taking seriously. Even clickbait websites do this (making them quite easy to debunk), but WaPo still seems to think we should take it on faith that they know what they’re doing despite all evidence to the contrary.
Apparently nobody bothered to tell Hillary Clinton, who once again repeated the narrative without reservation or nuance. Ever the conspiracy theorist she tells her sobbing hangers-on that the reason she lost is once again because of an array of shadowy forces hell-bent on keeping her down (for reasons never explained). Just like the wage gap myth it seems like this one just won’t die.
The elephant in the room is the increasing disreputability of old media like the Washington Post. Despite the catastrophic failure to do any decent reporting on the recent election, the old media seems to be of the opinion that it, and only it, can be trusted. CNN actually went so far as to state that it was illegal to possess Hillary’s emails and that only journalists were licensed to handle them.
Hillary finds herself and her media allies earnestly embarrassing themselves by committing to a narrative that nobody in their right mind could possibly buy.
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