Fake News. You’ve all heard it. There are even Fake News filters you can download, and tutorials on YouTube to help discern between the real, and the not so real. But, what is Fake News? Where did it come from? How long have the news services been compromised? Can we believe anything delivered to us through the Main Stream Media, or any other source for that matter, and what is the agenda behind the news services who follow this script?
Wikipedia defines Fake News as: Fake news is a type of journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media.[1] Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically, often with sensationalist, exaggerated, or patently false headlines that grab attention.
There has always been Fake News. The newspaper giants of the mid to late 1800’s worked overnight to out lie one another in order to provide the “Newsies” in the morning with the fodder to sell more papers. Often wittingly or unwittingly these publications provided public support for government where situations required a fired up, and poorly informed public. From the bombing of the Maine, and all the way to the Tonkin Gulf, news stories fanned flames where only a whiff of smoke existed.
About 1917 a small group of industrialists, that’s right, industrialists, got together and understood the power of the press, but more than that understood the power of controlling the press. They figured that if the information systems could be made to sing from the same sheet of music that it would lend legitimacy to the news coming out, and greatly benefit their plans for a more unified world especially if that music were THEIR music!
With a small amount of reasoning it came down to controlling just twenty-five national publications which while giving the illusion of competition, were actually under the command of the same eighteen editors who reported to J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and associates. The former literary dog fight became the renowned, and trusted Main Stream Media which eventually bled over to radio, TV, and even movie plots, all dancing together like the Radio City Rockettes. The image was one of integrity and gave the public the comfort of knowing the freedom of the press would KEEP America great, and Walter Cronkite most certainly edited the Ten Commandments for Moses. Gotta be true! We saw Moses at the movies.
This system flourished in full force from WWI all the way to around 1967 when the kids in the street began to point out we had no business in Vietnam no matter WHAT Cronkite said, and the ricochets all over Dealy Plaza were blowing bigger holes in the Warren Report than the one in Kennedy’s head! Fake News can be tricky. There are many variations. Remember the early days of the National Enquirer? We all knew it was a rag, but when there was a picture of a dead monkey with a cigarette in his mouth under a banner headline reading, GOVERNMENT ADMITS DEAD ALIEN FOUND AT ROCKWELL! you’d buy the paper! I know I did. The human trait of reading the absurd makes you want to read stuff you know to be false the same way you’d pay for a ticket to see Clint Eastwood shoot a thug in San Francisco. I know I did that, too!
Now take the Watergate story. Be honest, was Nixon any more crooked than Clinton or Obama? What did he really do. Tried to get some dirt on a Democrat. In the Clinton White House there was dirt. It was on Monica’s knees. The Washington Post, one of those twenty-five newspapers, assigned two reporters to track the story down, expand it, and spoon feed it to the other MSM outlets from sea to shining sea and Nixon got a free ride home! While the story was based in reality the amplification made Nixon’s sin the crime of the century.
Slowly the lines blurred between sources such as the Enquirer and the New York Times that they became indistinguishable. The paradox was that the alternative media began to see the MSM for what it was. They couldn’t compete with the budget of the Times, The Post, or the TV networks so they devised a new plan. The TRUTH! By the turn of the century the MSM had gone so far afield that telling the truth became a novelty, and people like Alex Jones, Crystal Lee Laramore, and Doc Greene saw an opportunity. One other factor began to filter in that changed the playing field. The advent of the internet. Once the satellites were up and spinning any thirteen year old girl could challenge Barbara Walters. For a while the MSM held sway, but after a while it began to take to the net, spinning the same old yarns. It is losing the war!
We as Americans take some things for granted. Politicians work for the bosses, prices will always rise and the Main Stream Media is one hundred percent, certified Fake News! So why do we keep watching it? We do that for the same reason we bought the paper with the monkey on the front page. MSM eroded slowly. At first I, like many others, scanned the headlines believing that even though I knew it was slanted at least the core would be a few facts, and if I took in ABC, CBS, CNN, and the New York Times, that by forming a weighted average I could arrive at the real story. That’s like having seven layers of icing on a crap cake. Bon Appetit! My final exit was after it became common knowledge that President Trump held some responsibility for Hurricane Harvey.
But, it doesn’t stop there. Let me ask you. Let’s have a show of hands. How many of you have ever SEEN
an ANTIFA member in person? How about some Black Lives Mattering down at your local police department? When was the last time a member of your local police department shot a twelve year old black kid for waving a stick? I don’t believe I’ll have to take my shoes off to count the hands. How can you tell Fake News? In a word, it’s ALL fake! The MSM filters all its news stories through the same cookie cutter mold that goes all the way from innuendo to outright lies! Then, they saturate the alternative media with preposterous claims in an effort to discredit that sector with the hope of luring the buying public back home. Well, it’s not going to work. People read. They think, and we have a president who calls them out on social media every day. We ASSUME they’re liars, and it doesn’t matter if George Soros is behind it or the Mickey Mouse Fan Club, the store brand is beating the national brand hands down!
Just look at this week alone. National Polls (Oh, that’s another MSM trick) says Trump’s approval rating is down to thirty percent. He fills up a venue in Phoenix. They grudgingly admit he rushed to Houston, but some bag lady posing as a journalist in New York said the First Lady was wearing the wrong shoes. Trump’s eleven year old son wore the wrong shirt a week before. Then they pitch in the story that Michelle Obama is a man, making it look like its source was Alex Jones in yet another effort to discredit him, and by that the entire alternative movement. Bottom line: Trump is the real president, we’re making real strides, and we’re reading REAL news. Where’s that monkey with the cigarette now?