The phrase
“fake news” has exploded in usage since the election, but the
term is similar to other malleable political labels such as
“terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any
clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument
of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize
about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are
typically those most aggressively disseminating it.
One of the
most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping
a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly
pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by
countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post
article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this
week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these
critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean
to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the
article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).
Now we have
an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was
releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign
officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright
lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that
the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored.
That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of
its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most
aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid
and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt
Eichenwald.
That the
emails in the Wikileaks archive were doctored or faked – and thus
should be disregarded – was classic Fake News, spread not by
Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin operatives but by established news
outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic and Newsweek. And, by design,
this Fake News spread like wildfire all over the internet, hungrily
clicked and shared by tens of thousands of people eager to believe it
was true. As a result of this deliberate disinformation campaign,
anyone reporting on the contents of the emails was instantly met with
claims that the documents in the archive had been proven fake.
The most
damaging such claim came from MSNBC’s intelligence analyst Malcolm
Nance. As I documented on October 11, he tweeted what he – for some
bizarre reason – labeled an “Official Warning.” It decreed:
“#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious
forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.”
That tweet was re-tweeted by more than 4,000 people. It was vested
with added credibility by Clinton-supporting journalists like Reid
and Frum (“expert to take seriously”).
All of that,
in turn, led to an article in something called “The Daily News Bin”
with the headline: “MSNBC intelligence expert: WikiLeaks is
releasing falsified emails not really from Hillary Clinton.” This
classic fake news product – citing Nance and Reid among others –
was shared more than 40,000 times on Facebook alone.
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