what is fake news

Mainstream Media is Now Whining About the “Fake News” Hysteria It Created

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After coming under attack, the alternative media successfully appropriated and reassigned the now ubiquitous term “fake news” to a variety of disingenuous mainstream media outlets. The corporate media is not too happy about this, and is doing what it does best (aside from cheerleading for war). It’s whining about it to its readers.

Nothing more perfectly highlights the mainstream media’s instinctual response to complain than an article published on Christmas Day in The New York Times, which reinvents history by claiming alternative media is to blame for turning “fake news” into an overly expansive and thus meaningless term. Here are a few excerpts:

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

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Additional Thoughts on “Fake News,” The Washington Post, and the Absence of Real Journalism

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The European Commission looked into whether the tech giants were meeting a pledge to remove hate speech within 24 hours of it being reported.

Only 40% of reports of hate speech are being removed within a day, it found. 

The pledge was made in May when the firms signed up to a “code of conduct” brokered by the Commission.

“The last weeks and months have shown that social media companies need to live up to their important role and take up their share of responsibility when it comes to phenomena like online radicalisation, illegal hate speech or fake news,” said Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova in a statement.

– From today’s BBC article: EU Criticizes Tech Firms for Slow Action on Hate Speech

On November 25, 2016, for the first time in my life, I became a part of the news as opposed to reporting on it. Of course, what I am referring to is the slanderous and amateurishly researched article published in The Washington Post claiming Russia used “fake news” websites to promote government propaganda during the U.S. Presidential election. The article was appropriately savaged by several of America’s leading political thinkers and writers, including Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.

To his credit, Glenn has been particularly relentless in his criticism, focusing on the mind-boggling fact that the paper refuses to publicly address any of the myriad concerns raised regarding this defamatory hit-piece. Here are just a few examples:

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