Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Fake News has been around for a very long time.
Does anyone remember Stephen Glass? This young journalist was a rising star at The New Republic whose articles were later discovered to be pure fiction. His downfall was made into a film called Shattered Glass and I found a quote from the film very relevant to the current state of journalism:
"Journalism is the art of capturing behavior and you have to know who you're writing for, you have to know what you’re good at. I record what people do and I find what moves them what scares them and I write that down. That way they're the ones telling the story and you know what? Those kinds of pieces can win Pulitzers too."
They certainly have. And Janet Cooke is a prime example of why the Pulitzer Prize has essentially become worthless. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a sob story written for The Washington Post, but the story was later discovered to have been completely fabricated. While Cooke subsequently returned the Pulitzer, she remains the only one who has.
Flash back to the New York Times Moscow correspondent reporter Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer in 1932 for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, 11 of them were published in June 1931.and completely denied the widespread famine (1932–1933) in the USSR, most particularly the mass starvation in Ukraine.
It took until 1990 for the facts to emerge with critics calling for his Pulitzer to be returned.
Even his employer, the NYT had to admit, that the denial was, "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."
In 2003 another New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, was accused of plagiarism and fabricating several news stories he had submitted. Thankfully, he never won a Pulitzer nor did these journalistic frauds: Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Mike Barnicle, Patricia Smith and a host of others easily found on Google.
Consider the Pulitzers given two newspapers for their Katrina reportage, most of which was discovered to be completely false. Here's a snippet from W. Joseph Campbell's media Alert:
Journalists reported snipers firing at medical personnel, I noted. They reported shots were fired at helicopters, halting evacuations from the Convention Center in New Orleans. They told of bodies being stacked like cordwood inside the Convention Center.
News reports also spoke of roving gangs that terrorized occupants of the Louisiana Superdome, where many people had taken shelter. The reports said children were victims of sexual assault, that one seven-year-old was raped and her throat was slit. They reported that sharks were plying the flooded streets of New Orleans.
None of those reports, as it turned out, was verified or substantiated.
"If anyone rioted," said a bipartisan congressional report about Katrina, "it was the media.
Although President Bush and FEMA took most of the criticism for the negligence in handling the disaster, the real culprits nearly escaped responsibility for the 2000 deaths that occurred.
The fact is that hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi harder than Louisiana but it was the failure of the poorly constructed levees and floodwalls that caused the decimation of New Orleans, a city that lay below sea level and was prone to flooding.
Many sections of the levees were built of fine sand and silt materials that were not capable of withstanding erosion from overtopping.
City managers should have foreseen this and spent the funding to shore up these levees but they didn't.
It is still not clear why Mayor Nagin did not use the city school buses to evacuate those residents who had no other means of leaving the city. Photos of the many buses that were never dispatched to the poorer districts remain the legacy of a disgraced politician who is now serving time for corruption.
Thanks to President Donald Trump constantly labeling today's news reports as "fake news", the public seems to be taking a deeper look at this reportage. The left is, however, depending on the ignorance of their voters to swallow every bit of mendacity about whites, Trump and his supporters.
The latest nonsense was exposed in the New York Post about a waiter in Texas who admitted he lied about a "racist tipper" note he said he received from a diner. Hoaxes like this against conservatives are quite common but now they are more apt to be busted by legitimate journalist investigators online and in this case, the New York Post, the sole Trump endorser in the NYC GOP primary.
The Left continues to promote a Trump Derangement Syndrome that is turning off many moderates.
Most of the anti-Trump protests have been predicated on false news reported in the mainstream media.
Black Lives Matters arose from the myth that Michael Brown held his hands up before the white cop shot him in Ferguson, Missouri. This never happened but this lie was told by a biased eyewitness who was heralded by the MSM as credible.
Next, we saw ignorant athletes wearing "Hands Up" tee shirts and holding hands up in solidarity with a deceased thug who got shot trying to take a cop's weapon away. This anarchist movement based on deceit has led to the targeting and murders of police officers around the country and no one on the left is taking responsibility for this.
The most recent protest marches are the result of the hysteria mounted by the media about immigrant children being separated from their illegal parents and kept in cages. Problem, of course, is that the photos of these caged children were taken during the Obama administration in 2014 before Trump had even announced his presidential candidacy.
We on the right can smell fake news right away because we know who's spreading it. We only wish that the viewers on The View; The Bill Maher Show; CNN; MSNBC and readers of The New York Times and the Washington Post had our olfactory prowess.