Sunday 27 November 2016

Fake news



The US magazine Slate tells the story of how "even those outlets that pat themselves on the back for being the serious voices in an Internet filled with fakes and anonymous sources can still fall prey to fake news in the desperate search for clicks". 

One of the fake stories doing the rounds in recent days was Ivanka Trump's "response" to her father's quip that he would date her if she wasn't his daughter: "If he wasn't my father, I would spray him with Mace”. The problem is that she never said it. It appears to have originated in a joke from a comedian in 2006. 

Still, that didn't stop certain US media outlets, including the Hill and the New York Daily News, from reporting the story in recent days. 

And, as DB spotted, it didn't stop the face of the BBC in the US - Katty Kay - from retweeting it either:


She must have so wanted to believe it.

2 comments:

  1. Fake news. Like Dan Rather's "fake, but accurate" Bush National Guard memos. Like that faked footage to erroneously damn Primark in that Panorama report. Like more than one photo tearfully tweeted by Jon Donnison. Like the "apocryphal but still quotable" fake quote from William Randolph Hearst about "furnishing" the Spanish-American War.

    The BBC has knowingly pushed plenty of fake news, as have CNN, the NY Times, CBS, and the rest of them. This is just one front in the war to undo Trump's election victory.

    How many different lines of attack to discredit the result have we seen now?

    1. Fake news
    2. Election fraud by Putin
    3. White Supremacy
    4. Angry 'Left Behind' fools who know not what they do
    5. The Electoral College is undemocratic

    All pushed by the BBC at some point.

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  2. I really despised our mainstream media for the way they represented Trump, during the campaign, as having no plans for power. I knew this was wrong because I had actually listened to some of the detail of his speeches. So the truth is - that contrary to what we were told - he does have some detailed plans including - whether you like it or not - an Eisenhower style infrastructure programme funded through borrowing...in other words just the sort of thing that the BBC has been campaigning for for the last 20 years! But they're still ignoring that. I only got the info from Bloomberg Radio.

    ReplyDelete

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