Monday, December 12, 2016

No workable policies, the left resorts to name calling

Although I think it’s dangerous and inaccurate for our media (and I include leftist digital news like Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Vox in media) and Democrats to call patriotic, non-college graduates “alt-right” which has become synonymous with Nazi, I do think I’ve observed the right falls for falsified information more than the left, and that includes memes about health products and cures, genetically modified food, vaccines, collapse of bee colonies, big foot, and things famous people have said. The left inserts more trolls—again my opinion—at conservative websites. This has been confirmed in their own words by recent videos by undercover researchers.  

This is not new—the phenomena of fake news—only the name is new and political since Clinton lost. As a librarian, I saw it all the time, especially from the animal rights movement. You’d see the same photo of an abused cow or dog appear in a number of publications as “real news.” I consider a lot of climate change news fake, yet that can get me called a “climate denier” as though Ohio was never under a glacier or that coal didn’t come from a time of heat and pressure. There was a time in the 20th century when pogroms or mass starvation in USSR were unreported and then called fake news by our own government and media when it did come out. Turks call reports of Armenian genocide fake to this day 100 years later, despite photos and survivors’ families. There are some who say no one died at Sandy Hook and no one landed on the moon. People have been falling for fake news and MSNBC news for years. Look at the whoppers Clinton told about the video causing Benghazi. Or Brian Williams. 
 As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, [Walter] Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union. http://www.weeklystandard.com/pulitzer-winning-lies/article/4040
http://www.dailywire.com/news/11475/brian-williams-blames-fake-news-clintons-loss-robert-kraychik

 https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/

 Glenn Greenwald is a source I cautiously recommend. He's done investigative research on both Snowden and Manning, two of our most famous leakers. Some of his writing would put him on the left, some on the right, some in the middle--and he's very suspicious of bipartisanship--says that's when the most mischief happens. He's openly gay, and moved to Brazil for that reason some years ago. https://theintercept.com/staff/glenn-greenwald/

 https://theintercept.com/2016/12/10/anonymous-leaks-to-the-washpost-about-the-cias-russia-beliefs-are-no-substitute-for-evidence/

There are news stories about fake news stories and fake news stories about fake news stories. Odd that the left only became interested when Clinton lost, and not when she was distributing misinformation about a video that caused Benghazi deaths. I'm pretty good at sorting these out, but this is trying the skills I learned as a librarian in Slavic Studies, Latin American Studies, Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, to say nothing of all the clerical jobs in a public library (Mt. Morris, Illinois), college and university libraries (University of Illinois, Ohio State University), and a private special library (OhioNet). Librarians known that everything on the shelves has a bias just through selection of what to purchase, and who controls the publishing industry.

But social media are a whole new ballgame. Some of the news sources I read online are filled with bad actors, trolls, kids barely out of high school working out of mom's basement, disgruntled government employees, web designers with desperate bosses seeking clicks so they can make their profit, and little old ladies like me--that's really what LOL stands for


1 comment:

Sue said...

I always love your POV. Even though I don't respond much, I always read your blog. Keep 'em coming! (PS...I am a "LOL", also.)