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Friday 9 December 2016

This is not fake!

Newsweek does not do Fake News

Hillary Clinton has just insinuated (to put it nicely) that "Fake News" might have cost her the 2016 election. The sites of Fake News, we might assume, include Drudge ReportBriebart, Fox News and Gateway Pundit. Clinton insisted that her claim was nothing more than an objective observation: "This is not about politics or partisanship." She is 180 degrees wrong. Briebart etc are not the purveyors of Fake News but political and partisan media outlets. They are no different from CNN, Time, NewsweekMNBC, Huffington Post or the Guardian, to name just six "progressive" sites. They did not get the whole US election wrong because they are "fake" but because they are ideological. Right now, I should think, every prominent media outlet, Left or Right, is political and partisan, though some offer space for a contrarian voice. The trick, for the consumer of the site's point of view, is to realise that media outlets are political and partisan before reading their opinion. Here, for instance, is somebody in the Guardian explaining Hillary's "Fake News" accusation: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/08/hillary-clinton-fake-news-consequences-pizzagate It is basically sympathetic, which is fine if you build that into your reading. For instance, it leaves out the fact that Hillary Clinton of "right-wing conspiracy" fame would say that, wouldn't she? And particularly about the Drudge Report because Drudge was right about Monica all those years ago when Clinton first used the expression "right-wing conspiracy". Here, to give a very different point of view, is a story I have lifted from the Drudge Reporthttps://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/
Here is another piece that is interesting on the "Fake News" of Vladimir Putin interfering in the US election: http://www.globalresearch.ca/mainstream-media-blames-russia-for-fake-news-while-pushing-neo-mccarthyism/5559136
Fake News, apparently, is in the eye of the beholder.