All the fake news that’s fit to print?

The history of “fake news” is that yes, there were some guys in the former Soviet Union, who were NOT working for the KGB but were just independent scammers making money by getting people to link to their fake news sites, which then served up ads which they got paid for.

If the term “fake news” had simply been limited to those people, we wouldn’t be having this blog post. But the mainstream media fell in love with the term “fake news,” and everything else that the MSM didn’t like, but which traditionally had other names (like “conspiracy theories” or “biased stories”) they started calling “fake news,” but only when the MSM perceived these things to have a right-wing bias.

The MSM has a long history of serving up misleading and biased stories when it fits into their left-wing narrative. For example, leaving everyone with the impression that George Zimmerman shot some 12-year-old kid in the back who was running away from him when in reality he shot a much older teenager who was taller than him and surely stronger and more experienced at fighting, after getting into a fight that Zimmerman was losing. Giving the biased mainstream media some benefit of the doubt, it’s not clear who started the fight, but of course the biased MSM, when they do acknowledge that there was a fight, blame Zimmerman for starting it.

The MSM reported the “hands up don’t shoot” narrative when all the weight of the evidence points to Michael Brown starting the fight with the cop who arrested him after Michael Brown robbed a convenience store, and he never had his hands up or said “don’t shoot.”

When it was clear that the MSM was trying to use the term “fake news” to try to shut down the freedom of speech of people whom the MSM disagree, the conservatives successfully fought back on twitter, labeling all of the misleading and biased MSM news as “fake news” also. The success of this grass roots campaign is demonstrated by this story in today’s NY Times, which like most stories in the MSM this year is extremely misleading and slanted. The story leaves out all of the background explained above (except for the part about the scammers in the former Soviet Union). In the alternate universe of the New York Times, conservatives out of the blue just started using the term “fake news” to attack the righteous and truthful reporting of the MSM.

I label this story about fake news to be fake news, because by eliminating the important background of what really happened, a valid story of grassroots conservative opposition to pervasive liberal propaganda and threatened suppression of free speech becomes just more liberal propaganda to attack anyone who disagrees with their narrative.

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Mike Street Station writes in a comment:

From the article, “Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online.” That term fake news has only been in common use immediately after the election when the media went on a 10 day fake news spree to blame the election results on viral online stories. The premise was ridiculous of course, no, Trump did not when because of a fake story that the Pope endorsed him. Blaming these type of stories for Trump winning the election is the very definition of fake news in my opinion.

Correct.

And the term quickly expanded from viral stories with fake facts, to anything that the MSM considers right-wing propaganda even if the facts are true. (Of course the MSM, masters of propaganda themselves, understand that true facts can be cherry picked and distorted to present a very false impression of reality.)

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Also, it continues to annoy me that #pizzagate is called “fake news” when that is something that has always been called a “conspiracy theory.”

There’s a liberal conspiracy theory out there that Donald Trump is a Russian intelligence agent, and that has never, to my knowledge, been called “fake news” by the mainstream media, or cited as a reason for why HRC won the popular vote instead of Trump.