When Donald Trump accused the media of being "fake news," it set off a paroxysm of rage among news outlets and their collaborators in the "new media" of social media and internet sites. They retaliated by cracking down on conservative blogspam being posted to social media, usually from hysterical sites and sometimes from outright untrue clickbait, calling all of that "fake news" and appointing fake news sites like Snopes, Politifact, and Wikipedia in charge of determining true from fake.

For most of us, however, his words resonated because we have become increasingly suspicious of what is reported in media. After the JournoList scandal, we know that a deep state style cabal in media is coordinating its message so to present the same idea in every place at once, which signals to most people that it is true. It was a corrupt and collusive activity that, for whatever reason, seemed ethically acceptable to its 100% Leftist audience.

At that point, we began to suspect that the news was not so much factual, but purely narrative with facts added or "spun" in such a way to support that narrative. JournoList showed us Leftist media collusion that presented a spun narrative as a widely-accepted truth, with other Leftist news sources repeating it. When it got discovered, they closed it down and reopened it a short while later, which means that there is most likely a version of it operating today. Much of the discussion on the list concerned the narrative and how to attack and defame conservatives, which means that the media was not just colluding on altering the story they were presenting, but was actively weaponized for the Left.

In other words, we recognized two different types of fake news: first, the obvious type that the Left points out which is sensationalistic or just made up, and second, the type that Trump identifies, which consists of canny propaganda re-interpreting facts so that the media can present an amplified denial of the truth.

Trump got his vindication this week when The New York Times lied about crowd size at a Trump event:

The New York Times has corrected a crowd size estimate it provided following President Trump's rally in Nashville, Tenn., on Tuesday night, after receiving sharp criticism from the president. The paper on Wednesday stated that attendance was more than five times larger than estimates it had originally reported. “While no exact figure is available, the fire marshal’s office estimated that approximately 5,500 people attended the rally, not about 1,000 people,” the correction stated.

The discrepancy -- estimating a crowd at less than one-fifth of the actual amount -- is not a typo. It is not an error. It is a deliberate distortion created by cynical Leftist propagandists pretending to be journalists. This is the nasty side of fake news: it is not just fake, it is manipulative, and it is as coordinated as the propaganda from the old Soviet Union.

Somehow, with Leftists, we always start noticing how they are similar to Stalin and Napoleon.

Lying is not new for The New York Times, which along with The Washington Post forms the center of the Leftist newspaper establishment in the USA. The New York Times invented an urban myth with their story on Kitty Genovese, later debunked as the type of narrative spin that Leftmedia now specializes in:

The murder of Kitty Genovese shifted from crime to legend a few weeks later, when The New York Times erroneously reported that 38 of her neighbors had seen the attack and watched it unfold without calling for help. The Times piece was followed by a story in Life magazine, and the narrative spread throughout the world, running in newspapers from Russia and Japan to the Middle East. ...But there were not 38 witnesses who did nothing. Not even close. The effects of the Genovese murder were vast, including the adoption of good Samaritan laws nationwide, and the discovery of the bystander effect, which showed that people are unlikely to help someone if they think ­others are available to do so.

This case must have made The New York Times drunk with power. They made up a myth -- and it spread like wildfire! Then, it influenced the creation of laws and a psychological discipline which made it easier to compel people to interact with the rising social disorder. They must have felt like they won the lottery, those New York editors, when they saw that chain of events.

Of course, that case pales in comparison to the perfidy of Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter who not only concealed the crimes of the Soviet Union because he was a "fellow traveler" on the Left, but also falsely praised a failing and brutal system. Duranty set the stage for the Leftist spin doctors of the future when he adjusted facts to fit the Left-wing narrative and as a result, essentially wrote lies:

The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP's Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied: Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated. And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day. In his masterwork about Stalin's imposed famine on Ukraine, "Harvest of Sorrow," Robert Conquest has written: As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, 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. What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing.

Why would they do nothing? Primarily: they agreed with him and so did their readership, so they saw profit in allowing him to continue despite the vast influence his writing had on American politics and attitudes of people who were voting on whether or not to go further Leftist.

Those early victories -- where the Left reported untruths and achieved sweeping policy changes as a result -- continue to inform the Left's use of media today. The New York Times under-reports attendance at Trump rallies because they hope that, by lying, they will be able to change reality to be more like what it would be if what they were reporting were true.

However, in the current climate, attitudes are different. People have seen over sixty years of intense Leftism and they now know what it will look like if Leftism gets its way: our heritage destroyed, our people dispirited, and our societies replaced by third world diversity and globalist standards which are starting to look a lot like Communism with consumerism grafted on.

This time, The New York Times blinked. The climate that allowed them to get away with mutilation of the truth has changed. And so now, they are in retreat, even if there is much clashing of teeth and howling.