My hair is literally on fire!
Or maybe it's my pants. I can't tell.
Either way, Russia is taking over America and soon they'll be force-feeding us borscht three times a day.
It's all because of fake news like this!

Those monsters!
And this Putin Puppet!

Spielberg you bastard!

It's a good thing that we can rely in the mainstream media to always accurately and fully inform us of what is going on in the world.
For instance, Time.


And the New Republic.

Stephen Glass, a former journalist who fabricated dozens of articles, told Duke students in a journalism ethics class Monday that he has repaid $200,000 to The New Republic and other magazines that published his work.
Monday’s disclosure appears to be the first time Glass has revealed that he repaid The New Republic, Rolling Stone and the publisher of the public policy journal Policy Review for more than 40 stories he fabricated.

And the New York Times.

The New York Times has concluded, after an extensive internal investigation, that one of its former reporters committed "frequent acts of journalistic fraud."
In a 7,500 word article published Saturday on its Web site, the prestigious newspaper accuses the reporter of making up reports from other cities while writing from his apartment in Brooklyn. The paper says the reporter invented quotes, wrote about scenery from published photographs and stole material from other news organizations.

And Rolling Stone.

Of course, all the fake news being pumped out by the "Russian news media" was pro-Trump.

A widely reported story on mainstream news outlets this week was that President-designate Donald Trump requested secret security clearance for his kids in an act of nepotistic impropriety.

The story was reported, among others by CNN, NBC News, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, CBS News, and Salon, which snarkily headlined, “Donald Trump’s trying to give his kids top secret security clearance, making sure his conflicts of interest are extra bold.”

But as USA Today reported, “Despite reports suggesting the contrary, a transition team official says Donald Trump did not request or begin paperwork to have his children gain top-level security clearance, according to a pool report.”

Or pro-Democrat.

Facebook and social media aren’t the only places where fake news hoaxers buy ads to swing election results. In one of the most famous political hoaxes in US history, a 527 group was formed by Vietnam Veterans who didn’t even serve with John Kerry in Vietnam to air four television ads claiming that John Kerry’s actions in Vietnam were dishonorable, unreliable, and not befitting someone seeking the office of the US presidency. Their claims and credibility have since been widely debunked.

Of course, the news media would never, ever take something as serious as war and sell it like a product.

Over at Fox News, Laurie Luhn, a top aide to former Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes revealed a lot about the network’s inner workings when she went public with bombshell accusations of sexual abuse by Ailes, who has since resigned in disgrace after multiple other female employees at the news network shared their own similar stories of harassment.

In one expose, it was revealed that Fox News doesn’t live up to its branding as “Fair and Balanced” or other tropes like, “We report, you decide.” Instead, the network had a vested interested in making sure its viewers decided in favor of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

Listen to what Luhn said: “I was very proud of the product. I was very proud of how we handled 9/11. Very proud of how we handled the run-up to the Iraq War. My job was to sell the war. I needed to get people on the air that were attractive and articulate and could convey the importance of this campaign. It was a drumbeat.”

Propaganda is just another way to say: fake news.

And of course, our trusted news media would never engage in CIA propaganda, amirite?

Sometime read the Wikipedia entry about Operation Mockingbird and marvel that you are on a non-profit encyclopedia’s well-sourced article, not some seedy conspiracy blog.

The details read like something you would expect out of Soviet-era Russia, campaign by the Central Intelligence Agency from the 1950s – 1970s recruiting major journalists from respected news sources to present the agency’s propaganda as news.

It wouldn’t be complete without bribes for journalists and publishers.

And then there is that bastion of journalistic ethics, the Washington Post.

In 1980, as the War on Drugs started by President Richard Nixon raged on, a Washington Post journalist named Janet Cooke published a story entitled, “Jimmy’s World,” about an 8 year old heroin addict.

The piece profiled Jimmy’s travails in tragic detail, noting the “needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms,” and chronicling his aspirations to become a drug dealer. The piece resonated so strongly it led to an all-out police search to find the boy and Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

That’s when Cooke admitted the story was a hoax and returned the Pulitzer, the only person to do so in the award’s history.

Let's not forget the myth that still lives in liberal circles.

In 2014, when a Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer confronted a suspect who matched the description of an assault and robbery that had just taken place at a convenient store, the young man, 18 year old Michael Brown, fought with the Police Officer, Darren Wilson, struggling to wrest his gun away. When Wilson pursued him on foot, Brown turned and charged at him, and Wilson fired several shots into the front of Brown’s body, killing him.

This was a very delicate tragedy with strong racial overtones, and in a rush to support a racially-charged, inflammatory media narrative, journalists enthusiastically spread a fake news story: that Michael Brown had his hands up and yelled “Don’t shoot!” at the time Wilson fatally discharged his firearm. It turned out to be false. Upon investigation by the Federal Justice Department, eyewitnesses changed their stories or admitted they didn’t see the shooting take place.

The eager embrace of this narrative by the media had real world consequences, stoking tensions and anger in Ferguson and leading to looting of local businesses and protests that turned violent. The shooting happened in August 2014. By March 2015, MSNBC anchor and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart finally offered a mea culpa with a column entitled, “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Was Based on a Lie.”

Fake news has always been there

From before this country even existed.

In 1769, John Adams gleefully wrote in his diary about spending the evening occupied with “a curious employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurrences etc. — working the political Engine!” Adams, along with his cousin Sam and a handful of other Boston patriots, were planting false and exaggerated stories meant to undermine royal authority in Massachusetts.

Several other leaders of the American Revolution likewise attempted to manage public opinion by fabricating stories that looked like the real thing. William Livingston, then governor of New Jersey, secretly crafted lengthy pieces that newspaper publishers featured. One, titled “The Impartial Chronicle,” was anything but, claiming that the king was sending tens of thousands of foreign soldiers to kill Americans.

But the most important was crafted in 1782 at a makeshift printing press in a Paris suburb. Benjamin Franklin, taking time out from his duties as American ambassador to France, concocted an entirely fake issue of a real Boston newspaper, the Independent Chronicle. In it, Franklin fabricated a story allegedly from the New York frontier .

The story was gruesome: American forces had discovered bags containing more than 700 “SCALPS from our unhappy Country-folks.” There were bags of boys’, girls’, soldiers and even infants’ scalps, all allegedly taken by Indians in league with King George. There was also a note written to the tyrant king hoping he would receive these presents and “be refreshed.”

Even against our most celebrated President.

Abraham Lincoln was more than just a foe of slavery. He was also a mixed-race eugenicist, believing that the intermarriage of blacks and whites would yield an American super-race.
Or at least, that’s what newspapers in 1864 would have had you believe. The charge isn’t true. But this miscegenation hoax still “damn near sank Lincoln that year,” says Heather Cox Richardson, history professor at Boston College....
The miscegenation pamphlet was perhaps American history’s most successful fake news campaign. Long after the election, the pamphlet’s authors were revealed to be Democratic newspapermen bent on scuttling Lincoln by fanning racial anxiety among working-class white Republicans. The two writers set the controversy alight by soliciting feedback from some of the more guileless anti-slavery intellectuals, including Lucretia Mott, who voiced vague support for the pamphlet’s principals—and then sending those letters to Rep. Cox. Other Democrats had written the later batch of fake miscegenation pamphlets making the rounds in working-class white neighborhoods. Though abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison were well aware of what was going on, they were powerless to stop it.

However, the biggest problem out there, by far, are the important stories that don't get reported.
The thundering silence on our wars of empire, our surveillance state, our prison complex, our police state, the epic failure of our democracy, the epic failure of globalization, global climate change, and the total failure of our news media, is still under-reported.
But we'll censor Facebook and Google instead.