[meow]

Good. It's about time someone with his level of popularity publicly called them a news source that has 0 credibility while the whole country was listening. He also named George Soros while the country was listening.

[insidious]

Good. It's about time someone with his level of popularity publicly called them a news source that has 0 credibility while the whole country was listening. He also named George Soros while the country was listening.

All this fake news shit is absolutely fucking pointless



Read "Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible" which is a horrifying account of how the post-Soviet Russian state media works under Putin. Or read Inside Putin's Information War.
The tl;dr of both sources is that modern propaganda works by getting you to believe nothing. It's like lowering the defenses of your immune system. If they can get you to believe that all the news is propaganda, then all of a sudden propaganda from foreign-controlled state media or sourceless loony toon rants from domestic kooks, are all on an equal playing field with real investigative journalism. If everything is fake, your news consumption is just a dietary choice. And it's different messages for different audiences - carefully tailored. To one audience they say all news is fake, to those who are on their way to conversion they say "Trust only these sources." To those who might be open to skepticism, they just say "Hey isn't it troubling that the media is a business?"

Hannah Arendt, who studied all the different fascist movements (not just the Nazis) noted that:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Does that remind you of any content on the internet?

The philosopher Sartre said this about the futility of arguing with a certain group in his time. See if any of this sounds familiar to you

____ have chosen hate because hate is a faith to them; at the outset they have chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease they feel as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions appear to them. If out of courtesy they consent for a moment to defend their point of view, they lend themselves but do not give themselves. They try simply to project their intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse.
Never believe that ______ are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The ____ have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. If then, as we have been able to observe, the ____ is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.

He was talking about arguing with anti-Semites and Vichyists in the 1940s.
This style of arguing is familiar to anyone who is familiar with what happened to Reddit over the past 2 years as Reddit was brigaded by and 4chan.

Ever see someone post something that is quite completely false, with a second person posting a long reply with sources, only to have the original poster respond "top kek, libcuck tears"? One side is talking about facts but the other is playing a game.

Just look at what happened to "Fake News."

This is a word that was born about around 9 weeks ago. It lived for about 2 weeks as a genuine English word, meaning headlines fabricated to get clicks on Facebook, engineered by SEO wizards who weren't even American, just taking advantage of the election news wave:

"You Won't Believe Obama's Plan To Declare Martial Law!"
"Hillary Has Lung, Brain, Stomach, And Ass Cancer - SIX WEEKS TO LIVE!"

For a while, it seemed like the real world could agree that a word existed and had meaning, that it referred to a thing. Then the word was promptly murdered. Now, as we can clearly see, anyone who disagrees with a piece of news - even if it is NEWS, not an editorial - feels free to call it "Fake News." Trump calls CNN fake news.

There is a two step process to this degeneration:

First, one gets an audience to believe that all news is agenda-driven and editorial (this was already achieved long ago).

Second, now one says that all news that is embarrassing to your side must be editorial and fabricated.

So who is the culprit? Who murdered the definition of fake news? A group of people who don't care what words mean. The concept that some news is fake and some news is not was intolerable, as was any distinction between those who act in good faith and sometimes screw up, vs those who act in bad faith and never intended to do any good - a distinction between the traditional practice of off-the-record sourcing and the novel practice of saying every lie you can think of in the hope one sticks. The group of people I'm talking about cannot tolerate these distinctions. Their worldview is unitary. They make all words mean "bad" and they make all words mean "the enemy.". In the end they will only need one word.

[meow]

bla bla

I appreciate all your effort but unfortunately I'm not reading all of that, or any of it for that matter, because if I read a little bit then I'll be compelled to read the rest.

[insidious]

bla bla

I appreciate all your effort but unfortunately I'm not reading all of that.

OK
You're choice, either way

[Skullmeat]

Your statement has some merit, except for one thing: CNN DOES LIE. A recent example is when Phil Mudd Calls Julian Assange a "Pedophile who lives in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London" and were forced to retract their statement when wikileaks threatened a defamation lawsuit. Had their been any factual information to back up his claims CNN would not have recanted.

[insidious]

@insidious Your statement has some merit, except for one thing: CNN DOES LIE. A recent example is when Phil Mudd Calls Julian Assange a "Pedophile who lives in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London" and were forced to retract their statement when wikileaks threatened a defamation lawsuit. Had their been any factual information to back up his claims CNN would not have recanted.

Oh yeah, of course they do. Every news outlet lies, some more then others.

My point isn't that news outlets don't lie, but that it's a catch-22.

Meaning that with an authority figure like Trump calling out "Fake News" isn't that his claim isn't totally unfound, because yeah, CNN does have some absolutely bullshit news. The point can be basically summed up like this:

Anyone who disagrees with a piece of news - even if it is NEWS, not an editorial - feels free to call it "Fake News."

Obviously this poses some problems, because even if a piece of new isn't fake it may be discredited and totally disregarded. The trouble lies in the freedom to call some news Fake and some new not Fake, and it's even more troubling coming from someone like the President of the U.S

Consider Fox. Fox publishes some outrageous shit, too. But if Trump agrees with it he won't call it Fake News, will he? He'll just go with it

IE Calling Something Fake News might not always be because it's fake, but simply to push Propaganda and a certain mindset onto the American People.

I mean, Trumps the same guy who tried to get people to believe Obama wasn't from Kenya and to produce a Birth Certificate

Specifically, however, I was responding to Meow's post/mindset

Good. It's about time someone with his level of popularity publicly called them a news source that has 0 credibility while the whole country was listening. He also named George Soros while the country was listening.

Second, now one says that all news that is embarrassing to your side must be editorial and fabricated.

This Fake News thing is only serving to further polarize the United States, rather than bring it together.

[DarkMuse]

Wait, you mean to say the Clinton News Network does not like Trump and ran a story about fake russian trump intel documents ? Nooo way.

Almost as fake as anonsec claiming to hack NASA for chemtrail proof
LMAO

[Bish0pQ]

I don't trust the news. They just tell what the people want to see. They blow everything up and they change a lot of facts or make it sound different.
If trump just noticed there are fake news companies, he's a little bit late.