The Truth About ‘Fake News’ and ‘Useful Idiots’

This post The Truth About ‘Fake News’ and ‘Useful Idiots’ appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
In the United States of late 2016, it’s come to this: A patriot like our own David Stockman gets smeared as a ‘useful idiot’ of Russian President Vladimir Putin on the front page of The Washington Post.
To be clear, David was not singled out in the Post story. But the story described ‘a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.’
The Post’s leading source for the story was a group of anonymous ‘independent researchers’ who assembled a blacklist of 200 websites supposedly disseminating ‘fake news’ and toeing the Russian line.
If you don’t wallow in mainstream media, you might not know ‘fake news’ is a thing now… so here’s a bit of background.
In the run-up to the election, a handful of bogus news stories caught fire on Facebook and other social media. The most widely shared one was typical of the genre – an item claiming Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump. They originated with little-known and hard-to-trace websites with disparate names like Ending the Fed or The Political Insider or the Denver Guardian.

This post was published at Examiner on November 28, 2016.

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