MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA

According to Gallup, American’s confidence in newspapers and television news is at an all-time low. There is reason to be suspicious of news media. They don’t always get things right.

For example, I recall a news article about an American soldier. The article said he was a first sergeant. Then it referred to his platoon. Wait a minute. An infantry company has four platoons. But the first sergeant is not attached to a platoon. He is part of the company headquarters. A follow-up article referred to the man as a sergeant first class. Sergeant first class is a military rank. First sergeant is a position in a military company.

Another example that comes to mind is the presidential election of 2004. Two months before the election Sixty Minutes aired a story that made a false statement about George W Bush’s service in the Texas Nation Guard. The story was based on documents to Sixty Minutes had received. It turned out that the documents were forged. When the forgery was discovered, Dan Rather said that if he had known that, he would not have gone ahead with the story.

So journalists, like the rest of us, are imperfect human beings. They make mistakes sometimes. But that is not the end of it. They have means in place to minimize errors. News writers work with editors so that some of these mistakes can be caught and corrected before the story goes to print or on the air or online. Some mistakes still get through. When errors are caught after the item has been released to the public, responsible journalists make corrections. The news item about the man they identified as first sergeant was really a sergeant first class. Sixty Minutes admitted that they had been conned and corrected itself.

Sure we might sometimes get an incorrect story from the mainstream media, but we know that the media makes an effort to minimize false stories. And if they sometimes fail, the media will make an effort to correct their errors. With false media, on the other hand, we know that they are deliberately trying to sell stories that they know to be false. At the very least we have to be skeptical of any “news” put forth by known disseminators of untrue stories.

Donald Trump, for example, lied as often as he told the truth. The Washington Post kept track of the false or misleading statements he made while he was in office. In four years he told 30,537 lies.

30,537 lies!

The President of the United States!

After that performance, why would anyone believe anything he said? Another notorious prevaricator is Alex Jones. At Sandy Hook Elementary School Adam Lanza murdered twenty children and one teacher. The worst thing a parent can face is the loss of a child at any age. (Believe me, I know.) How much worse it must have been for these people to lose their innocent children in such a senseless event. Yet Jones claimed the whole thing was a hoax, staged to motivate limitations on the ownership of fire arms. For adding more pain to the pain of their loss, Jones has been ordered to pay $473 million to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims.

These are only two of the most notorious fabricators. There are many more, including several “new” commentator qt Fox News, QAnon, and many of the MAGA promoters.

Sure, the Mainstream news is not perfect. They sometimes get things wrong. But the most egregious of the con artists are so often false that it would be a mistake to believe any of the garbage they spew unless it is confirmed by a reliable source.

I don’t know what motivates some people to make these false statements. Much of it seems to be greed. They tell these lies for political or financial advantage. That seems to be the in the two men we have cited. Others may be deluded themselves. Still others might be suffering from psychological problems that makes them see the world upside down. Whatever their moral, intellectual or psychological weakness, we need to avoid seeing the world through their flawed vision.

We rely on information we get to make decisions about our lives. We owe it to ourselves to make decisions based reliable information.

WHAT CAN YOU BELIEVE?

Some people think that we should not tax the ultra-wealthy or business very much because to do so would cause enterprises and enterprisers to have less motivation to succeed, and it would have a negative effect on business in the country. I do not agree with that position, but I do not think it is irrational or crazy.

I say this because I consider many ideas of conservative Republicans are indeed irrational and crazy. It is not necessarily irrational to make decisions based on misinformation. Every decision we make is based on what information we have, and we do not always have the best information possible. We can’t always get the best information, and we have to make choices based on the data we have.

However, any choice we make based on false data is not going to have the best result. And if we make a decision based on false data when the real data is readily available is indeed irrational.

Well-known extreme right-wing sources such as QANON and Alex Jones are not the only ones who spread misinformation. Online publication such as Natural News contribute to outright lies and distortion of truth that gets spread over the internet. On August 10 Natural News stated that the governor of Tennessee has issued an executive order authorizing the National Guard to carry out medical kidnappings. According to them, the guard could break into people’s homes, kidnap them at gunpoint, and take them to covid internment camps.

If this were true, it would be shocking, but of course it was not true. What the executive order actually did was authorize the guard to help in the covid emergency by such things as diagnostic testing, nursing, and ambulance services.

The story did not originate with Natural News. It had been posted on Instagram, but it was a satire. Natural News, not realizing that it was tongue in cheek, took the satire as fact and ran with it.

Here are links to two more articles from that source of “news.”

Biden wants to criminalize crossing state lines while “unvaccinated” - NaturalNews.com

Feds declare anti-vaxxers are “terrorists,” unveil 90-day plan to wage false flag violence and blame it on “anti-lockdown extremists” - NaturalNews.com

The social media also spreads false stories. One such story stated that airline flights were backed up across the country because pilots and crew were walking off flights and refusing to take mandated vaccines. In fact, the flight delays were caused by weather.

Another story stated that the Canadian province of Alberta had lifted Covid-19 restrictions because health officials had provided no evidence that the virus exists. In fact, the restrictions were lifted because predetermined goals had been met.

If you challenge anyone who believes wild tales like these, they will say you have been fooled by the mainstream media. But I ask you: What is more believable: sources like the New York Times or sources like Natural News?

INFOWARS

From Alex Jones’s InfoWars we can learn about the involvement of the U S government in 9/11. The Sandy Hook shootings never happened. The survivors of the Stoneham Douglas High School shootings were crisis actors. The government has programs that can control weather. Prominent Democrats are involved in a child pornography ring, located in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant. Where does Jones get his information? Some of it he just makes up. He also gathers stories from sources like RT, a Russian state-sponsored propaganda broadcast.

While you are perusing this misinformation, you can buy products from InfoWars, everything dietary supplements, including a medicine for Covid-19, T-shirts, hats, and coffee cups. You can even get food supplies to keep in store for the coming revolution. I don’t know whether Jones actually believes the ideas that he peddles, but he certainly pulls in a lot of followers. InfoWars attracts 10 million visitors a month, a lot more than a straight news site would attract. People who believe in Jones’s misinformation have made him a wealthy man.

QAnon is an anonymous website that also spreads false information. According to them North Korea’s Kim Jon Un was installed and is controlled by the CIA. Germany’s leader, Angela Merkel, is Hitler’s granddaughter. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros were involved in a plot to overthrow President Trump. They were also involved in a child sex-trafficking ring. The Rothschild family leads a satanic cult.

QAnon is anonymous, though it supposedly is run by a deep member of the CIA with the highest security clearance. Margorie Taylor Greene believes the QAnon stories. In the last election she was elected to represent Georgia in Congress. Donald Trump’s lies are too numerous to list. According to the Washington Post, which has been keeping track, Trump had made over 20,000 false or misleading statements in the first three and a half years in his administration.

All three of these have had their lies picked up and further spread by the social media. Trump notoriously releases some of his misinformation on twitter. Rather than conduct government business through official channels, he often makes his announcements by a tweet.

One has to wonder whether Trump’s false statements are delusional or a cynical disregard for the truth when he thinks a lie will serve his purposes better. Either way, these misstatements, along with his incompetence, demonstrate how unfit he is for the office he holds. At any rate, over 700 million people voted for him in the recent election and vast numbers of citizens are convinced that the election was somehow stolen from him.

What have we come to? That so many people have fallen for the lies of these charlatans? Unfortunately, it is not just these malignant forces that have captured the minds of Americans. The social media echoes the lies and false conspiration that Alex Jones et al project. From time to time Facebook or Twitter will temporarily suspend Alex Jones or label Donald Trump’s accounts as less than accurate. But it is usually too little, too late. Millions of people depend on sources like Facebook rather than traditional sources for their news.

It is not enough to try to reform the social media. The answer lies elsewhere. In a future post we will look at how we can minimize the damage done by these malevolent forces.