More on Fake News Fake Non Profits False Propaganda and Fake Science
The article below discusses how the the "fake news" label from the 2016 presidential campaign was created by a phony non profit which was funded by Google's Eric Schmidt in cooperation with the Democrats,the main stream media Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Kudos to Sheryl Attkisson for researching and exposing this as she has done with other things like the great cover up by the mainstream media of the neurological damage and other negative health consequences being caused by vaccines. Unfortunately, the internet monopolies are actively engaged in censorship and propaganda on a whole range of issues in collaboration and collusion with mainstream media. When you do google searches about vaccines you will find that the algorithms are heavily weighted to show you pro vaccine articles and websites as well as articles and websites that make fun of anti vaxxers with false information claiming that various anti vaccine science claims have been "debunked". Google has deliberately made it difficult to research the topic from a purely unbiased scientific perspective. One has to do a lot of digging to find actual scientific literature and discussion on these matters.
https://pjmedia.com/video/sharyl-attkisson-explains-tedx-talk-origins-2016-fake-news-narrative/
Sharyl Attkisson Explains the Origins of the 2016 'Fake News' Narrative in TedX Talk
In a Tedx Talk at the University of Nevada a couple of weeks ago, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson revealed
the origins of the "fake news" narrative that was aggressively pushed
by the liberal media and Democrat politicians during the 2016 election,
and how it was later flipped by President Donald Trump.
Attkisson pointed out that
"fake news" in the form of tabloid journalism and false media narratives
has always been around under different names.
But she noticed in 2016, there
seemed to be a concerted effort by the MSM to focus America's attention
on the idea of "fake news" in conservative media. That looked like a
propaganda effort to Attkisson, so she did a little digging and traced
the new spin to a little non-profit called "First Draft," which, she
said, "appears to be the about the first to use 'fake news' in its
modern context."
"On September 13, 2016, First
Draft announced a partnership to tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news
reports," Attkisson explained. "The goal was supposedly to separate
wheat from chaff, to prevent unproven conspiracy talk from figuring
prominently in internet searches. To relegate today's version of the
alien baby stories to a special internet oblivion."
She noted that a month later, then-President Obama chimed in.
"He insisted in a speech that
he too thought somebody needed to step in and curate information of this
wild, wild West media environment," she said, pointing out that "nobody
in the public had been clamoring for any such thing."
Yet suddenly the subject of
fake news was dominating headlines all over America as if the media had
received "its marching orders," she recounted. "Fake news, they said,
was an imminent threat to American democracy."
Attkisson, who has studied the
manipulative moneyed interests behind media industry, said, "few themes
arise in our environment organically." She noted that she always found
it helpful to "follow the money."
"What if the whole anti-fake
news campaign was an effort on somebody's part to keep us from seeing or
believing certain websites and stories by controversializing them or
labeling them as fake news?" Attkisson posited.
Digging deeper, she discovered
that Google was one of the big donors behind First Draft's "fake news"
messaging. Google's parent company, she pointed out, is owned by Eric
Schmidt, who happened to be a huge Hillary Clinton supporter.
Schmidt "offered himself up as
a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His
company funded First Draft around the start of the election cycle,"
Attkisson said. "Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the
anti-fake news train and her surrogate David Brock of Media Matters
privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook to join the
effort."
Attkisson declared that "the
whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign," she said.
Attkisson added, "But something happened that nobody expected. The
anti-fake news campaign backfired. Each time advocates cried fake news,
Donald Trump called them 'fake news' until he'd co-opted the
term so completely that even those who [were] originally promoting it
started running from it -- including the Washington Post," which she noted later backed away from using the term.
Attkisson called Trump's
accomplishment a "hostile takeover" of the term and cautioned people to
always be wary of "powerful interests might be trying to manipulate"
their opinions.
She described two warning signs to look out for.
- When the media tries to shape or censor facts and opinions rather than report them.
- When so many in the media are reporting the same stories, promulgating the same narratives, relying on the same sources -- even using the same phrases.
Attkisson pointed out that
there's an infinite number of ways to report stories, so "when
everybody's on the same page, it might be part of an organized
campaign."
She warned the audience about
the latest effort to quell speech through something called "media
literacy," where liberal elites tell everyone else who they should
trust. She said, "Media literacy advocates are busy trying to get state
laws passed to require that their version of media literacy be taught
public schools."
What's more, they're
developing websites and partnering with universities. She warned that
these people have their own agendas and want to tell you what to
believe.
"When interests are working
this hard to shape your opinion, their true goal just might just be to
add another layer between you and the truth," Attkisson concluded.