Fake News Fake Out

Fake News Fake Out

And the Ohio State (not) shooter

Conspiracy Theorist

By Mark Luedtke

Publication date: 121316

An attacker at Ohio State recently hospitalized eleven people. I wish the victims well. None have died, thank goodness. I’m sure you read the story, but it’s informative to recall every mainstream media outlet reported the term active shooter in its headline. The only problem was the attacker didn’t use a gun. He used a car and knife.

Media apologists will note Ohio State used the term active shooter in its warning, but that misses the point. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. Ohio State used the wrong term because the media has been banging the drums for gun control for decades. The only bad people on campus the media wants us to know about are attackers who use guns. We have no term that includes attackers who don’t use guns. The media doesn’t want us to know they exist because it undermines their push for gun control. If Ohio State had reported an active knifer on campus, the media would have buried the story. As it was, the mis-reporting sparked the usual irresponsible calls for gun control from the usual irresponsible leftists.

Politicization of the media permeates every story. If an attack story can be twisted to promote gun control, run it. If not, bury it. The same is true for every story. Global warming is an obvious example. The avalanche of fake polar bear stories comes to mind.

We saw it all during the election. When Hillary Clinton was exposed for selling government favors in return for contributions to her Clinton Foundation personal slush fund including from foreign governments, the media cared nothing for conflicts of interest. After Trump won, his supposed business conflicts became the biggest story of the post-election. When Clinton was busted for mishandling state secrets to the point of allowing foreign governments access to them, mishandling state secrets was not a problem. Now that Trump is considering appointing Gen. David Petraeus to a cabinet position and he once mishandled state secrets, it’s high treason.

The mis-reporting of news in order to advance a political agenda is done three ways. Sometimes the news is fake, such as stories about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of chemical weapons and his mobile chemical weapons factories. Sometimes only parts of a story are reported, often exaggerated. Stories about the war in Syria never mention the US is really fighting Syrian forces while aiding and abetting ISIS. Finally, many stories are ignored completely. For example, bureaucrats just enacted a new rule allowing any judge to sign a warrant to spy on any person in the US. Jurisdiction will no longer matter. This will legalize all FBI spying since there’s always a judge somewhere who will sign a warrant. Try finding that story in the news. Mis-reporting is so rampant that cases are easy to miss.

But the American people are waking up. Trust in media recently hit an all time low with only 32 percent of Americans trusting it. Having lost the election, establishment rulers and cronies hang on by their fingernails, and they’re scared. Panicking, they’ve called for help from the big guns to move the spotlight from the fake news they report to censorship of news they don’t like which others report. The New York Times leads the charge.

“Over the last week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome. On Monday, those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources,” it reported. “Google kicked off the action on Monday afternoon when the Silicon Valley search giant said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.”

This is a good reminder giant corporations, while nominally owned, are ultimately owned by the government. Profits stay private, but government controls them. Rulers ordered Google and Facebook to censor information on their behalf, and in order to keep their government-protected profits, their nominal owners agreed.

In a similar vein, The Washington Post posted a McCarthyite blacklist of websites including the Drudge Report and LewRockwell.com.

The establishment’s censorship effort will backfire, and it will be fun to watch.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.