If The News Fits Print It

There is something Orwellian about the term "fake news".   The term, of course, implies judgment as to what constitutes "fake" and "real", and who makes that judgment - an ugly place for any society that calls itself a republic or a democracy of any kind.   Thomas Jefferson spoke of the critical role of education in a society where the people decide who represents them - and it speaks to the colossal failure of America's educational system that some people in high positions of power have determined that the American people no longer possess the critical thinking skills necessary to determine the difference between ice cream and BS.   Given, in the Wild Wild West of the Internet, anybody can post anything, and if it goes viral, it can shape a narrative - true or not.   This phenomenon is most acutely expressed on social networks like Facebook, who recently enlisted the help of the "fact filter" service Snopes in helping it determine what is real and what is not.  These issues have always been with us, ever since the advent of the printing press, and exploding exponentially with the advent of electronic media and the Internet.   But, why the interest in "fake news" now, at this point in the history of the American experiment?

Many of us who followed the 2016 Presidential Election, from the beginnings of the primaries through November 8th,  saw how the Democratic Primary was increasingly, and obviously, being slanted, gamed, and ultimately, rigged to favor Hillary Clinton.   We saw how Wall Street loved her, how many of the worst neocons loved her, and many mainstream Republicans (such as the Bushes) voiced open support for her, in chorus with the establishment of the Democratic Party.   She had the Mainstream Media (especially CNN and MSN-BS), as well as the other apparatuses of the political establishment, on her side.  She, in short, was virtually anointed the next President. 

But as we all know, things did not go according to the establishment script - a script written and drafted by the DNC and the Clintons, polished by the MSM and the donors, and executed by the candidate and her surrogates.  But one set of actors in the ensemble did not follow the script: the swing state voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.   They defied the "directors" in this play - the donors and monetary backers of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.  While Hillary won the popular vote by almost three million, she did not win the swing states she needed to carry the Electoral College.    The swing state voters delivered what Michael Moore called the "biggest F$#% You" in history, to the political establishment and to its perceived representative, Hillary Clinton.   In any other election year, Trump and his ilk would have been destroyed in the polls, and it would not have taken a politician with the talents of Obama or Bill Clinton to do it. 

But this was not an ordinary election year - a fact painfully overlooked by the Democratic establishment, the DNC, and their purveyors of "big data" campaigning. 

What happened?  Why did the voters deviate from the script?

The writers of the script, and their supporters, realized that they lost control of the narrative surrounding their chosen candidate.   The Wikileaks dispatches, the exposed rigging of the 2016 Democratic Primary, and a host of other accusations - most of which the DNC was not able to control or manage adequately - were outside of the script and thus, outside of the control of the DNC.

So, how does the establishment try to regain control of the mechanisms that spin their narratives?

Enter "fake news" -  a combination of McCarthyite labeling of undesirable opinions and Orwellian gaslighting of those who don't conform.   A new-ish website, www.propornot.com, declares itself a "freindly neighborhood propaganda identification service" in the service of identifying those websites who publish what they deem to be "propaganda" favorable to the Kremlin.   I will agree that the sites they list can be of varying quality as far as the information they disseminate.  I find, however, that several questions are begged by the exercise of looking through the site:

1. Does the team at propornot have evidence that the purveyors of these sites take their orders from the Kremlin?
2. Who exactly runs propornot?  What are their credentials?

The first place I looked in trying to address these questions is the "about us" section of the website.   I find this section, however, wanting for specifics: it describes the site's proprietors as:

          "an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs."

Note the lack of specifics as to exactly who and what.

It's mission is described as:

          "We formed PropOrNot as an effort to prevent propaganda from distorting U.S. political and policy discussions. We hope to strengthen our cultural immune systems against hostile influence and improve public discourse generally. However, our immediate aim at this point is to empower the American voter and decrease the ability of Russia to influence the ensuing American election."

Again, who is "we"?  Where are they getting the information that somehow, Russia is hacking our elections and influencing the discourse?    The CIA seems certain, but is not revealing how or who - we are just expected to "trust them" (as if they never had any reason to lie.).  But the Russians themselves, as well as Julian Assange, assert that the source of the Wikileaks dispatches was not Russian hacking, but a leak from the DNC - also quite plausible considering the state of the Clinton campaign.

In short - who do you believe?

Much more on this later.