The ‘Fake News’ Con: A Case Study

American Thinker ^ | December 2, 2016 | Jack Cashill

[Kaslin]

The media have found a creative new way to explain away Hillary’s Clinton’s crushing defeat and their own humiliation. They have dubbed the agent of their mutual undoing “fake news” and talk about the phenomenon as though it made real sense.

In an all too typical New York Times opinion piece this week Michael Lynch defines “fake news” as “pure fiction masquerading as truth” and presents it exclusively as a “right wing” phenomenon. Like many of his colleagues, Lynch suggests the Russian government was involved in planting fake news items and believes that such items, regardless of source, may have cost Hillary Clinton the election.

To test Lynch’s thesis, we might profitably select a presumed “fake news” item and follow its course through what the Clintons once called the “communication stream of conspiracy commerce.” In August 2010, the Times identified a news item simple enough and seemingly fake enough, “Obama uses a phony Social Security number,” to makes a useful case study.

Tracking this story, one finds its source not in in Russia, but in Ohio. The person responsible for surfacing the number is a licensed private investigator named Susan Daniel. In 2009, troubled by the drift of the country under Barack Obama, she and fellow investigator Neil Sankey began to plow through proprietary databases and investigate Obama on their own time. What they discovered is that from 1986 on Barack Obama has been using a Social Security number that seemed to originate in Connecticut.

[FrdmLvr]

LOL! Progressive International Socialist Society.

[Pollard]

I’d like to see him just replace CNN or NYT with one of the new media outlets. Maybe more later but just that one would send quite a message.

[generally]

You’re right.

Fake, but accurate. - Dan Rather

The liberals are so smugly self-assured of their own superior morality, that they feel entitled to make things up to fit the narrative they want to push on us.