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Chutzpah

Fake news is ripping apart America, says . . . one of its biggest perpetrators



Part of it is that she's just parroting the establishment media's line. That's what she always does. The last time Katie Couric had an original thought, if she ever has, is a mystery to me and probably everyone else. Part of it too, I think, is that she is genuinely not very intelligent. It would take some nerve to sit there and rail against "fake news" when you got caught misleadingly editing your gun control special to make pro-Second Amendment people look stumped at a question, when in fact that is not what happened at all. Unless it's not a matter of nerve at all, but it's really a case of your not having the brains to know the difference:
Katie Couric says fake news is "tearing" the United States "apart at the seams." The Yahoo News anchor expressed her concern over people falling for fake news and called upon her fellow journalists to do a better job at helping people understand "complicated issues." "I remember I got sent a lot of stories from friends who were quite educated and were like, 'Did you see this?'" she told the New York Daily News. "And I would say, 'Come on, you're kidding, right? This is BS.'" She added, "We're not doing enough of a good job of breaking down complicated issues and helping people really understand them." While Couric blasted what she called fake news sites, she avoided placing blame on the mainstream media. However, she did say the lines between straight news and opinion "have been blurred considerably."

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Understand, she "avoided placing blame on the mainstream media" precisely because that's Team MSM does. Callum Borchers of the Washington Post has an apoplectic seizure every time someone calls something they do "fake news," because you see, that's simply not permitted. You can only call something fake news if it's on a site that exists for the obvious purpose of writing fake stories and only fake stories. When the MSM reports something that's flat-out false, that doesn't qualify because they don't want it to. Make the charge anyway, and liars like Chris Cillizza of CNN will restate your argument to make it sound like your objection is not that the MSM's story is false, but merely that you don't like it, then they'll lecture you: "Fake news isn't news you don't like." No. It's not. No one is claiming it is. Fake news is "news" that isn't true. And that includes when you deceptively edit interviews to give an impression the viewer wouldn't get if they watched the whole thing in its raw form, like Katie Couric got caught doing. Remember, all the media's yelping about "fake news" started after Trump won the election, and they convinced themselves masses of voters made their decisions based on nonsense they saw in their news feeds about Hillary cavorting with aliens or whatever. They thought it was an easy and risk-free way to discredit Trump's win while also hinting at how much more respectable they are by comparison. What they didn't count on was that conservatives would point out their own frequent sin of reporting nonsense, often based on tips from anonymous sources, and point out that in their own way their product is every bit as fake. I would argue it's even more so in this respect: The fake sites just make crap up, no bones about it. You have to be an idiot to be fooled by it, and most people aren't. The MSM, by contrast, cleverly choose their sources to craft narratives that suit their biases, but often don't tell the whole story. Sometimes they don't even accurately tell the portion of the story they deem to tell. And when they don't name their sources? Well, we're supposed to trust their judgment because, you know, they're real journalists. That's how they shield themselves from the charges of fakery, and it's a very clever argument. But when the product you put out isn't true, then it isn't true. If you're hiding behind your reputation to make people think it is, then sorry, that's worse than those schlep sites that everyone can pick out from a mile away.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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