FAKE NEWS IS NOT NEW

  Distortion of the news has become a daily occurrence by the mainstream media. Whenever I hear something negative about Trump such as the story that Trump told his lawyer to lie to congress or a report that tries to make his supporters look bad. Such as the case of the White teenager Nick Sandman wearing a MAGA hat who supposedly mocked an American Indian Vietnam veteran near the Washington monument, I usually reserve judgment because the truth will be revealed at some point. Usually within a matter of hours. Further discrediting the mainstream media and eroding the faith of the American people in their trustworthiness. They either outright lie or leave pertinent facts out of the story. Or they ignore the real news stories altogether. The stories that need to be reported are completely ignored most of the time. This is why James Okeefe started Operation Veritas. He does the news reporting and undercover work that the mainstream media should be doing.

 I have seen how the media distorts and ignores the news firsthand on a local level. During the state income tax battle of 1999 and 2000 I was a tax protester and appeared at every rally. The media tried to paint us as a bunch of rabble rousers and trouble makers. Instead we were just everyday citizens trying to stop bad legislation and we were ultimately successful. The crowd was a cross section of white collar and blue collar workers. Along with female homemakers pushing baby strollers. Like the Trump rallies they would try to diminish the size of our crowds protesting against the tax and enlarge the size of the counter protesters in favor of the tax.

 A few years ago myself and many others tried to get the local channels to report on a Black Lives Matters speaker who was invited to speak at a Rutherford County school spewing racial hatred and propaganda to students. The local media refused to investigate or report on the story. False news or a reporters interpretation of a news story can have a devastating impact on our nation. Although there is plenty of blame to go around for losing the war in Vietnam Walter Cronkite can claim much of that blame. During the 1968 Tet Offensive he went to Vietnam on a so-called fact finding mission. Cronkite was probably the most trusted and beloved newsman of that era. I did not find out until years later that Cronkite was very left wing in his political belief and worst of all believed in a one world government. To his credit, unlike newsmen today, you didn't pick up on his views in his news reporting. He simply reported the news and did not editorialize. Except for his trip to Vietnam. On February 27, 1968 he reported that the war was a stalemate and probably unwinnable. This statement made the American people think that we were losing when in fact we were in the process of destroying the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force.

 After Tet the North Vietnamese regular Army would have to shoulder the war effort until the end of the war. Tet was our greatest military victory since the battle of the Bulge. The battle of the Bulge and Tet were similar because in both battles we were surprised by the enemy. After the marshaling of our forces, however; we were able to effectively destroy the enemy. Tet was our greatest opportunity to deliver a knockout punch but instead it was the beginning of the downward spiral toward defeat. Our army would be plagued by low morale and a huge increase in drug use that has destroyed the lives of many Vietnam veterans. The following is just a short list of false news reporting in the past.

1. Walter Duranty and the Holodomor:The mother of all fake news stories must be New York Times reporter Walter Duranty helping Stalin's Russia conceal the Holodomor from the world. Duranty helped the communists cover up one of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated, the forced starvation of over 1.5 million people in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.

2. Dateline NBC rigs a truck to explode:In 1993, NBC News delivered a historic public apology for staging the test crash of a General Motors pickup truck for the Dateline NBC program. The reporters wanted to demonstrate that gas could leak from the truck's fuel tank and cause a dangerous fire after a crash, so they rigged it with explosives.

3. Jayson Blair: New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was investigated by his newspaper in 2003 and accused of inventing numerous reports. He was especially prone to inventing news reports supposedly filed from other cities, while he was in fact working from his apartment in Brooklyn. The scandal, however; that ultimately prompted his resignation involved accusations of plagiarism in a story he filed about the family of a soldier missing in Iraq.

4. Rathergate: The pivotal scandal of the New Media era was the pitiful end of Dan Rather's career at CBS News – a debacle so devastating to legacy media that liberals still try to rewrite its history, every time they think nobody's looking. Rather and his producer Mary Mapes tried to throw the 2004 election (and, in the minds of the strongest critics, America's war effort in Iraq) with a phony story about George W. Bush's Air National Guard service, complete with falsified documents from the 1960s that were demonstrably generated using 2004-era word processing software. 

5. The proto-Tea Party gun scare:

There was a lot of fake reporting surrounding the Tea Party movement. One of the most memorable examples was MSNBC breathlessly warning about "white people showing up with guns" at the 2009 health care reform rallies that were precursors to the Tea Party. The segment included a great deal of hyperventilation about the alleged anger of white people over "a black person being president," and the commensurate rise of "hate groups." MSNBC illustrated its claim with footage of an armed man at a rally after President Obama's speech to the VFW in Phoenix, Arizona. The footage was edited to conceal that the man was, in fact, black.

6. George Zimmerman's edited 911 call: The media was very interested in keeping the George Zimmerman – Trayvon Martin story hot, fresh, and outrageous, eagerly stirring a bubbling pot of racial paranoia for political and ratings reasons. A great deal of the early reporting about the Trayvon Martin shooting could be classified as "fake news." Who can forget the widely circulated images of Martin as a baby-faced child, even though reporters knew that wasn't what he looked like at the time of his death? The nadir of fake news in the Zimmerman-Martin story was reached when NBC News deliberately, maliciously edited a recording of the call Zimmerman placed to 911 on the night of the February 2012 shooting, to make it sound as if Zimmerman was obsessed with Martin's race. NBC reporters even tried to convince viewers Zimmerman used a racial epthet.

7. The adventures of Brian Williams: Brian Williams' anchorman career at NBC News came to an end in 2015 after he was accused of lying about taking enemy fire while helicoptering into Iraq in 2003. The accusation came from soldiers who were aboard the helicopter. Williams told the story repeatedly, over a span of years, before he was called out. NBC executives recalled having a great deal of difficulty getting Williams to admit he lied, and offer an unqualified apology. Amazingly, Williams still has a career in broadcast journalism. 

7. The Rolling Stone rape hoax:The biggest recent fake news story is the appalling Rolling Stone rape hoax, which led to a successful defamation suit against the magazine, its publisher, and reporter Sabrina Erdely by an administrator at the University of Virginia. Erdely claims she was deceived by the subject of her story, a young woman known as "Jackie" who claimed to have been gang-raped by a University of Virginia fraternity. Attorneys for U-Va. administrator Nicole Eramo argued that Erdely and Rolling Stone pushed ahead with the story even though it had numerous inconsistencies that could not be resolved, and none of the crucial details could be corroborated

8. The "fake news" freakout: The story about a professor creating an authoritative list of "fake news" websites, as widely reported across the mainstream media, was itself a fake news story. The creator of the list was a madcap left-wing activist who compiled it on a whim, not through any sort of rigorously-vetted academic process. When the list of fake news sites came under sustained criticism, it was removed from the Internet, long after generating a raft of stories on top news websites and TV shows.

These are just a few examples of fake news over the years. What is funny is that Obama started the term fake news as a way to discredit Conservatives. This was the basis for fact checking sites like Snopes. Trump, in his brilliance, through a hostile takeover, to borrow a corporate term, exposed the left as being the real liars. Now we associate the term fake news with the left and the mainstream media and not with the right. Thanks to Donald Trump.