The Source of Fake News

Dan Gifford asks What's the Main Source of Fake News? in a piece first published in Firing Line, but appearing on The Patch. Thanks and a hat tip to the War on Guns and David Codrea.

Gifford answers his own question with the fact that most fake news sources are "real reporters," or what Codrea calls "Authorized Journalists,"  who can be bought:

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" boasted a CIA source in another book, "Katharine the Great," a biographical sketch of Katharine Graham, the wife of Philip. She took over Post management after he committed suicide.

Gifford cites a large number of fake news and propaganda pieces, pointing out that because these stories appeared in what are perceived as legitimate news sources, the lies these stories told could persist for years. On such story involves debunked historian Michael A. Bellesiles' 2000 book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Giffords:

Bellesiles' book "attacked [and undercut] the central myth behind the National Rifle Association's interpretation of the Second Amendment," said the Journal of American History and other prestigious publications. NRA president Charlton Heston said the book's findings were "ludicrous."

Bellesiles replied as an Ancien Régime noble might have to a sans culotte republican: "when Professor Heston gets his Ph.D. and does the research, I might be open to persuasion." But the book was a fraud and Idaho software engineer Clayton Cramer, a veritable sans PhD David,fought the sneering arrogance of America's academic community Goliath to slay its lies. Emory fired Bellesiles and all of his award kudos were rescinded.

But discredited does not necessarily mean dead.

Bellesiles still has defenders and their perspective is worth an attempt to understand for contemporary sans-culottes who lack the facile word skills of their elite academic and media betters. So, even though Bellesiles' book is an acknowledged fraud, his defenders say it reveals larger "truths" or "alternate facts" as Counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway might put it...

But, of course, any one of us normals will ask ourselves, if it isn't true, then how can academics and elitists defend such stories.  How do they claim that even though they are not "true," they are still "the truth." Professor Marjorie Agosin, of Wellesley College, who apparently still revered the fraud of Rigoberto Menchu, which was actually written by French Marxist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, said in an interview with Gifford;

...that "Even if Menchú's book isn't true, it's still the truth." Agosin's "truth" or "alternate fact" as I understood it, was that even if the atrocities described were fabricated, other atrocities were committed by Guatemalan government forces against the Guatemalan Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement. But it's a one way truth. According to her line of reasoning, to say the known mass murders committed by the Marxists were atrocities is a subjective interpretation of necessary means to overcome capitalist oppression within the context of justifiable class struggle.

You may reject Agosin's "ends justify the means" consequentialism, but please know it has emotional traction for many of America's "real reporters" and academics largely because of the romantic chic affinity for Marxist "freedom fighters" that permeates America's newsrooms and university ivory towers.

So, as long as we have people who are so wedded to their ideology, and facts, and the real world don't actually matter, we will have fake news. Treat everything you read (including this blog, by the way) as possibly fake news, needing verification by other sources. While I don't deliberately lie to my readers, I can be led astray by my own biases.