RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember when Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory? The fake news media which predicted it in order to depress pro-Trump voter turnout certainly does. And so they’re out to fight “fake news.”

By fake news, they don’t mean their own raging torrent of misinformation and lies.

The media has gone to war against Facebook. While various supporters have blamed Hillary’s loss on everything from the FBI to internalized misogyny, the media has decided that Facebook is to blame.

Why Facebook?

Cable news is dying. Newspapers struggle online and offline. The mainstream media’s profitability lives and dies by social media. But the essence of social media is that it allows communities to shape what they see. That’s a terrifying idea if you’re a media conglomerate that depends on its megaphone.

But it’s also scary if you’re a leftist running for office in a country that doesn’t agree with your views.

Obama blamed “messaging” for the election results. But messaging requires being able to reach people. And that means clearing competitive voices out of the social media space by banning conservatives.

The war on conservative media is being conducted under the guise of banishing “fake news” from Facebook. But the fake news devil is in the details. Fake news can mean satire sites like the Onion or the Daily Currant. It can mean foreign clickbait sites that invent fake news. But it can also mean sites from outside the mainstream media whose stories are contested by the left for partisan reason.

The war on fake news is a smoke screen for a campaign against conservative media. And it’s easy to see that it’s conservative sites that are the real target of the Facebook book burners.

Buzzfeed, which depends heavily on Facebook traffic , has fed the “fake news” hysteria. Its list of “fake news” sites includes “hyperpartisan” sites. Its story contrasting “legitimate” mainstream media outlets, a category that somehow includes the Huffington Post, with a variety of right-leaning sites is a major piece of supporting evidence used in the fake news crusade.

Considering BuzzFeed’s history of fake news stories that fit its political narrative, it has no credibility fact checking anyone else. Examinations of BuzzFeed’s own methodology for its fake news article tore it into tiny little shreds. Its claim that fake news outperformed real news turned out to be… fake.

But what’s more important is how quickly the goal posts have been moved from fake news to conservative news, from fraudulent sites to fighting “clickbait” or “hyperpartisan” sites. And it’s clear that these are largely a euphemism for sites on the right that are outperforming the media.

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of The New York Times, and Dean Baquet, executive editor, issued their reflection to their readers. After reviewing it several times, I realized that the election of Donald J. Trump to the highest office in our country did much more than anyone could have anticipated. Not only did Trump fight the establishment, press and academia, and motivate American citizens to awaken from an eight-year period of fear and despair to demand a reversal of Obama’s executive orders, but he inspired the principals to make an unprecedented outreach to the public with a kind of desultory apology. They professed a purpose of rededication “to report to America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories…impartially and unflinchingly.” Although it was their use of biased analyses and writing assumptions over accuracies that diminished their readership, it is evident that they miss the point when they attempt to reassure their depleted readership that they can they can “rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage.” It is precisely that same coverage and same corruption that the American public will no longer tolerate.

Is it possible for a publisher and executive director to plan for a future without defining and owning up to the past? Will they re-educate the same staff writers who pandered to the establishment, the leftists and the globalists; the Soros- and Islamic-supported hatemongers of (BLM) Black Lives Matter, J-Street, (SJP) Students for Justice in Palestine and the (MSA) Muslim Student Association; the anti-Semitic revisionists; the corrupt elitists and academicians who delight in seeing their skewed views validated; the youths, immersed in socialism, who have been taught not how to think, but what to feel; and the populace that could not discern fact from propaganda?

Upon what standard lies were the Times readers nourished? When the Times repeatedly accused Israel of planning new “developments” northeast of Jerusalem that would allegedly split Judea-Samaria (West Bank), despite the map that was produced to prove the impossibility of their claim, a correction was never issued. When they claimed that singer-songwriter Eric Burdon was boycotting Israel, it was another falsehood not rescinded. When an article blamed Ariel Sharon’s entry into the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in 2000 for triggering the second intifada, he truth was that Sharon never entered the mosque and the second intifada was verified to have been planned in advance. When the Times repeatedly asserts that Gaza is occupied by Israel, but Israelis left in 2005 and Hamas is the sole occupier. When John Kerry spoke about brokering peace between Israel and Palestinians, and The New York Times amended it with a Palestinian narrative. Israel is routinely portrayed by the Times as being the obstacle to peace, while the Palestinians have consistently rejected all Israeli positions.

Over the final few weeks of his presidential campaign, at rallies all over the country, President-elect Donald Trump took up a new slogan: “Drain the swamp!” His audience, presumably tired of insider shenanigans from Washington, D.C., ate it up. They chanted the phrase in unison, cheering with relish.

There’s a good reason for this: Most normal, well-adjusted non-Beltway Americans harbor a vigorous and healthy disdain for Washington, D.C. As any well-intentioned visitor to our nation’s capital can tell you, the sights are indeed grand, and the history is inspiring. But sadly, between the trips to the Smithsonian and the National Gallery, one begins to grow rightly suspicious when passing countless upscale bars filled with sometimes-smug 28-year-olds getting hammered on $16 cocktails that were purchased, either directly or indirectly, with your own hard-earned tax dollars.

For most Americans, in other words, a glitzy Washington, D.C., is not a healthy Washington, D.C. A gleaming, prosperous industry town usually makes for a cheerful sight, but not when that “industry” revolves around taking other people’s money — truly mind-boggling amounts of money! — and transforming it into subsidized incompetence, black-hole accounting, and a leading export of sanctimony.

Ah, but never fear. The New York Times sees things differently from flyover America, as it tends to do. After a flurry of post-election stories bemoaning the various potential downsides of President Trump — some legitimate, some not — the storied Gray Lady decided to run with this doozy: “A Newly Vibrant Washington Fears That Trump Will Drain Its Culture.”

One could write a doctoral thesis regarding the multiple-layered ironies within this headline, or merely stare at it and marvel for days. As a bonus, it ran just one day after an equally spectacular headline: “Is Fashion’s Love Affair with Washington Over?” This piece, showing extra chutzpah, earnestly praised Hillary Clinton’s purple and black concession-speech pantsuit, which resembled the getup of a fancy comic-book villain, as “the end of what might have been an extraordinary relationship” between style and our nation’s capital. Okay.

This tone-deaf bonanza should come as no surprise, of course. In the election’s wake, even Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, noted that the paper was profoundly out of touch. “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to,” he said, “and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”

Well, folks, apparently neither is Washington, D.C. Once a staid, boring town plagued by a general sense of malaise, the nation’s capital, at least according to the Times, is now a progressive wonderland. “The administrations of two Bushes and a Clinton in between hardly had an effect on the city,” but thanks to the arrival of the Obamas, the city has undergone “an urban renaissance.”

According to former D.C. mayor Vincent Gray, Obama and his family “brought a level of dynamism that just wasn’t there before.” Among these reported wonders, we read, are SoulCycle, thriving independent bookstores that sell terrible Jonathan Franzen novels, and a bevy of happening 14th Street bars frequented by Obama staffers, with “their barhopping chronicled in the gossip pages.” (Side note: This last item is one of the reasons that the rest of America loves to hate D.C.)