Fake news is profitable.
The New York Times hit piece on the Comey memo earned the paper its most concurrent readers per second. Pretty good for a piece about a piece of paper that the leftist paper had never even seen and which was, supposedly, described to it by one of Comey’s associates.
But that didn’t stop it from racking up over 6 million views.
Media fake news isn’t just an agenda. It’s enormously profitable. Hit pieces powered by anonymous sources bring in over 100,000 readers in an age when live is king. For individual reporters, finding a source, real or fake, that can back up the left’s Trump conspiracy theories can put them on the map.
The Comey story comes from Michael Schmidt who made a name by supposedly finding documents relating to media claims of a “Haditha Massacre” in a Baghdad junkyard where “an attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.” It was dashing and also very convenient.
The claims didn’t hold up in court. Most of the Marine heroes who were dragged through the mud over Haditha had their cases dropped. One case dragged out and ultimately came out to very little. But the New York Times cashed in. And Schmidt did much better out of it than Cpl. Stephen Tatum.
Haditha was the Times’ discount version of Mai Lai. Now in a desperate effort to reclaim the glory days of the media left, the New York Times and the Washington Post are trying to recreate Watergate.
It’s no coincidence that many of the big vital hit pieces aimed at President Trump have come out of the Washington Post. At the end of last year, the paper owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos went on a hiring spree. The goal was “quick turnaround investigative reporting”.
Washington Post editor Marty Baron explained, “We are creating a rapid response investigative team to do investigative stories more quickly, using a lot of the digital tools that are available to us now. We hugely value the longer, deeper investigations as well, but we want to supplement that with quicker investigations that can have an impact almost immediately.”
How do you do “quicker investigations”? How can you predict that an investigation will pay off rapidly? The best way to make sure that your investigation will quickly deliver a major story is to fake it.
Those quick investigative stories haven’t been coming from digital tools. They are based on anonymous sources. Real investigative reporting takes time. But a fake news story full of innuendo backed by a bunch of anonymous sources that repeat what “everyone” in the media already knows is true, is quick.
That’s what having “an impact almost immediately” means. You don’t do the hard work. You fake it.
The Washington Post has racked up viral hit fake news stories backed by anonymous sources. And it’s paying off. The Post claimed a traffic increase of 50% at the end of last year with a 75% increase in new subscribers. The official line is that Jeff Bezos has transformed the Post’s digital strategy. The reality was conveyed by its new anti-Trump slogan. “Democracy dies in darkness.” The silly slogan was an exercise in branding. It announced that this was the paper of choice for “researched” attacks on Trump.
Now the Post has hit $100 million in digital revenues and added hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. All of this is quite a change from a few years ago when the Post was losing $50 million a year and Baron was talking about shrinking the newsroom.
