Fake News

It isn't just a conspiracy theory anymore. Michael Goodwin: The left-wing media created their own crisis, now have to pay the price for attacking Donald Trump

Only one in three adults say they have some or a great deal of confidence in mainstream media reports, according to an October Gallup survey.

If they were just incompetent, that would be one thing. I still wouldn't trust them, but you can't hate people for being stupid. You can be annoyed by them, or try to instruct them, but not hate them. These Professional Journalists™ aren't stupid; they're liars.

The settlement with ABC News (owned by Disney) and George Stephanopoulos has been in the news. They had to pay Trump 16 million dollars for a Presidential Library and legal fees. And they had to apologize.

Ouch — the apology surely stung much more than the money.

Then CNN, in the person of Clarissa Ward, and a cast of a few, stated that helped it helped free a prisoner of the Syrian government. Of course that wasn't true. And this isn't the first time that Clarissa Ward has been accused of having a strange relationship with the truth.

The woman behind the Duke rape scandal has finally admitted that she made the whole thing up in 2006, destroying lives for her 15 minutes of fame. She apologized.

Will the media also apologize?

Don’t hold your breath.

Then there is the Des Moines Register and a strange poll released just before the election.

Findings by the pollster, Ann Selzer, that were released three days before the election showed Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points. It was a potential earthquake since all other polls predicted Trump would win the state easily, and the Selzer poll gave Dems hopes that Iowa would flip blue and that other states would too.

In fact, the poll was off by an astounding 16 points, with Trump winning Iowa by 13 points.

Trump is suing over election interference.

Selzer and the Register have denied the charge, but her explanation for the giant size of her mistake is less than persuasive.

According to Semafor, she suggested her poll might have served to “energize and activate Republican voters.”

You could go back farther than that of course. Dan Rather and RatherGate (Ra^therGate?) comes to mind. But the granddaddy of them all is Walter Duranty of the New York Times, and his simping for the Communists in Russia, and hiding all evidence, and discrediting reports, of the Holodomor. That was the time Stalin & Company killed between 4 million and 7 million Ukrainians, perhaps more. But hey, Duranty liked Communism and didn't want to see it cast in a bad light. (4 million dead might do just that.)

For a few more cases of Fake News see this link from 2016: Get These Fake News Sites Off Your Feed Now. New York Times, and Boston Globe, and more.