The "It's not her fault, the Russians made Trump win, fake news could collapse in a big heap over everything proposed by Democrats
and make Trump's takeover go smoothly.
Every day Democrats waste to prove Hillary and the
Democratic Committee lost by no fault of their own is a day that Republicans
grow in power.
Republicans will soon scurry about under a blanket of real news of how Hillary's "journalists" made up stories about Russia so that Hillary Democrats could save face.
The Intercept
"In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two
blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia
is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the
U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears
a humiliating Editor’s Note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims
of the story were fiction: the first Note of which was posted a full
two weeks later to the top of the original article, the other of which was
buried the following day at the bottom.
The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far
worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear
that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had
claimed. In addition to the Editor’s Note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid
story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate
article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian
government effort to target or hack the utility” and that there may not have
even been malware at all on this laptop.
But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper,
they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists – including those at
the Post – aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false
stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post
(the paper’s Executive Editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how
profitable the paper has become).
After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear
levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia
stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false
claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted
way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people
who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of
the retractions.
Baron himself, editorial leader of the Post, is a perfect
case study in this irresponsible tactic. It was Baron who went to Twitter
on the evening of November 24 to announce the Post’s exposé of the enormous
reach of Russia’s fake news operation, based on what he heralded as the
findings of “independent researchers.” Baron’s tweet went all over the place;
to date it has been re-tweeted more than 3,000 times, including by many journalists
with their own large followings:"
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