Editor’s note: since CNN has been dominating the headlines over the past week, we thought we should make this week’s “6 random things for Friday” a fake news edition.
News Story of the Day: over the last several months, we have been inundated with this: 17 intelligence agencies say Russia hacked the election. Whenever somebody was asked to name these 17 intelligence agencies, nobody could, noting that they would give the answer later. It turns out that this was fake news: there was no consensus among 17 intelligence agencies, as The New York Times recently conceded.
Here is a correction made by the newspaper (emphasis ours):
A White House Memo article on Monday about President Trump’s deflections and denials about Russia referred incorrectly to the source of an intelligence assessment that said Russia orchestrated hacking attacks during last year’s presidential election. The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.
This fib was constantly repeated by the news media, Trump opponents and Hillary Clinton herself. Will they be held responsible? Nope.
Chart of the Day: for years, as highlighted in the epic film “Network,” the media landscape has been dominated by a handful of groups. Thanks to the Internet, this has changed, and these entities do not have a stranglehold on the narrative and the story anymore. Here is a chart that shows who controls what:
Illustration of the Day: here is a perfect depiction of the average CNN reporter:
Quote of the Day: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won a Nobel Prize in the 1970s and informed the world about the Soviet Union’s gulags, had a great warning to the west pertaining to the press and journalists:
“You know, that is one of the consequences of the weak sense of responsibility of the press. The press does not feel responsibility for its judgments. It makes judgments and attaches labels with the greatest of ease. Mediocre journalists simply make headlines of their conclusions, which suddenly become generally accepted.”
Tweet of the Day: there is a lot to criticize President Trump for, particularly his economic and foreign policies. But when the media drools over one president and provides nothing but negative coverage for another, this is biased reporting and one rule of fake news. Here is a tweet from PragerU:
Unprecedented negativity. @CNN @abcnews @CBSNews @NBCNews#FakeNewsCNN #FakeNews pic.twitter.com/LbpGdQ2VjK
— PragerU (@prageru) 30 June 2017
Video of the Day: James O’Keefe of Project Veritas has done it again. This time, he has a CNN associate producer talking about 90 percent of his colleagues believe President Donald Trump is “batshit crazy” and that American voters are stupid. With attitudes like this, how do you expect to produce objective, fair and honest news? If this is how they behave today, just imagine what happened behind the scenes before the Internet.
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