Do we have any responsibilities as American citizens?
Do we have a responsibility to be informed, for instance, and to know what we’re talking about? To look for truth?
One of the inconceivable stories in this inconceivable year was that Hillary Clinton has been operating a child-abuse ring in a Washington DC pizza place named Comet Ping Pong.
That little howler convinced a North Carolina man named Edgar Maddison Welch to drive to Washington to save the children. Fortunately Welch, didn’t hurt anybody when he opened fire in the restaurant, and he surrendered to police.
That’s only one example of the trash being spread on the internet right now. But people have been gobbling it up.
Conspiracy theories aren’t new, and no amount of evidence seems to matter. There are still people who believe zany stories about the 9/11 attacks, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the US landing on the moon. Accusations still make the rounds that the murder of 20 little children and six adults at Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax.
Fortunately, most of the people believing that stuff don’t do anything as dangerous as Edgar Maddison Welch did. But some of them are causing plenty of harm. The father of one child who died in Newtown has been repeatedly harassed by people insisting that he prove that his son is dead. Comet Ping Pong’s owners and employees have gotten death threats. Employees of another pizza place and a bookstore near Comet Ping Pong have been accused of being involved in the fictitious Clinton child-abuse ring.
The Comet Ping Pong story apparently originated on a white supremacist website and then spread like wildfire. Also spreading like wildfire: stories that Hillary Clinton is a murderer. One of the folks spreading those tales is syndicated talk-radio show host Alex Jones, who has insisted that Clinton “has personally murdered and chopped up and raped” children, and that dozens of close associates of both Clintons have died mysteriously.
Earlier this month, I was astonished to hear Marc Fisher – one of the Washington Post reporters covering the Comet Ping Pong story – maintain on the PBS NewsHour that the folks swallowing this claptrap are smart people.
“You know,” Fisher said, “I think there is a tendency to dismiss the people who spread these stories as uneducated or simply not understanding the technology they’re dealing with.”
“Anything but the case,” Fisher continued. “They tend to be quite educated people. They tend to be people who are very well-connected online.”
“Quite educated”? No well-educated person would believe this stuff. And I can’t imagine that things will get better after Donald Trump takes office. The president-elect lies with abandon. Some of his close advisers have insisted with a straight face that there’s no such thing as truth any more, that what’s true to one person isn’t necessarily true to another. Facts don’t matter.
Way too many Americans seem to feel they have no responsibility to think for themselves, no responsibility to seek the truth. It’s convenient to blame the bloggers, blame Fox News, blame Facebook for perpetuating this stuff. But that’s a cop-out. The primary responsibility lies with each American citizen.
It’s one thing to disagree with a candidate’s stand on things like abortion rights, school choice, what the US should be doing in Syria, and whether taxes are too high. It’s another to believe that a presidential candidate is operating a sex ring in a pizza place.
A lot of media folks and political leaders seem worried about whether Russia has been messing around with our democracy. I’m worried, too. But I’m far more worried, frankly, about the state of the American intellect, about our unwillingness to challenge what we read and hear unless it reinforces what we believe.
Truth does matter, our president-elect’s thoughts to the contrary. But it will matter in our democracy only if we want it to.
This article appears in Dec 28, 2016 – Jan 3, 2017.
Here is Monday’s Ziggy cartoon on fake news:
http://www.gocomics.com/ziggy/2016/12/26
There has to be some effective ways to counter lies, distortions and biases, right?
The truth is we all distort things in politics and in life. Are we willing to present both sides? Are we willing to organize and protest? If not now, when?
The Right is organized with Fox news, Rush Limbaugh on the radio, etc. The Left is scattered and divided.
“United we stand. Divided we fall.” (Aesop)
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“But Im far more worried, frankly, about the state of the American intellect, about our unwillingness to challenge what we read and hear unless it reinforces what we believe.”
Says someone who uses the NY Times and Washington Post for their facts.
“No well-educated person would believe this stuff. And I cant imagine that things will get better after Donald Trump takes office. The president-elect lies with abandon.”
(Mary Anna says)
How and why do you connect this fake news to Donald Trump? Please explain your logic for saying that you can’t imagine that things will get better after Trump takes office.
Your statements always seem to be so convoluted and scattered. Please help us uneducated ones, connect the dots in your thinking.
Then you go on to attack our soon to be president, saying that, ” he lies with abandon.”
Have you been misinformed by your unnamed news sources?
Are you aware that your vitriol against our democratically elected president sounds hypocritical?
You denounce these crazy news stories, yet you publish the same thing in your paper. What gives?
I wish, I wish, I wish that I could be half as “intelligent” as you guys on the left, but I was lucky to graduate from HS. I attended the school of hard knocks and still can’t seem to graduate. But when I read all this garbage from “intelligent” people I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. My classmates and I already know how to decipher a fake news outlet… ehem!
“Truth does matter” Yes it does Mary Anna. Yes it does.
Just think – only four more years of this drivel coming up from Mary Anna. It’s the same old story with the “alt-left:” denigrate anyone that does not agree with you as being too stupid to have an opinion. Rinse. Repeat endlessly.
Large swaths of the country have caught on to this scam from the alt-left, and aren’t buying it this time around. This time is different; the fake news left no longer has the power to decide elections on its own.
Donald Trump has proven time and time again to be a source of lies. He knows more than the generals. Climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese.
Funny to watch or listen to. Terrifying to think of the power he is about to fall into.
Throughput the campaign the right was outraged by news stories many claimed were false attacks on Trump, even if Trump was clearly the source of the information.
Tom I won’t defend everything Trump has said. But your candidate also claimed to be non partisan with her recount yet , by coincidence only challenged states Trump won. The opinion Mary Anna expressed was that Trump supporters only listened to media that supported their side. I think your comment may be evidence that the bias works on both sides
You are absolutely correct when you say that, “No well educated person would believe this stuff.” If one were “educated” in a system influenced under collectivist teachings, yes, the dissonance would be great when confronted with these “zany stories.” And when you have no evidence to present to the contrary, just start name calling, ie. white supremacist. Your conditioning under the influence of cultural Marxism shows quite evidently here. It will take some time to unlearn. I wish you luck.
Fgf. Jill Stein did not select the states she fought to have recounted. The states targeted for recount were the states that showed the greatest deviation between polls, exit polls and actual results. Also computer geniuses ran statistical data modeling and also picked the same three states. Stein didn’t pulls the states out of a hat.
The media I gather my news from doesn’t matter if I am watching Trump speak without the media spin added in. Besides, I happen to think nearly all media sources were and still are in love with Trump.
Tom do you have a link to that information?
That’s something I had never seen
Fgf. https://www.google.com/search?ei=fRRlWJjJM…
Tom the link does provide a reasonable justification for the recount. Both experts named appear highly credible.
However I do not believe that the 7 million dollars raised by Jill Stein would have been possible if states that Clinton won were included.
Most of the funding came from Clinton supporters hoping for an election reversal.
If Trump had lost I have no doubt he would have his own experts providing a plausible explanation to recount only the states he lost.
Fgf. My impression was many Clinton supporters weren’t paying attention and didn’t know about Stein’s recount effort.
Whatever happened to truth in advertising and laws to protect us from slander? Is no one taken advantage of these? I have become a fact check junkie and am not afraid to tell people that they are speaking or posting falsehoods online. Americans are, in general, lazy when it comes to social media. They will post any ridiculous thing they see. It needs to stop. The people that spawn this false news in the first place need to be held accountable for their actions. If we let it happen without trying to correct the problem, we are all to blame.
Obama hasn’t exactly been our best role model for how to deal with fake news. The lesson is that if you publicly mock the person who’s been using fake news against you, then that person might decide to run for president and win.
I don’t know anything about the pizza child sex ring, but it pays to be skeptical of the official line.
Kennedy, King, Robert Kennedy (among others) all had very strange details surrounding their assassinations. Specifically in the case of King a Kentucky court found the govt had misled the public and engaged in a conspiracy to hide facts.
Members of the 9/11 Commission felt they had been set up to fail after receiving less $ to piece together the events of that day than Starr had rec’d to prosecute the Lewinsky affair. Anyone looking into 9/11 for more than 30 minutes will quickly find they didn’t previously know a lot about any of the facts because the media didn’t report it. If you spend 2 hours researching 9/11 you’ll need a far greater leap of faith to buy the govt explanation than to put at least some credence into the “conspiracy theorists”.
By contrast the more one looks into Sandyhook, the more the official story makes sense – the information is out there, but we’d be fools to trust the media or govt in this country. As with other third world countries, our media is bought and paid for and our govt hides more than it reveals – neither have any accountability.
The Fourth Estate in this country is nothing more than entertainment mixed with a smattering of lies, half truths, and the odd isolated factoid. We have to take information where it is found and do our own leg-work.
I seem to remember that Iraq had WMD (Bush), Romney was not paying any taxes (Reid), and Benghazi was caused by a video (Obama, Clinton, Rice), so Trump’s lies seem to keep him in good company. Politicians lie incessantly, and the media is more than willing t believe the lies of the ones they support.