Attkisson pointed out that "fake news" in the form of tabloid
journalism and false media narratives has always been around under
different names.
But she noticed that in 2016, there seemed to be a concerted effort by
the MSM to focus America's attention on the idea of "fake news" in
conservative media. That looked like a propaganda effort to Attkisson,
so she did a little digging and traced the new spin to a little
non-profit called "First Draft," which, she said, "appears to be the
about the first to use 'fake news' in its modern context."
"On September 13, 2016, First Draft announced a partnership to tackle
malicious hoaxes and fake news reports," Attkisson explained. "The goal
was supposedly to separate wheat from chaff, to prevent unproven
conspiracy talk from figuring prominently in internet searches. To
relegate today's version of the alien baby story to a special internet
oblivion."
"He insisted in a speech that he too thought somebody needed to step in
and curate information of this wild, wild West media environment," she
said, pointing out that "nobody in the public had been clamoring for
any such thing."
Digging
deeper, she discovered that Google was one of the big donors behind
First Draft's "fake news" messaging. Google's parent company, Alphabet,
was run by Eric Schmidt, who happened to be a huge Hillary Clinton
supporter.
Yet suddenly the subject of fake news was dominating headlines all over
America as if the media had received "its marching orders," she
recounted. "Fake news, they insisted, was an imminent threat to
American democracy."
Attkisson, who has studied the manipulative moneyed interests behind
the media industry, said that "few themes arise in our environment
organically." She noted that she always found it helpful to "follow the
money."
"What if the whole anti-fake news campaign was an effort on somebody's
part to keep us from seeing or believing certain websites and stories
by controversializing them or labeling them as fake news?" Attkisson
posited.
Digging deeper, she discovered that Google was one of the big donors
behind First Draft's "fake news" messaging. Google's parent company,
Alphabet, was run by Eric Schmidt, who happened to be a huge Hillary
Clinton supporter.
Schmidt "offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top
multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft around the
start of the election cycle," Attkisson said. "Not surprisingly,
Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her
surrogate David Brock of Media Matters privately told donors he was the
one who convinced Facebook to join the effort."
Attkisson declared that "the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a
propaganda campaign." Attkisson added, "But something happened that
nobody expected. The anti-fake news campaign backfired. Each time
advocates cried fake news, Donald Trump called them 'fake news' until
he'd co-opted the term so completely that even those who [were]
originally promoting it started running from it -- including the
Washington Post," which she noted later backed away from using the term.
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