Monday, April 15, 2019

Mark Twain’s take on fake news




CNN’s White House reporter got an award this week – from, of course, the circled wagons of a largely discredited media – that largely hides its misreporting behind the First Amendment like a snake oil salesman hides behind a fake medical cure. Media keeps trying to sell us distorted information as truth, plaguing us with distractions. We get an unrelenting stream of half-truths via our smart phones from CNN, the Washington Post, and The New York Times and if you can imagine even HBO -- and somehow believe we’ve been informed. This sleight of hand would make Nazi propagandists green (yes, and I mean it in that way, too) with envy.
The news biz has become so slanted for so long it’s almost impossible to find an honest journalist these days, and we may have to reach all the way back to Mark Twain to find the last one (and he may well be the only one to that point since Benjamin Franklin.
Mark Twain, who was a white, straight, southern male, has come under fire from the ridiculously phobic left these days partly because he managed to write the only legitimate anti-slavery novel that stopped short of becoming propaganda.
Once jailed for taking on corrupt political figures in California, Twain fully understood just how corrupt media could become as well, and seemed to predict the kind of crap we get from a media in league with Democrats.
“It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive,” Twain wrote “There are people who think honesty is always the best policy. This is superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.”
This appears to predict what we now see coming out of a Democratic-controlled media, which hides truth behind false facts – or perhaps better, tells half truths that they sell us snake oil-like as the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and the only crap fit to print.
Media has become more adept at creating the illusion of being objective, when there is nothing behind the curtain except manipulation and distortion. While the 19th Century had more than its fair share of yellow journalists, the modern crop appears to be suffering from a bad case of hepatitis, and as another old saying goes, “pisses on your leg and tells you it’s raining.”
And because media is selling this misinformation to people who already believe the stuff they’re peddling, truth is not an option, and objective reporting is not profitable.
We like to think that intelligent people have the option to turn off radios, TVs even smart phones rather than accept these bogus providers of snake oil as legitimate sources of news. But, unfortunately, most intellectuals are married to these skewed sources of news, choosing only to read papers, listen to news report or follow research they already agree with, and so further indoctrinate themselves, believing they are really educated. They read rags like The New Yorker or Atlantic which they already know will never give them the other side of any story other than the one that is drenched with liberal propaganda or such intellectuals will delve into questionable anti-white books on slavery, leaving them ripe for when Democrats come to them for reparations.
Being a legitimately educated person means you have to challenge all that crap college professors hand out, even at the risk of flunking out. Better to flunk out in college than to turn into a Democratic flunky or worse when you get out. Questioning authority means questioning those aspects of authority you think you agree with since schools do their best to brainwash you from birth.
Twain also went on to note that loud obnoxious people like anti-Semite in Minnesota or that crazy nut on Long Island is not guarantee of truth.
“Noise proves nothing,” Twain wrote. “Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she’s laid an asteroid.”




email to Al Sullivan

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