Sharyl Attkisson explained in a TEDx talk at the University of Nevada that the Fake News narrative pushed by Democrat media and politicians began with a small nonprofit called First Draft. Google was the biggest funder of the push on First Draft. Hillary Clinton’s good friend and campaign ally Eric Schmidt, headed up Alphabet, the parent company of left-biased Google.
This does not appear to be an organic movement, few of these movements are organic in our environment.
“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 the wheat from the 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.”
That took place at the beginning of the election cycle.
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A month later, Barack Obama was complaining about freedom of speec. He called the Internet a “wild, wild West media environment.” Although no one was calling for it, he insisted somebody needed to step in and curate information of the media.
“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to.”
It was obvious from the beginning, they planned to influence people with their propaganda. Ms. Attkisson isn’t telling us anything we haven’t noticed.
Ms. Attkisson asked a mostly rhetorical question. “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.
While Ms. Attkisson believes Trump now owns the fake news narrative, it is true that Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even Reddit, run by liberals and leftists, own the vehicles of communication. They control what the people see, hence what they believe, just as media has done and continues to do at a far more frenzied pace.
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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Trump’s usurpation of the term was a “hostile takeover.”
She said people need to be on the lookout for the following two criteria:
- When the media tries to shape or censor facts and opinions rather than report them.
- When so many in the media are reporting the same stories, promulgating the same narratives, relying on the same sources — even using the same phrases.
If everyone is saying the same thing, consider it an organized movement or campaign. She adds that the shutting down of conservative media is real.
“Media literacy” is the new buzzword where liberal elites tell everyone else whom they should trust.
“Media literacy advocates are busy trying to get state laws passed to require that their version of media literacy be taught in public schools.”
They join with agenda-driven academics to promote it.
Unsurprisingly, there’s big money involved.
The left has gradually taken over our forms of communication and social media is the last bastion. They have control of education, entertainment, the arts, and there is little room for dissenting opinions. They have made being a traditional American into an oddity, a dangerous movement.
