3
11
n a Tedx Talk at the University of Nevada a couple of weeks ago (watch the video below) investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson revealed the origins of the “fake news” narrative that was aggressively pushed by the liberal media and Democrat politicians during the 2016 election, and how it was later flipped by President Donald Trump.
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.”
She noted that a month later, then-President Obama chimed in.
Google Issues Ultimatum to Conservative Website: Remove ‘Hateful’ Article or Lose Ad Revenue
“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.”
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.”