The media’s obsession with “fake news” is obviously a mask for dismantling opposing media narratives. Fact check sites like Politifact and FactCheck.org have spent years “debunking” actual facts while pretending to objectively assess them. Meanwhile, the media continue to promote headlines that simply don’t reflect reality.
The latest example: on Tuesday, Bill O’Reilly spent a Talking Points segment talking about the left’s take on identity politics. He said:
This is all about race. The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with. Therefore white working class voters must be marginalized…white men have set up a system of oppression and that system must be destroyed…The left wants power taken away from the white establishment and they want a profound change in the way America is run.
In other words, O’Reilly was attempting to sum up the racist views of the left about America’s supposed “white establishment.” But instead, the left treated O’Reilly’s summation of leftism as an admission of American guilt or a lamentation of the failure of American racism. Here was Huffington Post’s headline: “O’Reilly: ‘The Left Wants Power Taken Away From The White Establishment.’” Joy Ann Reid tweeted, “This is horrifyingly honest, and @DavidCornDC is right to call it reminiscent of something you might’ve heard in Apartheid-era South Africa.” Former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, “That time Bill O’Reilly got his internal and external monologues confused.” Here were some of the other O’Reilly-related headlines: “O’Reilly: Liberals want to undermine ‘white establishment’” (New York Daily News); “O’Reilly Laments That Left Wants To Diminish Power Of ‘White Establishment’” (Talking Points Memo); “O’Reilly: Left wants ‘power taken away from the white establishment’” (Politico); “Bill O’Reilly rose to the defense of white privilege in America’s voting process” (Washington Post).
This is fake news at its finest.
But the entire left media ran with it, and portrayed O’Reilly’s comments as a recognition of America’s horrifying racial bias and celebration of it.
No wonder nobody trusts the media.
