Last week, Harvard released a new research guide on “fake news.”
“Fake news,” of course, is the source of all evil, according to the Left. It’s only thanks to lies that Donald Trump was elected! Instead of targeting stories that are completely false, however, the Left applies the label of “fake news” to outlets that report factual stories but draw political conclusions from them — in other words, they call everything with which they disagree “fake news.”
Which means that their talk of “fake news” is actually fake news.
Of course, the largest “fake news” item of all is that “objective” news sources aren’t biased in their coverage. They obviously are, and it’s why conservatives have warmed to President Trump’s labeling left-leaning outlets such as CNN “fake news” even if CNN isn’t actually reporting anything factually false but merely drawing convenient leftist inferences from overblown coverage of core facts.
Nonetheless, the Harvard guide, written by “social justice” professor Melissa Zimdars of Merrimack College, purports to compile a handy-dandy list of fake-news sites to avoid. The list provides ten different ways to label the stories on such sites:
- fake news (actual fake news)
- satire
- extreme bias (“sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts”)
- conspiracy theory
- rumor mill
- state news
- junk science (“sources that promote pseudoscience, metaphysics, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims”)
- hate news
- clickbait
- proceed with caution (“sources that may be reliable but whose contents require further verification”)
Two other indicators are used for leftist sites that meet Zimdars’s politically correct standards:
- political (“sources that provide generally verifiable information in support of certain points of view or political orientations”)
- credible (“sources that circulate news and information in a manner consistent with traditional and ethical practices in journalism”)
So, for example, AlterNet.org, a far-left site, is labeled “political” and “credible.” Here’s one of their top headlines as I write this, by one John Feffer: “The Trump Dystopian Nightmare: Nuclear War, Climate Change, and a Clash of Civilizations Are All on the Horizon.” National Review is labeled unknown. The website I run, the Daily Wire, is labeled with “extreme bias,” as is the Daily Signal, the website of the Heritage Foundation, as well as the Drudge Report, which is essentially a linker site. The Daily Caller is called “political,” “clickbait,” and “unreliable.” The Blaze is called “political” and “clickbait.” The list doesn’t mention Barack Obama’s favorite outlet, Vox; it doesn’t mention Slate or Salon, either.
No wonder conservatives don’t trust the media — or the supposed media police. They’re too busy upholding the myth of mainstream-media objectivity to be concerned with the truth, which is that every outlet has its bias, and that we’re all better off admitting our bias openly rather than slathering facts in opinions and then conflating the two. I’ll proudly state that National Review and the Daily Wire are more honest than CNN; both outlets have an editorial point of view reflected in their content, but neither mistakes news for opinion or opinion for news. The supposedly objective outlets, by hiding behind the façade of that faux objectivity, constantly conflate their opinions with their news.
Here’s the reality: We’re not all going to be able to agree on narrative. But we should strive to find the facts we can discuss together.
So, how do we identify the facts?
