Let's just start with an interview of once big-time network news anchor Brian Williams who was back on network television covering the recent election.
Q: Mr. Williams, how many dead bodies was it again you saw floating past your Ritz Carlton hotel room during Katrina? How deep was the water again outside your landlocked hotel? And run that dangerous helicopter story by us again, if you will. You know, the one former military people who were there proved you lied about and you gave a phony public apology on national television.
And we need USA Today to tell us how many completely fabricated phony stories one of their foreign correspondents a few years back filed. The number if you knew would surprise before his editors caught on or got caught. And while we're at it Washington Post, let's go over that Bob Woodward intern story who got an award for a totally phony story she wrote about an inner city young person. It was both PC and PF--politically correct and also patently false.
And we're just scratching the surface here. MSM has a long history of fabricating the news. But somehow or other we don't think we're going to hear from these folks. Here's an excerpt from a 2007 piece on the subject from the Columbia Journalism Review, hardly a right wing organization.
www.cjr.org/feature/before_jon_stewart.php
Fake news has been with us for a long time. Documented cases predate the modern media, reaching as far into the past as a bogus eighth century edict said to be the pope-friendly words of the Roman emperor Constantine. There are plenty of reports of forgeries and trickeries in British newspapers in the eighteenth century. But the actual term “fake news”—two delicious little darts of malice (and a headline-ready sneer if ever there was one)—seems to have arisen in late nineteenth century America, when a rush of emerging technologies intersected with news gathering practices during a boom time for newspapers.
The impact of new technology is hard to overestimate. The telegraph was followed by trans-Atlantic and transcontinental cables, linotype, high-speed electric presses and halftone photo printing—wireless gave way to the telephone. The nation, doubled in population and literacy from Civil War days, demanded a constant supply of fresh news, so the media grew additional limbs as fast as it could. Newly minted news bureaus and press associations recruited boy and girl reporters from classified ads—“Reporting And Journalism Taught Free Of Charge”—and sent their cubs off to dig up hot stories, truth be damned, to sell to the dailies.
By the turn of the century, the preponderance of fakery was reaching disturbing proportions, according to the critic and journalist J.B. Montgomery-M’Govern. “Fake journalism,” he wrote in Arena, an influential monthly of the period, “is resorted to chiefly by news bureaus, press associations and organizations of that sort, which supply nearly all the metropolitan Sunday papers and many of the dailies with their most sensational ‘stories.’”
Montgomery-M’Govern delivers a taxonomy of fakers’ techniques, including the use of the “stand-for,” in which a reputable person agrees to an outrageous lie for the attendant free publicity; the “combine,” in which a group of reporters concoct and then verify a false story; the “fake libel” plant, in which editors are duped by conspirators into running false and litigious articles; the “alleged cable news” story, in which so-called “foreign reports,” dashed off in the newsroom or a downtown press association, are topped with a foreign dateline and published as truth. The editors of huge Sunday editions, with their big appetites for the juiciest stuff (what M-M calls “Sunday stories”) naturally set the bar lower for veracity than they did for hot-blooded emotional impact.
One could easily add to those fake techniques a journalism staple, the attribute "a source close to "or "an un-named source said...." Once upon a time when the three main networks controlled nearly everything, they lied to the population on a consistent basis. Their favorite method, fake news stories.
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