Obama Signs Executive Order Banning Fake News

The headline of this post is of course a fake news headline. I made it up.

I want to say "fooled ya!" But I probably didn't.

In fact, though, I took the post's header photo from a real fake news story titled "Obama Signs Executive Order Banning the Pledge of Allegiance in Schools Nationwide." It appeared on the real fake news site abcnews.com.

Yes, there is such a thing as real fake news.

As opposed to fake fake news.

Fake news has recently been a burning topic in the media. Even Obama referred to it.

He really did.

It's been identified as a kind of scourge and perhaps the reason why Trump won the election.

Trump voters rely on fake news, you see. Most of us are rural and only got internet hookups a few years ago. Plus it's difficult to operate a computer or at least check sources while clinging to a bible in one hand and a gun in the other.

With me, it's a cocktail and a cigar but still.

Speaking of fake fake news, the whole controversy is actually almost entirely fake.

J.E. Dyer of the conservative website Liberty Unyielding analyzed one of the most prominent fake-news-is-a-scourge stories (from Buzzfeed) and found that if you actually looked at the examples discussed, virtually all of them were cases of perfectly ordinary interpretation or opinion, not fake news in the sense of abcnews.com.

And yes, they were mostly examples of conservative interpretation or opinion.

Now that many sources within the "mainstream" media have been exposed by Wikileaks as clandestinely collaborating with one side in a political election, there's already a counterattack against the rival "alternative" media. And that counterattack is based on lies.

Not interpretation or opinion but lies. Read the Dyer piece or the recent article by Paul Crookston at National Review which comes to essentially the same conclusions.

Is fake news, even real fake news, destroying the integrity of our democracy (or at least what's left of it)? No, but you are very often being lied to.

And not by abc.news.co, whose entire site is one big wink (or at least you'll recognize it as one big wink if you have even slightly more sense than, say, your average Hamilton chorus member).

You know who the liars are.

Don't be fooled.