When CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a segment on their investigation into fake news, one of the examples they used was from a site called NTMY News which had the headline, “After Colonoscopy Reveals Brain Tumor, Donald Trump Drops from Race.” It’s obviously a joke about Trump having his head up his ass◦— get it? How could CBS possibly consider this ‘fake news?’ This was their evidence that social media had a fake news problem?
Another example they showed was from Celebtricity.com, which published a story titled, “Donald Trump Caught Snorting Cocaine by Hotel Staff,” which was an absurd article with no author’s name mentioned, and not even a date it was published. After about three seconds of reading the article pretty much everyone would have known that it was satire, not fake news. It began, “The Internet is buzzing today after white supremacist presidential candidate Donald Trump was caught by hotel staff snorting cocaine.” It continued, “Maria Gonzalez, an employee at the Folks INN & Suites Hotel in Phoenix, brought room service to his room witnessed it all.”33
It then attributes an absolutely insane quote to her, that you can’t help but laugh at, which says, “When I walked in I saw 3 naked prostitutes and maybe $100,000 in hundred dollars bills and a mountain of white powder on the table, I thought there was a dog on the floor asleep but it was his hair piece, he was bald and sweating like crazy. I asked him where to put the food and he asked me ‘did I wanna take a hit’ (snort some coke). I told him no, but I’ll take some of that money, [and] he called me a free loader, told me to get the fuck out his room and go back to my country.”34 The article was poorly written with awful grammar and was a complete joke, but 60 Minutes used it as another example of ‘fake news.’
Just because people click on a sensational headline from a fake news story, doesn’t mean they actually believe it! While people posting links to these stories on Facebook may have generated traffic from curious readers who clicked on them, few people doing so were actually duped by them, and most just got a good laugh. As you will see, studies were conducted into fake news about the election, and yes some of it fooled people and went viral, but it actually had no effect on how people voted.35
What’s far more sinister than some random fake news site or even trying to spoof a real one like the ABCNews.com.co or the CNN.com.de sites, are major mainstream media outlets that millions of people trust, actually reporting fake news, because their stories get spread far and wide across social media since they come from brand name ‘news sites’ like CNN or The Washington Post.
Former London mayor Ken Livingstone once stated, “The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.”36 And as you will see, those are often the real monsters we need to be concerned about.
Because the liberal media perpetuated the myth that Hillary Clinton would surely become the next president, they received a devastating blow to their credibility on election night. The Hill ran a headline reading, “The biggest loser in 2016? The mainstream media and journalism,” and in the article stated, “There are many losers in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory. They include Hollywood, pollsters, the Bush family and the GOP’s donor class, and neocons. But the biggest losers are the mainstream media (MSM) and journalism itself.”37
The New York Times had a headline asking “Can The Media Recover from This Election?”38 Fortune magazine asked, “How Much Will Cable News’ Record Ratings Drop Post-Election?”39 Then a survey conducted by CBS and Vanity Fair magazine found that Americans now saw mainstream media as the most unethical business, more so than the pharmaceutical companies, and the banking industry.40 Another survey from Monmouth University in New Jersey found that 6 out of 10 Americans believe that the mainstream media regularly reports fake news.41
Why weren’t half of the hosts and contributors fired from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC after the election? How could these networks keep such incompetent and out of touch people on the payroll after everything they had been reporting for so long was so wrong? What’s more disturbing is instead of ‘cleaning up their act’ after their embarrassing election coverage, the networks started getting more extreme and more biased by the day.
The anti-Trump mania exploded on cable news, the Big Three broadcast networks, late night comedy shows, and even on tech and sports websites like CNET, Gizmodo, and Deadspin when the stories had nothing to do with tech or sports at all. The liberal media was now in an existential crisis and had to try to explain to their viewers how their reporting had been so inaccurate. Instead of admitting their failures, they immediately started inventing excuses◦— first placing blame on ‘racist white people,’ and then on fake news spreading ‘lies’ about Hillary Clinton, and then they finally settled on one grandiose unifying conspiracy theory◦— that the Russians were behind it all.
One of the first things mainstream media began doing was labeling rising conservative social media stars as white nationalists or white supremacists. The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, Wired magazine, and even celebrity blogger Perez Hilton all mentioned me by name, trying to tie me to David Duke, Richard Spencer, and the white nationalist movement, even though I never said I was a supporter of the Alt-Right, and to the contrary have stated on numerous occasions that I’m not.
The Guardian’s headline read, “Former Ku Klux Klan Leader and US Alt-Right Hail Election Result.”42 The article claimed, “Members of America’s alt-right reacted with glee to the news of Trump’s victory. The provocative conservative movement, largely active online, has been closely associated with Trump’s campaign.” It then quoted tweets from Alex Jones, Michael Savage, David Duke, and me! I immediately sent them a cease and desist and threatened to sue them for defamation so they removed me from the article and added a note on the bottom stating, “This article was amended on 16 November 2016 to remove a quoted individual who was mistakenly included.”43
Another outlet also issued a retraction after I threatened legal action, saying, “An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Mark Dice as an ‘alt-right’ commentator. He is not and news.com.au sincerely apologizes for this error.”44
The Establishment media were so furious that a whole group of social media savvy conservatives like myself were amassing huge followings that they tried to take us down using one of the oldest tricks in the liberal playbook◦— smearing us as racists.
One independent journalist decided to sue a reporter at Fusion, a social justice warrior cable channel, after she was accused of making a “white supremacist” hand sign, which was in reality just the “okay” hand sign which President Trump regularly uses.45 The Independent in London also ran a story making the same absurd claim about the woman’s ‘okay’ gesture being a “white supremacist hand sign.”46 The ‘hand sign’ story was laughed at online by Trump supporters who couldn’t believe how crazy it was, and some commented that it signaled the “death of journalism.”