Anchor Katy Tur appeared to insinuate that she was concerned Trump may have journalists he doesn’t like assassinated, drawing parallels between Vladimir Putin, who is accused of having some of his most vocal critics killed. During an interview with Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer, Tur asked, “As we know, there’s, since 2000, been a couple dozen suspicious deaths of journalists in Russia who came out against the government there. Donald Trump has made no secret about going after journalists and his distaste for any news that doesn’t agree with him here. Do you find that this is a dangerous path he is heading down?”870
The fact that Katy Tur is put on air is a prime example of MSNBC’s low standards and poor quality talent pool they have to work with. During an interview with Republican Congressman Francis Rooney of Florida, when Tur again was grasping at straws to keep the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories circulating, Rooney pointed out that it was President Obama who got caught on a hot mic telling the Russian president he’d have “more flexibility” after his election.871
Tur responded, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re referring to, Congressman.”
Rooney replies, “Remember when he leaned over at a panel discussion or in a meeting and he said, I’ll have more flexibility after the election? No one really ever pushed the president on what he meant by that, but I can only assume for a thug like Putin it would embolden him.”
Tur then immediately ended the interview.872 Any journalist should have known what he was talking about since it was a pretty stunning exchange to have been caught on tape, and what Obama meant was that he didn’t want to lose votes in his bid for re-election, so he had to wait until after the election to do what he really wanted with Russia. In response to online criticism of her ignorance she tweeted, “To be fair, I didn’t touch politics in 2012. I almost exclusively covered fires and shootings in NYC area.”873
This is the same ‘journalist’ who says that Trump has “weaponized” the term “fake news” and claimed that Trump had never denounced white supremacists during the 2016 campaign despite video compilations circulating on YouTube and Facebook showing him doing such things over and over again, as far back as the year 2000 when he denounced David Duke as a racist and a bigot.874 Tur’s father◦— it’s interesting to note◦— is also a reporter who now identifies as a woman, and once threatened to ‘curb stomp’ conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for using the wrong pronoun during a panel discussion Mr. Tur was involved in when he was called ‘sir.’875
MSNBC hasn’t gotten as much heat as CNN since the ‘fake news’ backlash began because it is a liberal network, whereas CNN was supposed to be impartial, and has recently changed its format from covering breaking news around the world to being an extension of the Democrat Party and a mouthpiece for George Soros.
Conclusion
The search for truth and investigating and verifying what a bona fide fact is, and what makes it different from a belief or an opinion has been an age-old philosophical quest known as Epistemology. What is knowledge? What is truth? How do we “know” something? While Socrates and Plato were searching for answers to these important questions over two thousand years ago, it’s a strange situation we find ourselves in when the ‘information age’ has helped to cause millions of people to drown in misinformation. It’s a paradox. Misinformation has become so pervasive in the information age that some say we’re living in a ‘post-truth’ world.
The Oxford Dictionary defines post-truth as “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” and the constant flow of media that is carefully crafted from multibillion-dollar corporate conglomerates has gotten constructing a post-truth world down to a science. Millions of people are mesmerized by an endless amount of information that bombards us constantly; wanting our attention, wanting us to believe something, wanting us to buy something, and wanting us to be something. It’s hard to tune it out and think for ourselves sometimes, and it seems that fewer people are even thinking at all.
Thankfully, however, many are waking up to this mass manipulation and have seen the new systems of media production and distribution as they were constructed, and remember what society was like before this information overload engulfed our world.
While some of the information I covered in this book may seem like common sense to those who have lived long enough to observe patterns over years or decades, it is important to clearly document what has happened so we can teach the younger generations about the details and the sophistication of information manipulation mechanisms and help them become media literate.
Even if you’ve suspected this kind of deception occurs, I’m confident that this book has provided you with countless pieces of evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are in an information war, and as technology advances, the tactics to abuse it will likely also continue to advance. Soon it may be difficult for even experts to prove that something is or is not true.876 James Madison once said, “A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”877
Unfortunately people have always, and will most likely continue, to believe that some hoaxes are real, and that some real events are hoaxes. Millions of Americans believe President Trump is a white supremacist and that police departments across the country are dominated by racist white men who enjoy killing black people. A large number of people still believe the moon landing was faked, and Flat Earthers even made a resurgence in early 2016, despite having limitless scientific research at their fingertips, they actually believe the Earth is flat and that NASA is lying to us; so it’s clear we have a serious problem with knowledge and information in today’s society. Others are more concerned with celebrity gossip than actual issues which directly impact their lives.
One thing we can do is prevent this problem from getting worse by being aware of the dangers of clickbait journalism, and knowing how most ‘news’ websites make money today. People should know why old subscription models are better◦— when people paid for monthly or yearly subscriptions to newspapers and magazines they liked and trusted instead of these companies relying on people sharing their articles on social media which encourages websites to generate page views by any means necessary.
The more shocking and sensational the headlines, the more likely people will click the link, bringing traffic to the site and revenue from the advertisers. Social media platforms are now the lifeblood of most ‘news’ sites which rely on people sharing their articles on Facebook or Twitter in hopes of duping people into clicking on them.
Owners of major media companies see the power their empires hold and often choose to use their outlets to influence people instead of informing them. From activist journalists to senior editors to CEOs, many in the big media companies can’t help but impose their personal political ideology on the world by using the infrastructure they have at their disposal. By building mountains out of molehills, through lying by omission, agenda-setting, framing stories and issues in a certain light, and by manipulating what is spread through social media by either limiting its reach or artificially amplifying it, the major media and tech companies try, and they do, influence the way people think and thus how they act.