Fake MSM whines about “fake news”

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Domainfax is really revving up on the post-truth thing, over the weekend profiling a ‘fake truther’ via WaPo:

Fewer than 2000 readers are on his website when Paris Wade, 26, awakens from a nap, reaches for his laptop and thinks he needs to, as he puts it, “feed” his audience.

“Man, no one is covering this TPP thing,” he says after seeing an article suggesting that President Obama wants to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership before he leaves office. Wade, a modern-day digital opportunist, sees an opportunity. He begins typing a story.

“CAN’T TRUST OBAMA,” he writes as the headline, then pauses. His audience hates Obama and loves President-elect Donald Trump, and he wants to capture that disgust and cast it as a drama between good and evil.

He resumes typing: “Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back …”

Ten minutes and nearly 200 words later, he is done with a story that is all opinion, innuendo and rumour. He types at the bottom, “Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country,” publishes the story to his website, LibertyWritersNews.com, and then pulls up the Facebook page he uses to promote the site, which in six months has collected 805,000 followers and brought in tens of millions of page views.

“WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!” Then he looks at a nearby monitor that shows the site’s analytics, and watches as the readers pour in.

“Down with the globalists,” writes a woman in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, one of 3192 people now on the website, 1244 of whom are reading the story he just posted.

Meanwhile, on the same feed of Domainfax material we got this which, incidently, was the number one story all weekend at the “independent always” freak show:

Samantha Armytage has attacked Waleed Aly’s editorial judgment in an extraordinary cross-network jibe.

The Sunrise presenter accused The Project co-host of opining instead of presenting facts during an interview with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop on Wednesday night.

In the tweet fired-off on Thursday, Armytage shared a Mamamia report of the terse interview, and told her 166,000 followers, “Journalists have a responsibility to quote correctly. Not just give their opinions.”

Aly was accused of misquoting Immigration Minister Peter Dutton during an interview with Bishop, in which he asked her whether Peter Dutton was wrong to say former prime minister Malcolm Fraser should not have let Lebanese Muslims into Australia in the 1970s.

“Well that’s not what he said. He was talking about the situation years ago where we didn’t provide the kind of support and services to people coming in to Australia that we do today, and that can have consequences,” the Coalition frontbencher corrected him.

…Armytage’s tweet was jumped on by people on both sides of the debate. Some agreed with the 40-year-old breakfast presenter, arguing Australians were tired of Waleed’s “self-important smug opinions” and accused his Gold Logie win this year of being “token”.

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Can someone please tell me the difference between “fake news” and TV celebrities accusing each other of racism presented as news?

The only difference between these competing outlets of fake news, social versus mainstream, is who takes home the dollars in the end. The blogger takes home the ad revenue. The MSM does so too. But, the latter has one further dividend in that the racism “debate” kills off any sensible discussion about the economic fallout caused by high immigration, including the impact on house prices. Thus it protects the only profitable business is has left in Domain listings. Moreover, this is a part of a muhc wider and more consistent editorial effort to to the same.

Fake news certainly exists. And marginal “keyboard warriors” do re-enforce subjective views over the commons, but next to the rent-seeking fraud currently perpetrated by the MSM, they are the least of it.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.