Whos Really to Blame for Fake News - Look in the mirror, America.

[kpete]

What is truly horrifying is that fake news is not the manipulation of an unsuspecting public. Quite the opposite. It is willful belief by the public. In effect, the American people are accessories in their own disinformation campaign.

That is our current situation, and it is no sure thing that either truth or democracy survives.

Investigations of fake news have reported that it is a commodity — primarily a way for its perpetrators, many of whom are young people overseas, to earn money by blasting out ludicrous material for which there is an audience, and in that respect it is no different from many of the alt-right sites. Commodity or not, fake news has already played a role, perhaps a substantial one, in Donald Trump’s election, especially since his campaign was aided by Russian hackers and trolls disseminating falsities — everything from Hillary Clinton using a body double to Pope Francis endorsing Trump to ongoing charges of voting irregularities to Clinton heading a child-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria.

There is now a Gresham’s law in news as in money: Phony news pushes out real news.

We have been heading in this direction for a long time, not because people necessarily love the outlandishly scurrilous or because they are joyfully conspiratorial (though both of those things are probably true), but because it is to the benefit of the right wing, as I have written in earlier posts, to disrupt truth. Conservatives have a near-monopoly on that disruption. A Buzzfeed analysis of fake news found only one viral false election story from a left-wing site.



the rest:
http://billmoyers.com/story/whos-reallyto-blame-fake-news/

[Va Lefty]

1. "The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves"

[dawg]

2. Right-wingers are willing to lie. They push this propaganda and ...

their followers choose to believe it.

Both the propagandists and their willing marks are to blame.

Liberals generally consider themselves to be "principled". They are generally unwilling to engage in this sort of behavior.

Nonetheless, I don't think we need to concede the viral meme field to the other side. We need to relentlessly push back against these false memes anytime we see them. And although it isn't in our nature, we need to cast a little shame and scorn on those who forward them. They need to know that there are consequences for spreading lies.