Now all news is "fake news": The right's war against truth goes back long before 9/11

[DonViejo]

Donald Trump and his media allies have convinced millions of Americans that there's no such thing as the truth

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Conservatives are trying to give us all a headache — and not just by taking away our health insurance and worshipping Donald Trump. They are launching an attack on the concept of reality itself. This is not entirely new, of course. The right has made good use of propaganda and the old “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes” routine for many years.

Recall that back in the early 2000s, many of us were alarmed to see Iraq war propaganda making its way into the mainstream, eagerly passed on by major newspapers and cable news shows. The people pushing the attack had a long history of advocating for the invasion before 9/11 and had even made clear they were hoping for a pretext. Nonetheless, in those days of compulsory patriotic flag-waving the media showed no inclination to be even slightly skeptical, and the result was catastrophic.

Even as news was filtering out that the case against Saddam Hussein for supposedly aiding Osama bin Laden was thin to the point of nonexistence, top leaders such as Dick Cheney were blithely asserting that they had proof. The media largely took them at their word. When it became obvious that Saddam’s WMD cache did not exist, many on the right simply insisted that it did. This 2015 poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University shows that tons of people still believe it:

Overall, 42 percent of Americans believe that U.S. forces found active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq. Republicans are more likely to hold this belief than Democrats: Fifty-one percent of Republicans think it’s “probably” or “definitely” true that an active program was found after the 2003 invasion, with 14 percent saying that it was definitely true. Still, large portions of other groups think that the WMD program, a major part of the justification for the invasion, was actually found, including 32 percent of Democrats.

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http://www.salon.com/2016/12/27/now-all-news-is-fake-news-the-rights-war-against-truth-goes-back-long-before-911/

[Mike Nelson]

1. FOX "News" reported the...

...weapons of mass destruction were there, were found, etc, as I recall.