I Say Disinfomation, You Say Misinformation

POTUS calls the bile pouring out of the media "Fake News". But what is really happening? Is it all out and out lies? Completely fabricated stories with no basis in reality? Here's something to chew on.

“Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.” ~ Neil Postman

One of Postman's most influential works is Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In Amusing, Postman argued that by expressing ideas through visual imagery, television reduces politics, news, history, and other serious topics to entertainment. He worried that culture would decline if the people became an audience and their public business a "vaudeville act." Postman also argued that television is destroying the "serious and rational public conversation" that was sustained for centuries by the printing press.

Postman was a progressive, a liberal but in the classic sense and he foresaw the dangers that faced American culture due to manipulation of our news/information providers.

There is no doubt that much of what we see in the MSM is outright manipulation. This is presented through journalism schools as "Advocacy Journalism." Definition:

Advocacy journalism is a genre of journalism that, unlike propaganda, is fact-based, but supports a specific point of view on an issue.

IMHO advocacy journalism accomplishes the exact same purpose as propaganda. It is more insidious and due to the dumbing down of the population, more effective. Out and out lies can be exposed for what they are, but fact-based manipulation just leads to arguments and division.

Laying Bare This Administration’s Contempt For Americans

Accepting the seductive comfort of self-delusion, this Administration’s apparatchik media shills have demonstrated since 2007 their incuriousness of the man they and they alone placed on a throne of lies.  Their requisite authority exists to deceive the public nowadays.

The lies are now piling thick, fast and mountain high.

The story of Obamacare is Machiavellian:  “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”

During a press conference at the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer said Gruber was “some adviser who never worked on our staff.”

Gruber visited the White House more than a dozen times, according to official visitor logs. One of those meetings took place in the Oval Office with none other than TWMDCO.

The Gruber tapes were roiling the Internet by Veterans Day with only one news outlet covering the story.  Several days later CBS mentioned it on an early morning show.  By Sunday, Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation confessed he was “dumbstruck” by his “stupid American voters” comment opining, “What we have here is another example of the sorry state of American politics where people take money for things in which they don't believe and whether it's good for the American people is not even a question.  As for the president, he may want to consider that old politician's prayer—Lord, I can take care of my enemies, just protect me from my friends.”

Nine days after the shitstorm erupted, ABC and NBC decided to report on what actually lay behind the honeyed rhetoric—something Dr. Charles Krauthammer succinctly illustrated—“the arrogance of an academic liberalism, so perfectly embodied in the Gruber Confession, that rules in the name of a citizenry it mocks, disdains and deliberately, contemptuously deceives.”