Confessions of a Fake News Reporter
by Douglas Herman
Strike-The-Root.com
January 04, 2017
“A lie can travel half way around the world while truth is still putting on its shoes.” ~ Mark Twain
I write for those so-called “fake news” websites. You know the ones: the 200 odd deplorable websites, the ones Hillary, the Pope and Michael Moore have attacked as threatening to destroy World Peace, Democracy, Facebook and the Mainstream Media (MSM).
I only write for a handful of them, sad to say, although I’ve been linked to scores more. One of my recent columns went viral and it probably swayed the entire election – for better or worse: Before Trump, Sen Bulworth Spoke Truth To Power . Seriously, the blatant corruption of the losing team, from Super Delegates to Podesta and PizzaGate to hidden Hillary health issues and secret sums of money funneling through the Clinton Foundation in “Pay to Play” accusations cost them the election, despite the best efforts and endorsements of the entire American media.
I’ve written for Rense, Counterpunch, Antiwar and Zerohedge. Most of my best stuff appears here on Strike The Root first, or STR as we call it, a website where Henry David Thoreau rather than Mark Zuckerberg is our moderator. Tragically, STR did not appear on ProporNot and we are devastated, absolutely devastated. Not.
Sometimes I ask my friends: If knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, which is preferable? I always hope someone will respond, as Socrates or Obi Wan would have: Knowledge of our ignorance is power; bliss in this age is unattainable.
So then, as an average American citizen, is it better to be misinformed or uninformed? Because Disinformation is almost a holy sacrament within the mainstream Operation Mockingbird media. Thus we fake news reporters believe we’re channeling our inner Tom Paine, Mark Twain or Henry D. Thoreau when we blog or post or link. When HDT wrote: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root,” he was a spreader of fake news, by today’s tender standards. We like to think of ourselves as worldwide root strikers, following in his footsteps.
Cui Bono: Who Benefits?
Cops and crime scene investigators (CSI) always ask that question: Who benefits? Who had most to gain by the murder? We fake news reporters pride ourselves on getting the facts. Like legendary Joe Friday from that old TV show, Dragnet, we interview eyewitnesses, contact insiders and whistleblowers, sift through the circumstantial evidence (Like John Podesta’s creepy artwork) and attempt to deduce the truth. Unlike the TV talking heads and Op/Ed writers for the elite media news, we want to know exactly Who Benefits? Even if it pisses off some elites. Or the elite media.
“There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”
Sounds like some fake news screed, right, or some wacky conspiracy theory, right? Nope, this was written almost a hundred years ago by the Father of Public Relations and author of a book on propaganda that greatly influenced Adolf Hitler. Edward Bernays was Jewish and teaching in New York in 1923. Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, read his book Crystallizing Public Opinion and learned a lot from him a few years later, adopting Bernays’ masterful propaganda techniques. “There is no means of human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate propaganda,” Bernays wrote and the Nazis adopted. “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.”
The Rest…HERE
