Andrew Klavan: What is Fake News?

Yes, “fake news” is worse than we think. Here is Andrew Klavan at Prager University — first, an excerpt from the transcript, then the video below:

You’ve probably heard a lot of people recently screaming and yelling about Fake  News. Charges fly from all points on the political spectrum: this story is mistaken — it’s Fake News; that statement is incorrect — it’s Fake News.

But to my mind, these arguments miss the point. Mainstream American news is ALL fake because the major news outlets are so consistently biased toward the left that whether any given story they report is factual or not, their overall reportage is essentially leftist propaganda. You can complain about the right-wing slant of Fox News all you want, but left-wing ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN have, combined, almost ten times the viewers.

Look, the chief journalist at ABC is former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos; the president of CBS News is David Rhodes, the brother of a former senior Obama staffer.

Comcast, which owns NBC, is run by a major Democrat donor. Same for the leadership at CBS and Time Warner, which owns CNN.

Only seven percent of American journalists identify as Republican. And while a lot of news outlets forbid their reporters to donate to candidates, 96 percent of those who did donate last time out gave to Hillary Clinton. These journalists claim that despite the fact they’re all Democrats, they can be objective. It just ain’t so. Psychologists have shown that when people associate almost exclusively with those who agree with them, they suffer from groupthink and confirmation bias and lose their ability to see events clearly.

Now, it’s not that these journalists are liars, exactly – it’s that their bias skews their reporting in very specific ways. Let me give you Andrew Klavan’s Three Rules of Mainstream Media Journalism. These can transform any story, whether it’s true or not, into Fake News.

Read more: Prager University