Fake News Madness

A SAPIENT Being's Guide to Spotting Fake News Media and How to Help Fight and Eliminate It

Corey Lee Wilson

• Publisher: Fratire Publishing LLC
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781953319340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Millions of today's youth, college students, and young adults have been brainwashed over the decades by fake news coming from mainstream media (MSM), social media, and leftist academia to the point where they lack the open mindedness, objectivity, and critical thinking skills to recognize it and its harmful effects.

Fake News Madness offers an opportunity to be part of the solution to this problem. By spotting fake news media using ethical journalistic standards we can take action to fight and eliminate fake news with practical logic, facts, truth, and sapience-and together counter the biased and unethical journalism, mainstream news, and social media on and off campus.

For some of you this MADNESS book will be a revelation, an epiphany, a sapient being moment. For others, it will be a triggering event, denial of truth, and a painful intervention.

As the time-tested saying goes, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions-but they're not entitled to their own facts." Facts are facts, the truth is the truth, but they can be skewed and manipulated for disingenuous methods and false narratives. Mainstream news, social media, and academia have perfected and promoted their liberal and leftist agenda without recourse. They are in many ways the media arm of the Democratic Party and many are infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).

Only seven percent of American journalists identify as Republican and the rest claim that despite the fact they're all Democrats, they can be objective. It just ain't so! Psychologists and the Heterodox Academy have shown that when people associate almost exclusively with those who agree with them, they suffer from groupthink, viewpoint orthodoxy, and confirmation bias-and lose their ability to see events clearly and objectively.

In 2016 the fake news media narrative was more an unequivocal declaration: Donald Trump must not win. As well all know, he did, and the overwhelming pro-Clinton MSM predicted he would lose. And lose big! How could they get it so wrong? And how could one man be the number one obsession and enemy of fake news?

1 – The Fake News Orgy of the 2016 Presidential Election

Credit: NBC

The reason Fake News Madness was selected as the first book of the 50 MADNESS book titles to be published is because it sets the precedence for spotting fake news which affects every other book topic. If we cannot call attention to, analyze, and eliminate the presence of fake news and its negative impact, we cannot fully understand the topics and meanings of the 50 book titles in a sapient manner.

Many in America are unaware of the fake news phenomena and the liberal and leftist bias within it. Many are the victims of it—trapped in a viewpoint orthodox echo chamber or so tyrannized by public opinion, they’re afraid to think for themselves. When truth and non-fake news once again assert their rightful place throughout America in mainstream media (MSM), journalism, and academia—freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity, and intellectual humility will prevail.

The search for truth and investigating and verifying what a bona fide fact is, and what makes it different from a belief or an opinion has been an age-old philosophical quest known as Epistemology. What is knowledge? What is truth? How do we "know'' something? "While Socrates and Plato were searching for answers to these important questions over two thousand years ago, it's a strange situation we find ourselves in when the 'information age' has helped to cause millions of people to drown in misinformation.

Media Liberal Bias Confirmed

As well documented by the Media Research Center (MRC), only the liberal media denies that there is a liberal bias problem in the media, but decades of studies and polls (not to mention common sense) have proven an overwhelming bias in their coverage of just about everything. A Harvard study analyzing the media coverage of President Trump's first 100 days in office found that 80% of it was negative. Of course, that was obvious to anyone old enough to pay attention during the election, but it was surprising that Harvard, a very liberal university, would actually investigate the matter.

The study analyzed reports from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal; as well as CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News, and even the BBC, and found the average coverage was 80% negative. Also, not surprising was that CNN's coverage was 93% negative. Fox News, on the other hand, was shown to be 52% negative and 48 % positive, which fits in almost perfectly with their trademarked slogan "Fair & Balanced."

This kind of slanted coverage is certainly nothing new. A famous study of liberal bias in the American media was conducted in 1986 and found that most journalists working for the major national news outlets were Democrats with liberal views on issues like gay rights, abortion, affirmative action, and welfare programs. The study, later published in a book called The Media Elite, gathered its data by conducting surveys of journalists at the Big Three broadcast news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), along with print outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Newsweek.

It concluded that because liberals dominated most news organizations, their coverage reflected their political attitudes both consciously and unconsciously; even if they didn't think they were being biased because they unconsciously believed that their views were 'correct,' so in their minds they didn't see their coverage as biased at all.

A decade later in 1997, another major study of journalists was conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and that found that 61% of reporters leaned Democrat, but only 15% leaned Republican with 24% of those surveyed appeared to be independent.

In 2002 a professor at Dartmouth College published his research on media bias in his book Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues, which also showed that most mainstream media in America present liberal views in a more favorable light.

Another study in 2005 by researchers at UCLA found a "strong liberal bias" at most mainstream media outlets with the exception of Fox News and The Washington Times. A 2007 study at Harvard University also confirmed a liberal bias in television news.

Documenting TV’s Twelve Weeks of Trump Bashing in 2016

In the twelve weeks since the party conventions concluded in late July 2016, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump received significantly more broadcast network news coverage than his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, but nearly all of that coverage (91%) was hostile, according to a study by the Media Research Center (MRC).

In addition, the networks spent far more airtime focusing on the personal controversies involving Trump (440 minutes) than about similar controversies involving Clinton (185 minutes). Donald Trump’s treatment of women was given 102 minutes of evening news airtime, more than that allocated to discussing Clinton’s e-mail scandal (53 minutes) and the Clinton Foundation pay-for-play scandals (40 minutes) combined.

For this study, the MRC analyzed all 588 evening news stories that either discussed or mentioned the presidential campaign on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from July 29 through October 20, 2016 (including weekends). The networks devoted 1,191 minutes to the presidential campaign during this period, or nearly 29 percent of all news coverage.

MRC’s measure of campaign spin was designed to isolate the networks’ own slant, not the back-and-forth of the campaign trail. Thus, their analysts ignored soundbites which merely showcased the traditional party line (Republicans supporting Trump and bashing Clinton, and vice versa), and instead tallied evaluative statements which imparted a clear positive or negative tone to the story. Such statements may have been presented as quotes from non-partisan talking heads such as experts or voters, quotes from partisans who broke ranks (Republicans attacking Trump or Democrats criticizing Clinton), or opinionated statements from the reporter themselves.

Additionally, MRC separated personal evaluations of each candidate from statements about their prospects in the campaign horse race (i.e., standings in the polls, chances to win, etc.). While such comments can have an effect on voters (creating a bandwagon effect for those seen as winning or demoralizing the supports of those portrayed as losing), they are not “good press” or “bad press” as understood by media scholars as far back as Michael Robinson’s groundbreaking research on the 1980 presidential campaign.

The results show neither candidate was celebrated by the media (as Obama was in 2008), but network reporters went out of their way to hammer Trump day after day, while Clinton was largely out of their line of fire. MRC’s analysts found 184 opinionated statements about Hillary Clinton, split between 39 positive statements (21%) vs. 145 negatives (79%). Those same broadcasts included more than three times as many opinionated statements about Trump, 91 percent of which (623) were negative vs. just nine percent positive (63).

Even when they were critical of Hillary Clinton—for concealing her pneumonia, for example, or mischaracterizing the FBI investigation of her e-mail server—network reporters always maintained a respectful tone in their coverage.

This was not the case with Trump, who was slammed as embodying “the politics of fear,” or a “dangerous” and “vulgar” “misogynistic bully” who had insulted vast swaths of the American electorate. Reporters also bluntly called out Trump for lying in his public remarks in a way they never did with Clinton, despite her own robust record of false statements.

As for those “horse race” assessments that were exclude...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• A SAPIENT Being's Preface
• Are You a Sapient Being or Want to Be One?
• 1 – The Fake News Orgy of the 2016 Presidential Election
• 2 – Pretty Much All of Journalism Now Leans Left
• 3 – The Problem With Journalists, Social Justice Warriors & Media Bias
• 4 – Today’s Media Elites: A Byproduct of Campus Illiberalism
• 5 – Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided
• Democrats Express More Trust of Most News Sources; Republicans Express More Distrust
• What Can Readers Take Away From This Study?
• 6 – Not So Hidden Agenda and Collusion of Fake News Media
• 7 – The Destructive Influence & Power of Fake News Media
• 8 – Social and Mainstream Media’s Anti-Conservative Bias
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
• 9 – 33 Examples of Twitter’s Anti Conservative Bias
• 10 –The MSM and Democratic Party’s Collusion to Destroy Trump
• 11 – WOWW’s Journalism Code of Ethics, Practical Logic & Sapience
• 12 – 25 Other MSM Worst Fake News Examples
• 13 – Spotting Fake News Media Like a Media Watchdog
• Be Skeptical of Other ‘Media Watchdog’ Impersonators
• MSNBC Producer’s Scathing Exit Letter: Ratings Model 'Blocks Diversity of Thought and Content'
• 14 – Ten Prevalent Liberal/Leftist Fake News Stories and Agendas
• 15 – Which Media Sources Can We Trust and Not Trust?
• Appendix
• Glossary
• References
• Author Bio