Long before fake news became a hot topic, liberals in the mainstream media were practicing their own special brand of fake news.
The best examples of this fake news-for-a-good-cause go back to the 1980s, when two of the biggest stories in America involved the rise in homelessness and the national scare over a new disease called AIDS. I was a correspondent at CBS News at the time and I witnessed firsthand how - and why - the media got both those stories monumentally wrong.
The networks were doing lots of homeless stories back then, and the homeless we put on TV almost always looked just like you and your next-door neighbors.
How could serious reporters really think the homeless by and large were people we knew in our everyday lives? They saw the homeless on the streets.
It didn't take an investigative reporter to figure out that the homeless living in cardboard boxes in the freezing cold were nothing like the Americans who were watching Tom Brokaw on TV. But the homeless lobby had an agenda and they needed their liberal friends in the media to help them pursue it.
Journalists misled the American people - and again, for a "Good cause." Just as the homeless had to be our friends and neighbors - or else we might not spend enough on them - people with AIDS also had to be just like us - or else the public might not care enough to spend federal tax dollars to find a cure for a disease that mainly hit gays and junkies.
In many ways the mainstream journalism version of fake news is worse than what the social media version, where jerks put out ridiculous stories about nonexistent underage sex rings run by Hillary Clinton out of a pizza parlor.
https://townhall.com/columnists/bernardgoldberg/2018/05/22/fake-news--the-mainstream-media-version-n2482836
The best examples of this fake news-for-a-good-cause go back to the 1980s, when two of the biggest stories in America involved the rise in homelessness and the national scare over a new disease called AIDS. I was a correspondent at CBS News at the time and I witnessed firsthand how - and why - the media got both those stories monumentally wrong.
The networks were doing lots of homeless stories back then, and the homeless we put on TV almost always looked just like you and your next-door neighbors.
How could serious reporters really think the homeless by and large were people we knew in our everyday lives? They saw the homeless on the streets.
It didn't take an investigative reporter to figure out that the homeless living in cardboard boxes in the freezing cold were nothing like the Americans who were watching Tom Brokaw on TV. But the homeless lobby had an agenda and they needed their liberal friends in the media to help them pursue it.
Journalists misled the American people - and again, for a "Good cause." Just as the homeless had to be our friends and neighbors - or else we might not spend enough on them - people with AIDS also had to be just like us - or else the public might not care enough to spend federal tax dollars to find a cure for a disease that mainly hit gays and junkies.
In many ways the mainstream journalism version of fake news is worse than what the social media version, where jerks put out ridiculous stories about nonexistent underage sex rings run by Hillary Clinton out of a pizza parlor.
https://townhall.com/columnists/bernardgoldberg/2018/05/22/fake-news--the-mainstream-media-version-n2482836
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