“Fake news.” “Snowflakes.” “Nazis.”
All of these terms have lost their meaning because of overuse and misuse. However, speech is free, and journalists should currently be fighting to save words instead of getting rid of them.
Don’t tell that to the “Thought Police” at CNN.
While authors Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle are the ones who wrote an opinion piece on Sunday for CNN, and CNN left an editor’s note claiming the opinions are those of the authors, CNN still chose to publish the piece concerning Derakhshan and Wardle’s call to “Ban the term ‘fake news.’”
Guilt by association?
In current society, the term “fake news” is used when someone doesn’t like what others are saying about them. In reality, “fake news” should really only be used when a published story can be verified as untrue.
While Derakhshan and Wardle agree with me, where we disagree is in the use of the term. Words in general shouldn’t be banned at all, no matter the use of the phrase.
The basis for their call to ban the term “fake news” stems from a Columbia Journalism Review study that “shows that people in three other countries increasingly believe that the 'mainstream' media peddle fabricated stories.”
They don’t?
The media constantly persecutes people in the public arena before all of the facts come out in whatever situation is the “flavor of the week.” In today’s media-driven society, you are guilty until proven innocent. Is that not “fake news?” It’s speculation at best.
Derakhshan and Wardle expanded on the use of language in a report they co-authored for…the Council of Europe. That’s right. These two wrote a report commissioned by the socialist European Union.
Because socialists have never tried to constrict language, right?
Oh, and the report in question was published by the uber-liberal Harvard University’s Shorestein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
“We need to rethink our vocabulary,” the authors wrote in the CNN opinion piece.
The authors suggest other terms to be used in place of “fake news”: “Misinformation,” “Disinformation” and “Malinformation.”
George Orwell would be astonished that his prediction of “reeducation” is coming to fruition. For Orwell’s work of fiction, “1984,” to be coming true should be a wake-up call to all of us that Socialism is taking hold in a country that was set up to be anything but that.
“The combination of social media and television is a hotbed for sensational politicians who benefit from populations polarized by political, economic, religious, racial or ethnic divisions,” the co-authors also wrote.
And who accelerated those divisions in the U.S.? In recent history, you can thank people like former president Barack Obama, failed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and serial socialist and Democratic piggy bank George Soros for that, among others.
The funny part is that this “opinion” piece is part of CNN’s “Free Press” campaign. Other opinions from this campaign include those of CNN’s own Christiane Amanpour and Brian Stelter, so take this free press campaign with as much sincerity as most of us have trust in those two “journalists.”
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