What is Fake News? | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:02You’ve probably heard a lot of people recently screaming and yelling about Fake News.
2. 0:07Charges fly from all points on the political spectrum: this story is mistaken — it’s Fake News;
3. 0:13that statement is incorrect — it’s Fake News.
4. 0:16But to my mind, these arguments miss the point.
5. 0:19Mainstream American news is ALL fake because the major news outlets are so consistently
6. 0:25biased toward the left that whether any given story they report is factual or not, their
7. 0:30overall reportage is essentially leftist propaganda.
8. 0:34You can complain about the right-wing slant of Fox News all you want, but left-wing ABC,
9. 0:39CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN have, combined, almost ten times the viewers.
10. 0:46Look, the chief journalist at ABC is former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos; the
11. 0:51president of CBS News is David Rhodes, the brother of a former senior Obama staffer.
12. 0:56Comcast, which owns NBC, is run by a major Democrat donor.
13. 1:00Same for the leadership at CBS and Time Warner, which owns CNN.
14. 1:05Only seven percent of American journalists identify as Republican.
15. 1:10And while a lot of news outlets forbid their reporters to donate to candidates, 96 percent
16. 1:15of those who did donate last time out gave to Hillary Clinton.
17. 1:19These journalists claim that despite the fact they’re all Democrats, they can be objective.
18. 1:24It just ain’t so.
19. 1:26Psychologists have shown that when people associate almost exclusively with those who
20. 1:30agree with them, they suffer from groupthink and confirmation bias and lose their ability
21. 1:35to see events clearly.
22. 1:37Now, it’s not that these journalists are liars, exactly – it’s that their bias
23. 1:42skews their reporting in very specific ways.
24. 1:45Let me give you Andrew Klavan’s Three Rules of Mainstream Media Journalism.
25. 1:50These can transform any story, whether it’s true or not, into Fake News.
26. 1:55Rule Number One: Whenever left-wing prejudices are confirmed
27. 1:59by a single event, that event is treated as representative.
28. 2:03But whenever left-wing prejudices are contradicted by a single event, that event is treated as
29. 2:09an isolated incident – and if you treat it as representative, you are deemed to be hateful.
30. 2:13So, for instance, a white cop shoots a black suspect.
31. 2:17The mainstream media treats that story as representative of general police racism
32. 2:22even though studies show cops don’t use deadly force more often on blacks than on whites.
33. 2:28On the other hand, if a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, and someone is bold enough
34. 2:32to point out that the terrorist act is, in fact, representative of the daily acts of
35. 2:37Muslim terror around the world, this is considered Islamophobic.
36. 2:42The leftist media cherry-picks when an event illustrates a larger narrative.
37. 2:46That’s Fake News.
38. 2:48Rule Number Two: When a scandal breaks on the right, the news
39. 2:53is the scandal.
40. 2:54When a scandal breaks on the left, the news is: who wrongfully disclosed
41. 2:58that scandalous information?
42. 3:00Thus, when the media wanted to raise suspicions that Donald Trump was somehow in league with
43. 3:04the Russians, they freely quoted illegally leaked information from intelligence sources.
44. 3:10But when Congressman Devin Nunes announced he had information that the Obama administration
45. 3:15might have misused intelligence against Donald Trump’s transition team, the story became:
46. 3:21How did Nunes get that information?
47. 3:22And did he do it legally?
48. 3:24The scandal meter is heavily weighted to fall to the right.
49. 3:28Fake News.
50. 3:30Rule Number Three: Individual extremists on the right are highlighted,
51. 3:35but the overall extremism of the left is ignored.
52. 3:38In one of the fakest Fake News stories in recent history, the mainstream media rose
53. 3:43up as one to tar conservative Tea Party members as racist, when all they really wanted were
54. 3:49lower taxes and less government spending.
55. 3:52Reporters gave the Tea Party disparaging nicknames; represented their almost universally peaceful
56. 3:57gatherings as “ugly” and “violent”; and whenever an individual Tea Partier said
57. 4:02something wrong, it was cited as evidence that the movement itself was tainted.
58. 4:07Meanwhile, the continually violent, vandalizing, anti-Semitic socialist movement that went
59. 4:14by the name of Occupy Wall Street was hailed by journalists as an important social development
60. 4:20right up to the moment it vanished without a trace
61. 4:22(except for the piles of litter its protesters left behind).
62. 4:26Peaceful Tea Partiers wanted the small government prescribed by the Constitution, so they were radicals;
63. 4:32violent Occupiers wanted the widespread government intrusion of socialism,
64. 4:36so they were heroes.
65. 4:38Very Fake News.
66. 4:40Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas was once criticized when his magazine essentially convicted some
67. 4:45white Duke University lacrosse players of raping a black woman — a rape, it turns out,
68. 4:50they did not commit – because it didn’t happen.
69. 4:53Thomas defended himself, saying, “The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”
70. 4:59The mainstream media almost always get their left-wing narrative right, whether the facts
71. 5:04support it or not.
72. 5:05That’s called confirming your own prejudices.
73. 5:08It’s called bias.
74. 5:09It’s called Fake News.
75. 5:12I’m Andrew Klavan for Prager University.