"Fake News": The Emergence of a Post-Fact World

[Odin]

(02-02-2017, 04:35 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: In an earlier post on this thread I posed a not-altogether rhetorical question: Why does it matter, then, "fake news?"

My concern is not the demonstrably false news reports emanating from either the media or the Trump administration when they involve sideshows, such as the size of an inaugural crowd or the removal of a civil rights icon's bust from the Oval Office.  In the larger scheme of things, this is so much "white noise."  Of much deeper concern to me is what happens when misinformation, deception, or lies impact directly on policy making at the highest levels of government.  In other words, what happens when the stakes are much, much higher?

Only recently, just such a substantive "story" (quotation marks intended) has been peddled first by FOX News and then by national security advisor Michael Flynn:

This article appeared in The American Conservative today: "The Trump Administration’s Lies About Iran"

Flynn’s dishonest claim that a Houthi attack on a Saudi vessel was an “Iranian action” has morphed into an even more provocative, false claim from the Press Secretary today:

Quote:The White House Press corps wanted to know what being put “on notice” entailed, and Spicer responded by claiming that Iran’s government took actions against a U.S. naval vessel, which would be an act of war. “I think General Flynn was really clear yesterday that Iran has violated the Joint Resolution that Iran’s additional hostile actions that it took against our navy vessel [bold mine-DL] are ones that we are very clear are not going to sit by and take,” he said.

Spicer has managed to combine Flynn’s nonsensical statement blaming Iran for the attack with the garbage analysis I mentioned earlier in the week that the attack had been intended for a U.S. ship, and he has produced something even more divorced from reality. No U.S. ship was attacked or targeted by anyone, Iran wasn’t responsible for the attack that did happen, and yet according to the Trump White House Iran took “hostile actions” against one of our ships. This is as blatant a lie as any that Spicer has told over the last two weeks, and it is on a matter of the greatest importance. The Trump administration is conjuring up “hostile actions” against a U.S. vessel out of thin air, and they appear to be doing so for no other reason than to stoke tensions and make conflict with Iran more likely...

You can read further at this link: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/l...bout-iran/

Baby Boomers have seen this movie before: the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964.  (I was only ten at the time, too young and naïve to understand that a minor naval skirmish had been used by the Johnson administration as a pretext for direct involvement by US armed forces in the Vietnam War.)

See "The Truth about Tonkin," published by the U.S. Naval Institute in February 2008.  This long-form analysis (with footnotes) begins as follows:

Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents have persisted for more than 40 years. But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Is the Trump administration setting us up for still another conflict in the Greater Middle East, this time with our long-time nemesis, Iran?  It's beginning to appear that way.  And how does that square with his campaign rhetoric?

Bannon wants a "holy war" with Islam and he'll find a way to get one.