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

[TeacherinExile]

(02-03-2017, 12:01 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(02-03-2017, 11:04 AM)TeacherinExile Wrote:

(02-02-2017, 09:34 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(02-02-2017, 09:10 PM)Odin Wrote:

(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:

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.

Maybe China, too.

Excellent link, though I wish you had posted it under the thread "Trump, Bannon, and the Coming Crisis" (Minor quibble, to be sure.)  I'd love to see more discussion about "The Clash of Civilizations," which I don't hold much store by--Huntington's premise.  The outsized role of Bannon in national security matters is quite troubling, as he is a political operative, first and foremost.  What should we make of Sean Spicer's offhand remark that the U.S. would use armed force to “defend international territories from being taken over?”  We're a long way from the Monroe Doctrine now, aren't we?  And isn't "international territories" an oxymoron?

It was in direct response to something posted here, but yes, more suited to the other thread, of whose existence I was not aware when I posted it.

There is such a thing as an "international territory", but I suspect what he meant was "foreign" (in relation to the US) territories being taken over, under the assumption that China's claims to those features in the South China Sea is illegitimate.

By way of clarification (and edification for me), can you provide a citation for "international territory" as the accepted nomenclature?  I thought "international waters" was the right phrase.  Is it a difference without a distinction?