Washington Post: Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

Fake news, white nationalism, Russian interference are the new talking points. And sure, it will keep the mindless Democratic hive brains happy, but they won’t help them win the Rust Belt any more than the speech Hillary delivered about a cartoon frog a few months ago.

But getting back to the topic of fake journalism…

Did you know that Trump’s meltdown was nearly complete on October 9th, 2016? Brian Beutler of New Republic sure did

It’s a good thing you didn’t, though, cause then you’d totally not be surprised by Brian Beuter of New Republic, declaring on November 16th that Trump’s meltdown begins
Slate, however, was not content with letting New Republic rest on its laurels of ultra-left progressive propaganda and declared that Election college is an instrument of (you guessed it) white supremacy, sexism, racism, transphobia, ageism, classism, heterosexism, able-bodeism, and other even more unspeakable things

And you could almost believe Slate (just the same way you could almost believe the polling numbers that Budget Player Cadet so naively trusted), if it wasn’t for that small matter of Slate praising Electoral college 4 years ago

Him winning doesn’t mean he didn’t melt-down. It means that he was elected anyway.

Trump is an interesting president, and most people aren’t political. They hear nonstop negative things about Hillary, and they know Trump from his public persona, it’s not amazing that the stupids got out the vote for him.

Also, a meltdown isn’t fake news, it’s subjective opinion journalism. Fake news is like Pizzagate, or stuff saying the Clinton Foundation is a scam.

This effort to three-headed-monkey the term “fake news” is fascinating. Is the theory that if the phrase is tossed at enough people who write for large media organizations, everyone will forget that the term really refers to insane conspiracy theories about child-sex-rings in pizza restaurants?

Just one question … Did this fake news have any commercial’s or advertising associated with it?

This is sloppy as hell and not in line with the tone of the rest of the piece:

"“Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior US official said. Those actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees.”

Trump literally stood up on a stage and requested that the Russians hack the DNC emails.

No he was talking about the hastily deleted personal emails of HRC, not the DNC emails.

Wow, that is so much better.

Not to worry, folks. The infallible and all knowing John Bolton himself says the whole thing is a false flag operation run by the Obama administration.

I know the rest of the world is lumping Pizzagate in with the fake news, but it’s not. Pizzagate is a grassroots conspiracy theory, same as people who think the moon landing was a hoax. The people pushing it believe it to be true, and it’s based on evidence – flimsy, nonsensical evidence, a house built out of toothpicks, but there are toothpicks.

Fake news is garbage pulled from thin air for monetary gain.

OK. But, a distinction without a difference.

McConnell now backing investigations. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of this thing.

I see a significant difference there.

That post was mostly in jest. “wouldn’t be prudent…”.

But if you were president elect, would you go out of your way to piss off the CIA?

In terms of publicly asking a foreign nation to hack into your opponent’s emails and publicize them, implying they’ll receive rich rewards for doing so, there’s a significant difference which sort of emails are involved?

I disagree.

It may very well have been in jest, or it may have only been a throw-away line to pump up the room. Have any of you actually listened to one of his campaign speeches? That’s essentially the entire content of his stump speech: he wanders from topic to topic, feeling out the crowd for what pumps them up. That one hit the mark, so he went further.

Of course, this is the same guy who tweets:

Unless you catch “hackers” in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn’t this brought up before election?

It was “brought up”. He brought it up. The man is a wonder for the ages.

If I tell my buddy, “Hey, it sure would be great for all of us if someone murdered Tim,” I’m not sure it matters that I was joking when my buddy murders Tim.

Now if these email were leaked by an anonymous source to the NYT or WashPo well that’d be great journalism.

If the NYT or WashPo received data from both the RNC and DNC and chose to only release the damaging DNC data explicitly to elect the Republican candidate, your equivalence would not be false. But, alas, that’s not what happened, so it is.

Not so sure on that one, my impression was that the Pubbie stuff wasn’t released to anyone. I am open to citation, but that is my understanding as I type.

The DNC stuff was pertinent because it was about stiffing Bernie. What would the RNC stuff reveal? That they didn’t want Trump? We already know that, right?