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2016 should go down in history as The Year Journalism Died. But this was no murder. This was a suicide.
To be sure, journalism had had its head in the oven for decades, but 2016 was the year it finally cut its wrists and jumped in the bath clutching a plugged-in appliance. Now, the legacy media have the cheek to try and play Banquo’s ghost, pointing everywhere but the planet-sized mirror right in front of them.
A talking head in HBO’s documentary tackling Fake News says the quiet part out loud.
“The worst part of 2016 is what we did to ourselves,” Georgetown University “disinformation expert” Molly McKew says about the subject in hand, revealing, well, everything.
This is the point that even the most childishly innocent lost tribe in the remotest steaming depths of the Amazon jungle could tell you. The legacy media are damned, contemptible, bigoted liars and we know it and they know it.
Yet, still, they persist in shouting their innocence – even as they stand there with their hand stuck in the Fake News cookie jar.
At first glance, “After Truth” is a timely effort showing why our already low opinion of journalism cratered following Trump’s election. Instead, the film avoids that reality while punching so far down it might reach China before the end credits roll.
Did you know Infowars anchor Alex Jones was a fraud? That he makes stuff up while peddling nutritional supplements? What about how people use Facebook to share obviously false stories that, sadly, some take as the Gospel truth?
Thank you, “After Truth.”
Not only does the documentary state the obvious. It does so over and again. Anything is better, apparently, than diagnosing the rot infesting journalism today.
I’ve never taken Alex Jones seriously. The man is an obvious clown-show as obviously non-credible as any side-show preacher. Sometimes, he’s hilarious (when he trolled the Young Turks team into a violent meltdown, it was the funniest thing I’d seen in years), mostly he’s ridiculous. Occasionally, he’s just vile.
But Jones is an insignificant anthill of bullshit compared to the Everest of lies, mendacity, manipulation and propaganda piled up by the legacy media every single day.
The term “Fake News” came of age because the media tried to blame fraudulent news stories for Hillary Clinton’s loss. (Clinton herself later used it, along with a dozen other excuses, to explain her shocking defeat).
President Trump turned the phrase on its head, and the mainstream media followed right along. How? By generating more Fake News than any time in modern journalism history […]
None of that, and we mean not one fake story on those lists, gets a close up in HBO’s “After Truth” documentary. Instead, we spend endless time revisiting the Pizzagate scandal, something tied to one news source – the oh, so credible Infowars.
Oh, and some Tweets, too.
Pizzagate was a ridiculous conspiracy theory which, at one point, threatened to spill over into real violence. But it was nothing compared to the legacy media’s gargantuan conspiracy theories, like Black Lives Matter, which have spurred deadly violence in dozens of American cities.
The poor pizza shop owner who lived through the conspiracy deserves all of our sympathy, no doubt. Still, which Fake News scandal did a greater disservice to the country, a false meme which threatened an entrepreneur and his eatery, or serial lies designed to overturn the will of the American people?
[…] Journalists are incapable of shame and/or self-reflection.
So we’re left with this Frankenstein’s monster of a documentary. And boy, do the stitches show […]
And it gets a bit scary when [Facebook critic Kara] Swisher says some of Jones’ rants aren’t “free speech.”
Oh, yes they are, as ugly as they might be.
Why lavish so much attention on Jones in the first place, though? Your neighbor’s toddler can tell he’s a scam artist from a simple glance.
Well, because he’s vaguely right of center, and movies like “After Truth” can use him as a cudgel against the conservative movement.
And that’s the real purpose of After Truth: not to shine a light on real, damaging Fake News. The legacy media could never do that, because that would mean shining a light on their own ugly, rotten corpse.
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