Ben Shapiro responds at National Review Online to Harvard’s new field guide to fake news.
“Fake news,” of course, is the source of all evil, according to the Left. It’s only thanks to lies that Donald Trump was elected! Instead of targeting stories that are completely false, however, the Left applies the label of “fake news” to outlets that report factual stories but draw political conclusions from them — in other words, they call everything with which they disagree “fake news.”
Which means that their talk of “fake news” is actually fake news.
Of course, the largest “fake news” item of all is that “objective” news sources aren’t biased in their coverage. They obviously are, and it’s why conservatives have warmed to President Trump’s labeling left-leaning outlets such as CNN “fake news” even if CNN isn’t actually reporting anything factually false but merely drawing convenient leftist inferences from overblown coverage of core facts. …
… No wonder conservatives don’t trust the media — or the supposed media police. They’re too busy upholding the myth of mainstream-media objectivity to be concerned with the truth, which is that every outlet has its bias, and that we’re all better off admitting our bias openly rather than slathering facts in opinions and then conflating the two. I’ll proudly state that National Review and the Daily Wire are more honest than CNN; both outlets have an editorial point of view reflected in their content, but neither mistakes news for opinion or opinion for news. The supposedly objective outlets, by hiding behind the façade of that faux objectivity, constantly conflate their opinions with their news.
Here’s the reality: We’re not all going to be able to agree on narrative. But we should strive to find the facts we can discuss together.
