Fake News Spread By Trump Cronies

Okay, this is pretty much a bombshell.



We've all read about how the outrageous anti-Clinton fake news on the Internet is the work of the Russians, or of teenagers from Macedonia and a few American slackers, but it turns out large quantities are being turned out by influential Trump cronies, including Laura Ingraham (talk radio diva) and Floyd Brown (who helped produce the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped to sink Michael Dukakis in 1988, and who calls Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a "lifetime friend"), among numerous others.

Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity.

And Brown:

But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he owns called Liftable Media Inc., which operates a number of high-impact, tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown’s sites, Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in the U.S. with 13 million monthly unique page views, according to rankings maintained by the site Alexa. Another, called Conservative Tribune, is the 50th largest site with over 19 million monthly unique visitors.

Click here for an article at The Intercept by Lee Fang entitled "Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies." It mentions a lot of fake news items: The Clintons had a role in the plane-crash death of JFK Jr.; Soros-owned "Smartmatic" voting machines were rigged in favor of Hillary; "the United Nations backed a “secret” Obama administration takeover of local police departments"; John Podesta, Hillary's campaign manager, had participated in occult rituals; President Obama had redesigned the White House logo to change the American flag to a white flag, “a common symbol for surrender, which has many people wondering if Obama was trying to secretly signal to America’s enemies that he was surrendering”; Hillary went on a “drug holiday” before the Las Vegas presidential debate; Obama's birth certificate is under renewed scrutiny.

Then there's Steve Bannon's Breitbart.com:

Breitbart News blends commentary and journalism with inflammatory headlines, in many cases producing fake stories sourced from online hoaxes. The site once attempted to pass off a picture of people in Cleveland celebrating the Cavaliers as a massive Trump rally. The site furiously defended Trump’s false claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the 9/11 attacks, a claim that multiple fact-checking organizations have thoroughly debunked.

Another disreputable site is WorldNetDaily:

Campaign finance records show that Great America PAC, a Trump-backing Super PAC, paid WND, known as the largest purveyor of Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories, for 'online voter contact.'

And the fake news works:

“We live in a time when people don’t care about facts,” said Judy Muller, professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.

During the last three months of the campaign, Buzzfeed News found that the top 20 best-performing hoax stories related to the election had more Facebook engagement than the 20 best-performing stories from major news outlets.

There's much, much more in this excellent article. I highly recommend it.