‘Fake News’: Who is Really Making the War on Truth?
The other day David Ignatius, a columnist at the Washington Post, declared sententiously that «truth is losing». He meant of course «the truth» according to the US government. Ignatius recently interviewed Richard Stengel, a State Department official responsible for «public diplomacy», someone who had previously worked for Time magazine, a stellar source of «truth» and the «American way». Things are getting tough, Stengel said. We’ve entered «a ‘post-truth’ world, where the facts are sometimes overwhelmed by propaganda from Russia and the Islamic State». You can see right away where this conversation is headed. And how outrageous to compare Russia and the IS, when the original purveyors of Salafi-Jihadism are located in Washington, DC.
Unhampered by inconvenient facts, Stengel was just getting started with Ignatius. «How do we protect the essential resource of democracy — the truth — from the toxin of lies that surrounds it? It’s like a virus or food poisoning. It needs to be controlled. But how?
The State Department official complained that people don’t believe the US government, which is not exactly a revelation. During the Vietnam War, it was called the «credibility gap». This was an understatement. In fact, the gap was a chasm between what the US government said about the war and the visible, perceivable reality of it reported from the scene.
Back then, there were still journalists who had the courage to speak out against the Washington line. When American journalist Seymour Hersh uncovered the My Lai massacre in March 1968, it was Life magazine which published the photographs of the Vietnamese men, women and children, gunned down by American soldiers. Hersh, who is still at work, was a journalist in the old American tradition of «raking the muck». His predecessors include people like H. L. Mencken and I. F. Stone. Apart from Hersh, the «muckrakers» are long gone, but the muck remains and so does the «credibility gap».
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http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/12/11/fake-news-who-really-making-war-truth.html