fake news? I believe that! 5s

A free press is the only thing that stands between our liberty and tyranny. The first thing dictators do is commandeer the press and write the news. The citizen consumer has the responsibility to have educated himself, to keep an open mind and read opinions contrary to his, and to be able to read or watch critically. Otherwise, fake news will drive out real news.

Everybody Already Knew.

Deception is the greatest of all weapons, far more powerful than both the pen or the sword. Both Putin and Trump tell untruths. But even if empirically evident, if one keeps repeating the same lies... over time it becomes the truth to those that believe. It's not truth anymore or even untruth. It is THEIR truth, so real news becomes fake news. CNN is losing it's sponsors and rates poorly on tv. So they fight desperately against Trump and Putin, yet both remain strong and standing. Get used to it.

"Get used to it"?! Accept the Big Lies as a new normal? Capitulate to tyranny, to phony patriotism and flag-waving and military parades? Never!! You are a self-made coward. A follower. A loser. What do you lose? Your self-respect, your manhood, your freedom, and any semblance of a life.

Forty percent of the country and 85% of Republicans, aka the Trump base, has not only gotten used to his Mussolini act, but they embrace it as if their souls depend on it. They identify with Trump as if they had Stockholm Syndrome. I have heard testimony amounting to "He can come into my house, shoot my mother and rape my dog and I'd still be his supporter!" I am serious.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

CNN losing sponsors, RA? Whatever it lost is entirely due to its former connection to Kathy Griffin. You're getting your dose of fake news from the John Birch rag, The New American. See? I Google; therefore I am.

No Trump-Skin In The Game (sorry, bad pun) here, since I'm watching from across the pond (where, of course, we're sent our own fair share of fake news on a daily basis). So as for what triggered my parody muse to get me kickstarted again this week it was the blatant over-the-top how-stupid-do-they-think-we-are MSM switch from "Hillary's Campaign did absolutely nothing illegal" to "Devastating information about her was retrieved in an illegal manner".

Not only does it make no sense that the Russians (should they have actually digitally hacked her campaign) would then need an oldfashioned analogue physical meeting (Duuh! What year is this?) to deliver any findings, it's also straight up insulting to intelligent viewers to infer that information about what a candidate wants to hide can itself be illegal depending on which way it's brought to the public in USA.

If that female Russian lawyer had used her somewhat latina looks and travelled to enter the states illegally across the Mexican border, and then submitted the alleged information about Hillary to some media outlet - then, according to MSM logic, it would suddenly have been totally legit to use it.

But let me frame the whole situation for y'all in an even simpler way:

MSM contradicting logic as of July 2017:
Policy on people: Open the borders - Come one, come all!
Policy on information: We need a wall! CLOSE THE BORDERS!

Information which is DISinformation, or which is obtained through espionage, or which is disseminated surreptitiously, secretly and selectively in secure surroundings to political operatives, and which is prejudicially based on geopolitical power maneuvering, and which disrupts democratic processes – is illegitimate. Those who respect those definitions can be called the mainstream press. The others can be called tabloids, Breitbart, Goebbels, Fox News, etc. It's up to us the People to recognize the lies and, through the investigative power of the press and the enforcement power of the law, close the borders on them by exposure. Y'all.

CNN is a reliable news outlet y'all can never change that nigga!

If it weren't for the fact that what you've said is the exact opposite of objectivee truth, I'd say you made a pretty good point, Vigilant

Good "thinking" there Vigilant - I guess 300 million Americans must be so totally unapt at creating DISinformation that not a single campaigner was able to do it on home soil, hence travelling to Russia for high quality?

Actually, the three major cable news outlets don't just report the news anymore, they spin it to fit their ideological preferences and also play interpreters of the news while at the same time generating news themselves that add more time to their news cycles. Btw, since when is fear-based wild speculation and conjecture considered factual evidence of anything? Most of what CNN reports lacks substance and is inconclusive. They parrot the Washington Post and New York Times daily. Then come the talking heads. It's annoying.

^ Fox ain't no fake news, boy! The Corrupt News Network is lyin' about our President who tells it like it is! That's real news! We're so used to be lied to that real news seems strange. Well time to stand up and get rid of the LSM. There ain't no Trump collusion with Putin. It's a damn lie spread by that miserable hag Hillary and her misfits on the left side of the aisle! Or else those bunch of sissified, black or red flag wavin' heathens that will burn in hell! All Demonrats deserve to die. Bunch of ungrateful bastards, traitors to the flag & Constitution, reprobates and crazy Black Lies Matter fools. Send 'em my way. I'll school 'em with my Remington and my bloodhound Liberty! That's my 2¢ worth.

Peter, I think that clever American politicians are laundering their DISinformation through Russia. All's well with the world; the dog is wagging the tail.
Your 2 cents worth, VoR? You over-charged.
Rob, I left out the biased MSNBC and CNN and such performers as Bob Lemon and Rachel Maddow as a provocation, which deep thinkers like CML fell for.

@ Vigilant: You cannot close the borders on neither information or alleged disinformation unless you roll back the whole technological evolution. Even as we spar here our comments are digitalized and travell many laps around the World before reassembly, no doubt parts of them passing thrugh many nations where either your or mine or both's arguments would be illegal to utter out loud. And even if you could resolve and reinstate such ancient border control in the USA alone you'd still have to deal with the age old question of whether an objective truth even exists, or if that is a semi-religious sort of whishful thinking to help the brain cope with its own and the body's daily hustles (and who'd get to decide what your border patrolmen should withhold from the rest of the people by closing the borders on information anyway).

Old type MSM top down information has become a Jurassic World where everyone is looking to the sky for the next Facebook or Twitter meteor to induce even more extinction. From this side of the pond I've no (or at least very little) skin in your side's game, but beyond my occasional parody writing outlets on the subject I've a layman's interrest/fascination for such things as contrast problems and logic vs cognitive dissonance vs contradicting points of view. I believe their longtime success is proof enough that the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution is the smartest foundation slash social Operating System so far created in any nation - on the other hand it does date back to an age where information was spread via horse and carriage - whereas we now all live in a World where the Chinese just leaped technology ahead even further by teleporting a photon into space! (JFGI).

From what I can see of the technological revolution at a generational distance, it has engendered an Orwellian scam which leads the way to anarchy and babble in speech and thought. A.J. Liebling observed, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Now, everybody owns one, and generally uses it ignorantly against his self-interest. If facts are false, if reality is fiction, if news is opinion, if science is cartoonish sci-fi, if objective fact (e.g., evolution) is subsumed by subjective fact (e.g., creationism) then, save for the ancient founding documents of our civilization, we are doomed. Gresham's Law applies to information: fake news drives out real news. You and everyone has skin in the game. What are you going to do before 1984 rolls around and Big Brothers Trump or Putin and their fellow autocrats and technocrats concentrate communication and surveillance technology into their own hands, as they have wealth?

What, no discussion of the creative merits of the piece? The most important consideration is whether the mainstream media ARE reliable/fraudulent-conspiratorial, and whether the news IS biblically-correct/fake. Admittedly, there is the tangential issue of oxymoronic or paranoid contentions, such as, "The story in Breitbart has been meticulously researched." or "The New York Times pays journalists to invent news." Also homonyms, as in the mispronounced discovery of "Fox and Friends" as f-a-u-x. As H.L. Mencken pointed out, "Every decent man (Vigilant included - ed.) is ashamed of the government he lives under."

To update Socrates: "The ungrammatical life is not worth living." Thank you, Grammarian, for reminding us that the discipline of grammar is not only its own reward, but the glue that holds civilization together. Peter is living very well in a non-native language.
You and me seem to agree.

^ this jerk isn't worthy to wipe Trump's azz!

Well, if we're gonna evolve this and go at it on a quote note level I'll go with Stephen Hawking's "It is not yet clear if intelligence has any long-term survival value" (there are different versions, but I'm sure you get the gist). The idea that a so called free press is all that stands between western civilization and a de-evolution to feudal times are an interresting one (but after all, a two party system is already only the slightest possible upgrade from a one party one) and applying Gresham's law about currency on information instead makes some intuitive sense, pulp quantity always winning out over fact quality it seems - but the key word is "seems" as long as new forms of distribution of information evolves and weeds out the pulp dinosaurs' heaps of crap!

Maybe I should do Cher's "If I could turn back time" next? Naah, I've already submitted a piece on Status Quo! :-)

And big thanks to The Grammarian for reminding people not to forget the creative merits of this parody, I worked hard to nail the pacing and to vary the choruses.