Political Correctness Is the Real Problem When Talking About 'Fake News' Marisa Trevino - LatinaLista
go to original December 10, 2016

Hillary Clinton wants to blame her election loss on fake news, and use that storyline to push for government censorship. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down. (The Young Turks)

Fake news is nada más than bold-faced mentiras (lies). In recent months, the nation has witnessed an onslaught of these lies, with scary repercussions.

Take for example, Pizzagate. A vicious lie was circulated online that Hillary Clinton was connected to a child sex ring being run out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Because one dunce-head, 28-year-old Edgar Welch, believed the lie and envisioned himself a modern-day superhero, who could swoop in and save those imaginary children, several people were needlessly traumatized when Welch showed up at the pizza place with his gun.

The saddest commentary on this situation is that Welch isn’t the only one who believed the lie. According to a poll from Public Policy Polling, nearly 50 percent of Trump supporters believe the Pizzagate lie.

The latest lie to capture the conspiracy-hunting mindset of Trump supporters — get ready — is Disney’s new ‘Star Wars’ movie. A Trump supporter is lying to people saying that Disney reshot the movie to include an anti-Trump message. Without even seeing the film, people are believing this latest lie and began the hashtag #DumpStarWars. Of course, Disney now has to clarify that this is a lie but it’s obvious that there are way too many people nowadays who prefer to believe lies, even when the truth is presented.

But all these lies have to start somewhere. Researchers have found that these lies have been spreading quickly online with help from a number of “foreign players.” Vietnam, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Russia, North Korea – the list reads like a Who’s Who of grudge-bearing adversaries and opportunists.

The only way to counter the spread and belief of these lies is for people to hear leadership denouncing them. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have spoken out against “fake news” but, sadly, that kind of leadership won’t come from our President-Elect. A major part of his political incorrectness is his habitual ‘exaggeration of the facts.’

...When lies are framed as news, we have a problem. But when lies are knowingly presented as fact then we have more than just a problem. We have the beginnings of a collapse of the very moral values that have elevated, sustained and attracted global admiration since our country’s founding — and that’s a crisis.

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Related: Trump Drives Misleading News Coverage 140 Characters at a Time (The National Memo)

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