The New York Times sounded a little giddy on the front page of its Business section April 21 with the headline “Obama joins the Fight to Curb Online Lies.” This spin strongly suggests Obama never lies. He’s a valiant warrior against lies.
That came after a badly disguised press release at CNN.com on Obama “He must immediately join the fight against misinformation.” As usual, they make it sound like a superhero has landed when he arrives on the scene.
Never mind PolitiFact giving Obama the “Lie of the Year” in 2013 for “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” Never mind Obama’s bald-faced lies in 2012 that the Benghazi consulate attack wasn’t a terrorist thing, it was a protest of an Islamophobic YouTube video that got out of hand. As if the Islamic radicals brought grenade-launchers to a “protest.”
This underlines why the liberal media should not be trusted in a “disinformation” fight. They have a frustrating tendency to put themselves on the side of “information” and conservatives on the side of “disinformation.” Don’t try to argue it’s more complicated than that. They’re not listening.
TimesReporters Cecilia Kang and Steven Lee Myers offered the narrative that social media was a powerful tool for helping elect Obama. However, they became a source of malignment as Trump rose to power. Their story began with Obama “yukking it up” in 2011 with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“As an apostle of the dangers of disinformation, Mr. Obama might be an imperfect messenger,” they wrote. He rode social media to victory, “but then, as president, did little to intervene when its dark side – propagating falsehoods, extremism, racism and violence – became apparent at home and abroad.” Obama rehashed “whether he had done enough to counter the information campaign ordered by…Putin to tilt the 2016 election against Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
They don’t blame Hillary for losing. They are also blaming Putin. Disinformation was suddenly “eroding democracy” just as the Democrats lost the White House.
President Obama took his old friend Zuckerberg aside right after the 2016 election to warn “he needed to take the problem more seriously.” This is exactly how and when our liberal media finds the urgency to fight “disinformation.”
The TimesAn Obama keynote speech was featured at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s event. When Obama spoke on this subject recently at the University of Chicago, no “independent fact checker” checked the veracity of his information, like his revisionist claims about being tough on Russia as president. They’re not “independent,” and neither are the social-media sites that use them to curb conservatives.
There is no place in the Times article or in the CNN piece was there any mention of the Hunter Biden laptop, which the liberal media and Big Tech rashly ruled was “disinformation” in the last weeks of the 2020 campaign. This story was retracted on the internet. On March 17, the Times admitted – deep in an article on page A-20 – that it’s authentic information. Even now, CNN can’t handle the truth. Reporter Paula Reid produced one story on March 30 (which aired several times) still saying the laptop was “purported to belong to Hunter Biden.”
CNN is now asking the same question. The New York TimesDo you agree? New York Post didn’t report “online lies” on Hunter’s laptop? Can the media have any humility about the idea that sometimes conservative journalists can ferret out and verify information they don’t like? That if it’s not “disinformation” if it’s accurate, but may help Republicans? If not, they have no moral standing to prance around like heroes fighting “disinformation.”
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