An interim report in Britain’s House of Commons has called for stern action to be taken against “disinformation” and “fake news” posted online via social media and news websites.
In a move that no doubt would make Jonathan Swift guffaw, Breitbart notes the report calls for satire and parody to be included under the umbrella of “fake news.”
Among other things, Breitbart says the report “demands existing ‘accuracy and impartiality’ rules for television and radio be extended to ‘online content.’ This could mean online news being forced to operate like the BBC, proclaiming to be impartial rather than being open about their political leanings.”
Because, of course, the BBC is a paragon of unbiased news coverage.
One January study found that the BBC’s Brexit coverage was overwhelmingly biased against pro-Brexit viewpoints. The report, titled “The Brussels Broadcasting Corporation?” tracked thousands of hours of radio and television material and found that only a fraction of the organization’s news allowed for pro-Brexit opinions, over the past 18 years:
A report by Citivas, in conjunction with News-Watch, monitored BBC flagship broadcasts since 1999 and found that only 3.2% of the guests had Euroskeptic views, compared to guests with pro-European Union opinions.
Coming to America – Soon
Of course, it’s very easy to see where this is all going, and that it won’t just be confined to the British Isles.
As the hysteria surrounding the Brexit vote showed, elitists are determined to assure that if the great unwashed won’t think and vote how they like, then they must crack down on what informs these people until they can be re-educated to go along as desired.
This eerily similar hysteria surrounding President Trump’s victory in 2016 proves that our elites in America have the same plans in mind.
Send In the Hall Monitors
Here’s a recent headline for you: “Twitter brings in anti-Trump academics to combat intolerance.”
Twitter “announced that it is working with experts to measure ‘healthy conversation’ on the platform. A six-strong-group of academics will analyze ‘echo chambers’ that form around political discussions on Twitter and ‘incivility and intolerance’ on the microblogging site.”
Four of the six academic hall monitors just so happen to have expressed hostile opinions against President Trump, Fox reports.
They’ll be there to keep your thoughts “healthy,” conservative Twitter users. Because, really, that is the crux of the problem. Having the wrong thoughts is not healthy because it does not advance the schemes of those who wish to be our overlords.
Remember, these are the people who believe Russia stole the presidential election from Hillary Clinton. And how did the Russians do that?
By hacking into our voting machines and changing results?
No.
Rather, they employed bot attacks on social media and nefariously fooled you ignorant peasants into voting for the wrong candidate. Your thoughts were wrong. You are unable to compile information for yourself and reach the proper conclusion. You must be protected from yourself.
The Trump Aftermath
One academic who totally gave this rather transparent game away was one Joshua Benton, who fancies himself “Lab Director” of Harvard University’s Nieman Lab, which rather gaudily considers itself a champion of journalistic excellence.
One day after Trump’s election victory, Benton wrote the following:
Joshua Benton
In a column just before the election, The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg argued that “the cure for fake journalism is an overwhelming dose of good journalism.” I wish that were true, but I think the evidence shows that it’s not. There was an enormous amount of good journalism done on Trump and this entire election cycle, from both old-line giants like the Times and The Washington Post and digital natives like BuzzFeed and The Daily Beast…. For anyone who wanted to take it in, the pickings were rich.
The problem is that not enough people sought it out. And of those who did, not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions. And even for many of those, the good journalism was crowded out by the fragmentary glimpses of nonsense.
Why, oh why, did you conservative peons not thirstily imbibe the journalistic brilliance to be found in The Washington Post and BuzzFeed? All of this could have been avoided, and right think would have won the day.
Captive Audience, Captive Minds
Ultimately, this all goes back to the liberals’ favorite power move: creating the captive audience.
Whether it is dominating the television and movie industry and pumping nonstop propaganda for decades onto people who just wanted to eat some popcorn and be entertained, or co-opting professional sports and turning it into cultural Marxist agitprop for fans who just wanted to watch a ballgame, liberals love having you in their playground and at their mercy.
Joshua Benton
The ultimate example of this is, of course, the schoolroom, where young Americans for decades had to sit in class and absorb left-wing “education,” powerless to leave because the law said kids had to go to school.
They had 3 channels and PBS back in the day. Now there is an internet and they can’t control you. And that will never work and so it must be changed.
Otherwise, you just may think the wrong thing again, and do something stupid like elect the president you want.
