What Fake News Really Looks Like
The Republican party has become the most dishonest political movement in the history of the United States.
An acquaintance of mine gave me a copy of the South Tidewater News that was delivered to her home. To call it a right wing rag would legitimize it too much. It's not even a rag. It's a fake publication printed on newsprint to give its right wing propaganda a glow of legitimacy.
The publishers of this collection of lies are so dishonest they even copied ads from other publications to make it appear more realistic, but my acquaintance confirmed that at least one of those ads was not submitted by the supposed advertiser. It's pretty clear that all of the ads were just copied. The publication also includes small bits of local information that anyone can find on the internet.
I've changed this post a bit since I first wrote it because a colleague sent me a link to an article from the Columbia Journalism Review, which says these publications are distributed by The Metric Media network. According to CJR, there are two primary stakeholders of the network including one who had been reported on for plagiarized and fake content.
After reading the article, I was surprised that with all the funding these Republican shills receive, the publications are so sloppy, with poorly written articles, photos that don't match the content (their Lynchburg publication had two photos of Bobby Scott in for articles about Bob Good) and several ridiculously mundane and short AI generated stories listing recent tweets by politicians. It's mostly AI and doesn't seem to go through any human proofreading.
And the pretense is striking. CJR points out that while posing as local newspapers, they often miss significant local news stories.
For example, our analysis found, when a building collapsed in Miami in June, across the local news network, just one story was published, six days after the event, despite the network having about 40 Florida-based titles. In August, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, but none of the fifteen-odd Louisiana-based sites even mentioned the Category-4 storm.
But what do you expect from the right wing? The people who cry "Fake News" when confronted with evidence that doesn't match their beliefs are behind America's most dishonest propaganda outlets which refer to themselves as "national news". Why wouldn't they generate a series of fake local newspapers as well?
The publication I have is filled with accusations of Democrats promoting violence, when it's Republicans who spent decades promoting violence against us. They talk about 2nd Amendment solutions to political problems. They wear t-shirts promoting the murder of journalists. Winsome Earl Sears called for the murder of abortion activists, saying, "Murder is murder, and one day it's going to be your turn." But they accuse Democrats.
They lied about trickle down economics. They lied about covid. Winsome Earle Sears is lying about Virginia's economy. Jason Miyares is lying about crime. They're lying about the cause of the government shutdown which is causing so much pain for all of us.
