{"id":22246,"date":"2016-12-07T22:02:21","date_gmt":"2016-12-08T03:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22246"},"modified":"2016-12-07T22:02:30","modified_gmt":"2016-12-08T03:02:30","slug":"manufacturing-normality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22246","title":{"rendered":"Manufacturing Normality"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2016\/12\/06\/manufacturing-normality\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Manufacturing Normality<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"post_meta\">Sometime circa mid-November, in the wake of Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat (i.e., the beginning of the end of democracy), the self-appointed Guardians of Reality, better known as the corporate media, launched a worldwide marketing campaign against the evil and perfidious scourge of \u201cfake news.\u201d This campaign is now at a fever pitch. Media outlets throughout the empire are pumping out daily dire warnings of the imminent, existential threat to our freedom posed by the \u201cfake news\u201d menace. This isn\u2019t the just the dissemination of disinformation, propaganda, and so on, that\u2019s been going on for thousands of years \u2026 Truth itself is under attack. The very foundations of Reality are shaking.<\/p>\n<div class=\"post_content\">\n<p>Who\u2019s behind this \u201cfake news\u201d menace? Well, Putin, naturally, but not just Putin. It appears to be the work of a vast conspiracy of virulent anti-establishment types, ultra-alt-rightists, ultra-leftists, libertarian retirees, armchair socialists, Sandernistas, Corbynistas, ontological terrorists, fascism normalizers, poorly educated anti-Globalism freaks, and just garden variety Clinton-haters.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, for us, the corporate media is hot on the trail of this motley of scoundrels. As you\u2019re probably aware,\u00a0<em>The Washington Post<\/em>recently published a breathtaking piece of Pulitzer-quality investigative journalism shamelessly smearing hundreds of alternative publications (like the one you\u2019re reading) as \u201cpeddlers of Russian propaganda.\u201d The piece,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/business\/economy\/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say\/2016\/11\/24\/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html\">a classic McCarthyite smear job<\/a>\u00a0perpetrated by the\u00a0<em>Post<\/em>\u2018s Craig Timberg, was based on the groundless, paranoid claims of what Timberg unironically describes as \u201ctwo teams of independent researchers,\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fpri.org\/\">The Foreign Policy Research Institute<\/a>, a third-rate, former anti-Communist think tank, and an anonymous website,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.propornot.com\/p\/home.html\">propornot.com<\/a>, that no one had ever heard of prior to its sudden appearance on the Internet last August, and which, based on the tenor of its tweets and emails, appears to be run by Beavis and Butthead.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Manufacturing Normality Sometime circa mid-November, in the wake of Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat (i.e., the beginning of the end of democracy), the self-appointed Guardians of Reality, better known as the corporate media, launched a worldwide marketing campaign against the evil and perfidious scourge of \u201cfake news.\u201d This campaign is now at a fever pitch. Media outlets [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14578,3741,5493,2779,496,669,12414,1250,5228],"class_list":["post-22246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-cj-hopkins","tag-clinton","tag-counterpunch","tag-fake-news","tag-mainstream-media","tag-reality","tag-sanders","tag-truth","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22247,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22246\/revisions\/22247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}