Winstonm, on 2017-June-10, 20:17, said:
Odd, but I've lately been thinking about a potential Saturday Night Live sketch where Trump is in front of the press corps but they ignore him and laugh at Trump-jokes that are being passed around as if they were blonde jokes and finally all simply turn their backs on him as if he were not there.
Surely, being irrelevant is Trump's worst nightmare.
He's a laughing stock for sure, but he's in a position to cause serious damage, as we've seen. Evidently, he's a reader of the alt-right fake news sites that offer the praise he needs.
A Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorist, a False Tweet and a Runaway Story
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A pro-Trump activist notorious for his amateur sleuthing into red herrings like the “Pizzagate” hoax and a conspiracy theory involving the murder of a Democratic aide, Mr. Posobiec wrote on May 17 that Mr. Comey, the recently ousted F.B.I. director, had “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation.”
It mattered little that Mr. Comey had said no such thing. [Note: I watched those hearings throughout, and Comey definitely said no such thing.] The tweet quickly ricocheted through the ecosystem of fake news and disinformation on the far right, where Trump partisans like Mr. Posobiec have intensified their efforts to sow doubt about the legitimacy of expanding investigations into Trump associates’ ties to Russia.
But as the journey of that one tweet shows, misinformed, distorted and false stories are gaining traction far beyond the fringes of the internet. Just 14 words from Mr. Posobiec’s Twitter account would spread far enough to provide grist for a prime-time Fox News commentary and a Rush Limbaugh monologue that reached millions of listeners, forging an alternative first draft of history in corners of the conservative media where President Trump’s troubles are often explained away as fabrications by his journalist enemies.
In this fragmented media environment, the spread of false information is accelerated and amplified by a web of allied activist-journalists with large online followings, a White House that grants them access and, occasionally, a president who validates their work. The right-wing media machine that President Bill Clinton’s aides once referred to as “conspiracy commerce” is now far more mature, extensive and, in the internet age, tough to counter.
In an email, Mr. Posobiec described his work as “reality journalism — part investigative, part activist, part commentary.” A day before his tweet, the White House had allowed him into an Oval Office photo op with the president, and he tried to ask a question about Seth Rich, the murdered Democratic National Committee staff member.
Once Mr. Posobiec pushed the send button on Twitter, the conservative media machinery kicked into gear. Later that day, Breitbart News published an account of Mr. Comey’s May 3 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee under the headline “Comey Under Oath: ‘Have Not Experienced Any Requests to Stop FBI Investigations.’”
GotNews.com, a website that often misrepresents media accounts of the Russia investigation to cast Mr. Trump in a more favorable light, repeated the claim but also raised the possibility of a more serious offense. Mr. Comey, the site said, might have perjured himself if he had claimed in a memo — as outlets including The New York Times have reported — that Mr. Trump pressured him to call off an investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.
The next day, the perjury question was the subject of an article on InfoWars, the home of Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who has called the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks an inside job and questioned whether the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., really happened. InfoWars had almost five million visitors in the last month.
That afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh was also onto the story, telling his audience, “Comey said, under Senate oath, he had never been pressured to halt any investigation.” As evidence, Mr. Limbaugh read straight from the GotNews.com article. The whole Russia investigation, he declared, is “a political witch hunt.”
That account of the Comey testimony has lived on in the weeks since, with Sean Hannity of Fox News citing it as recently as Tuesday night. “And by the way,” he insisted on his program, “James Comey also said it never happened.”
I don't find it surprising that the aforementioned media sources make money by spreading false information. They cater to the folks who buy those tabloid papers displayed by checkout counters in grocery stores, and they'd be gone if there was no market. But it is sad to see that some of those customers now live in the White House.
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Mr. Trump has been seen reading material from GotNews.com, an outlet founded by Charles C. Johnson, who has also helped start a crowdfunding website that pays for private investigations and legal defenses for fringe conservative causes. Among its current campaigns is one to help a man accused of sending a journalist with epilepsy a Twitter graphic that triggered a seizure.
In February, the president was spotted with a printed copy of a GotNews article in the Oval Office. The article, which claimed to pinpoint a source of leaks from within the West Wing, was shown to him by his wife, according to one person with knowledge of the encounter — first reported by Politico — who did not know how the first lady had come across it.
The site’s tagline now reads: “President Trump reads us. You should too.”
People who know Trump know to feed him a steady diet of adulation, and they know where to find it. It's not going to be in a real news site.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
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