Nothing New: ‘Fake’ & Weaponized News Has Long Haunted Our War-Weary World

‘Today’s ‘fake news’ crisis is by no means a recent phenomenon born during the Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, as the mainstream media would have us believe, even while big media outlets hypocritically label alternative news outlets as the sole source of fake news.
Not only is America suffering under the maliciously misleading fake news peddled by today’s “mainstream” media; America and the world also have gravely suffered, at least since the mid-19th Century, under an orthodox media that was — and remains — a weaponized menace to peace and social concord. There is hardly a more unsettling example of an early war-mongering media figure than famed editor Horace Greeley.
Stepping back for a moment, it’s notable that the liberal-internationalist New York Times — unlike liberal-left street protestors who typically march against U.S. military intervention in foreign lands — has long interpreted liberalism quite differently on the geopolitical level. Our esteemed “newspaper of record” spanning three centuries, has frequently used its pages to call for, justify or not seriously challenge claims made by governments as the pretext for highly questionable military interventions. ‘
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