THE BIG MONEY BEHIND FAKE NEWS, What really powers the media’s fake news scandal machine,
5/26/17, by Daniel Greenfield
Fake
news is profitable.
The New
York Times hit piece
on the Comey memo earned the paper its most concurrent readers per second.
Pretty good for a piece about a piece of paper that the leftist paper had never
even seen and which was, supposedly, described to it by one of Comey’s
associates.
But
that didn’t stop it from racking up over 6 million views. Media
fake news isn’t just an agenda. It’s enormously profitable. Hit pieces powered
by anonymous sources bring in over 100,000 readers in an age when live is king.
For individual reporters, finding a source, real or fake, that can back up the
left’s Trump conspiracy theories can put them on the map.
The
Comey story comes from Michael Schmidt who made a name by supposedly finding
documents relating to media claims of a “Haditha Massacre” in a Baghdad
junkyard where “an attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of
smoked carp.” It was dashing and also very convenient.
The
claims didn’t hold up in court. Most of the Marine heroes who were dragged
through the mud over Haditha had their cases dropped. One case dragged out and
ultimately came out to very little. But the New York Times cashed in. And Schmidt did much better
out of it than Cpl. Stephen Tatum. Haditha
was the Times’ discount version of
Mai Lai. Now in a desperate effort to reclaim the glory days of the media left,
the New York Times and the Washington
Post are trying to
recreate Watergate.
It’s
no coincidence that many of the big vital hit pieces aimed at President Trump
have come out of the Washington Post. At the end
of last year, the paper owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos went on a hiring spree.
The goal was “quick turnaround investigative reporting”.
Washington
Post editor
Marty Baron explained, “We are creating a rapid response investigative team to
do investigative stories more quickly, using a lot of the digital tools that
are available to us now. We hugely value the longer, deeper investigations as
well, but we want to supplement that with quicker investigations that can have
an impact almost immediately.”
How
do you do “quicker investigations”? How can you predict that an investigation
will pay off rapidly? The best way to make sure that your investigation will
quickly deliver a major story is to fake it.
Those
quick investigative stories haven’t been coming from digital tools. They are
based on anonymous sources. Real investigative reporting takes time. But a fake
news story full of innuendo backed by a bunch of anonymous sources that repeat
what “everyone” in the media already knows is true, is quick. That’s what
having “an impact almost immediately” means. You don’t do the hard work. You
fake it.
The Washington
Post has racked up
viral hit fake news stories backed by anonymous sources. And it’s paying off.
The Post claimed
a traffic increase of 50% at the end of last year with a 75% increase in new
subscribers. The official line is that Jeff Bezos has transformed the Post’s
digital strategy. The reality was conveyed by its new anti-Trump slogan.
“Democracy dies in darkness.” The silly slogan was an exercise in branding. It
announced that this was the paper of choice for “researched” attacks on Trump.
Now
the Post has
hit $100 million in digital revenues and added hundreds of thousands of digital
subscribers. All of this is quite a change from a few years ago when the Post
was losing $50 million a year and Baron was talking about shrinking the
newsroom.
Baron,
who had come out of the Boston Globe, planned to
save the Post with strong metro coverage. But nobody
in D.C. actually wanted metro coverage. Unlike Boston,
Washington
D.C. isn’t a real city. It’s a mashup of two cities, one filled with poor black
people and the other with wealthy government types. The former don’t buy the Post.
And the latter don’t want to read about the people living around them. Next
year, the Post suffered an 85% earnings loss. Baron’s
plan to save the paper had failed. Instead what made it a powerhouse again was
the flow of anti-Trump hit pieces. As Baron euphemistically put it, "I
think there’s a direct connection between investigative reporting and
subscriptions."
“The
people who are subscribing clearly want us to do investigative reporting...
that’s something they are willing to pay for,” he said. But he was playing coy.
Those subscribers wanted anti-Trump hit pieces. . They expected the paper to
bring down President Trump. They were investing in dead tree media the way they
invested in any left-wing political campaign. The Post had become just another PAC. The
media’s business model was to become Media Matters. The parasite had eaten the
beast.
The
stories fit Baron’s definition of fake news as “stories that have no basis in
fact” and “disseminating bizarre conspiracy theories.” But the bizarre
conspiracy theory that Trump is a Russian puppet is the Post’s
bread and butter. And its promise of bringing him down leads to stories that
have no basis in fact.
Amazon
boss Jeff Bezos bought the Post for $250 million and invested another
$50 million in it. Bezos is famously intolerant of failure. The paper must
deliver growth and its growth strategy is Trump fake news. If it stops
delivering that “quick turnaround investigative reporting” that brings all the
lefty digital subscribers, its editors will be sorting boxes in an Amazon
warehouse in hundred degree temperatures.
The
brand of journalism once embodied by Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, of making
up stuff so you don’t get fired, is now the modus operandi of the entire Washington
Post. Make up stuff or the lefty subscribers convinced that the Post will pull off another Watergate will
go back to Salon or DailyKos.
If
the Post doesn’t pander to their
paranoia and conspiracy theories, some other clickbait site will. The Post’s
business strategy is the false promise of Watergate. We’ll bring down Trump
just like we brought down Nixon. The paper is selling readers a lie. And it’s
trying to make the lie happen with fake news. The Washington
Post is bad for
democracy, it’s bad for journalism and it’s bad for America.
But
it’s great for the bottom line. And not just at the Post. Trump
fake news has been very good for business at the New
York Times, CNN and the Washington Post. It’s no
coincidence that these are the media outlets in the business of churning out
hit pieces backed by anonymous sources. Fake news isn’t just a lie. It’s a lie
cloaked in the garb of journalism. Recognized brands and anonymous sources lend
legitimacy to left-wing conspiracy theories.
The New
York Times desperately
needed high growth in digital subscription to compensate for its cratering
print subs. To survive, the Times had to find a quarter of a million new subscribers every
quarter. It actually
improved on
those numbers. That amounted to a $13 million profit taking it from an $8
million loss. It added 41,000
subscriptions alone in the week after President
Trump’s victory.
Those
are the hard numbers that drive the media’s fake news machine and help the Times’
college dropout editor Dean Baquet keep his cushy salary. It’s not just
left-wing politics. It’s media greed.
Trump
is the media’s golden goose. The media is making a fortune trying to kill him.
Even as it knows that the fortune will vanish in a moment if its fake news echo
chamber of innuendo actually got its way. Subtract Trump and CNN and
MSNBC got back to the ratings basement. The lights go off on Colbert’s stage and
the Washington Post and the New
York Times get ready
for their own extinction.
The
media isn’t just biased. It’s feeding off the worst impulses of the worst of
its lefty readers and viewers. The left is throbbing with organizations and
outlets promising that they can pull off a coup and reverse the defeat of the
last election. There’s big money at stake. And something even bigger. Survival.
The
internet has been eating print. It devoured advertising. Then it devoured news.
Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post was symbolic of the new media food
chain. The media had to kill journalism to survive. Its models, Jon Stewart and
lefty conspiracy clickbait sites, showed it the way.
The
media left compressed into one echo chamber distinguished only by brand styles.
The Post and Salon are doing the same thing. The Post is just using its brand to upsell fake
news and conspiracy clickbait. It’s performing the coup de grâce on
journalism’s corpse for political agendas and profit.
Instead
of examining why so many Americans rejected them, leftists retreated into a
fake news bubble of conspiracy theories in which President Trump is a Russian
agent and the media will bring him down. The fake news bubble’s mainstreaming
of conspiracy theories won’t bring down President Trump. But it is burying the
media’s credibility in a pile of its own garbage that it will never climb out
of again. The media is killing democracy to survive. But democracy is more
likely to eventually kill the media. The fake news media perpetrating the scam
is cashing in big. But it’s headed for moral bankruptcy.
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York
writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
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