Whose World is Fake News?

There was a little item on the news last week, to the effect that the old TV show "Murphy Brown" was coming back after a quarter-century or so.

Oh, yippie.

The old show starred Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown, who was the host of a TV news magazine back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I watched it back then (we didn't have cable up in the hills, and dish satellites hadn't been invented yet, so the options were limited).

I'm guessing that the notion of this reboot is driven by the successful reboot of another ancient sitcom, "Roseanne".  I say "successful" although there have only been a handful of episodes of "Roseanne" to date and it has not had a chance to settle into its regular viewership yet for us to know if it will be popular for the long run.  But in the view of the Hollywood left, it has to be taken on somehow, lest a show with a positive (?) conservative star possibly be allowed even to try to succeed.

I can hear it now, and so can you.  "We can't let THAT show be out there like that.  Let's exhume some show that we can do that preaches OUR values [whatever those are] and give it a run for its money.  Hmmm .... is Edgar Bergen's kid still alive?  We can do Murphy Brown!"

Or something like that.

It's interesting.  My political leanings are the same as they were when Murphy Brown was on TV, and yet there is not a chance I will watch it now, although I always watched it then.  And I never once -- I'm not kidding -- watched the original Roseanne show, not one episode.  Never could stand her, to tell you the truth.  But I do watch the reboot of it, if only because there is something novel about its political take that I won't see elsewhere -- and I'm still not a Roseanne Barr fan by any stretch.

I guess they have been filming, or at least making promos.  Some press flack put out a thing about the rebooted "Murphy", describing a clip as follows:

Murphy says [in the clip] that until recently she’d been semiretired: “I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she says. “But then we had an election,” and the screen fills with images of Donald Trump. Murphy declares, “We’re taking on this world of alternative facts and fake news.”

I'm a bit confused as to what world she is planning to take on.

President Trump is not technically in the media.  When he popularized the term "fake news", he was referring not to things that candidates were saying, like "You can keep your doctor", but very specifically that members of the media were putting out stories, under the protection of the First Amendment, that were simply not true.  Those stories were and are what is meant by "fake news."

Gee ... is the Murphy Brown character taking on the media then?

Last week, in the course of a meeting at the White House with California political leaders who were fighting their state's sanctuary policies, the topic of the MS-13 gang came up.  In reply, President Trump made reference to the gang members, who are amoral murderers and rapists, as "animals."  Any logical hearing of the context makes it ridiculously obvious that the reference was to MS-13 gang members.

Of course, the media ran with a clip that completely omitted the context and blasted out a narrative that the president had referred to "immigrants" as animals.  Not "illegal immigrants" and not just gang members, but just "immigrants."  Even though the context was clearly not that, CNN, the New York Times and others just ran with it, screaming.  CNN's talking heads were blasting the president for something that had not happened.

That's called "fake news" and is an absolutely, 100%, gold-plated textbook example of what was meant when the term was coined -- the media blasting out, unabated and sourceless, a story that was simply not true.  Worse, in this case, it was editing the reporting to make the actual quote only, in its out-of-context form they presented, something that would fit their anti-Trump narrative.

What would Murphy Brown say about that?  That the end justified the means, even when done by people with a Constitutional protection?  That it doesn't matter, because it was Donald Trump?  That she was embarrassed for her profession when they do that?  OK, probably not that.

But according to the flack, she (or the show) is taking on the world of alternative facts and fake news.  I suppose that in their twisted minds they think that fake news refers to something else, like maybe that anyone outside California, New York and Massachusetts is ever going to watch the rebooted Murphy Brown.  And they're free to think that.

But let's see what they think the fake news is that they're "taking on."  Because they, and their own profession, are they ones producing it, all by themselves.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton