Hurricane Helene as she made landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida, a huge storm covering the entire South and Gulf: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

JONESBORO, Ark. – The rain and wind from Hurricane Helene is lashing out even here in the Delta on Friday night, and that’s an actual fact. There are no two partisan sides to report in this story.

This storm was huge, covering most of the Gulf of Mexico region and the Deep South as it came ashore as a category 4 hurricane, the eye making landfall in the Big Bend of Florida, where many people still deny climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and vote for politicians who call it a hoax, like Matt Gaetz.

The remnants of Tropical Storm Helene even making it’s way to Arkansas and Missouri: NAJ screen shot

It’s unclear what it will take to make people face reality and be willing to vote to do something about it.

Meanwhile, the new Ford media van Gwyneth took me in the rain for a first visit to Arkansas State University, where I spoke to a group of journalism students about fake news. They had been exposed to the standardized warnings used in education now about how to spot and avoid it.

I told them the story of how it all got started and exploded on the scene in 2016, referencing this story we published in December after Donald Trump won the election.

America Has Fallen and Can’t Get Up

It contains a section on how The Washington Post was duped into running the first story on fake news in the modern era, citing a leak from a shadowy, anonymous group of spies called PropOrNot, made up of “computer scientists, statisticians, national security professionals, journalists and political activists, dedicated to identifying propaganda.” This set the stage in a backfired attempt at counter intelligence to make the case for how Russian propaganda influenced the press and thus the electorate in the campaign.

The problem was, the story was misframed, blaming “liberal” news sites such as CounterPunch for spreading Russian propaganda in its effort to help Trump win the election, when in fact, it was right-wing news sites, especially Breitbart News run then by editor Steve Bannon in league with the Russians to help spread false stories online and social media about Hillary Clinton.

As CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair said at the time, countering the story, “the Post put its credibility on the line when it agreed to quote the spectral figures behind PropOrNot as an anonymous source, investing these sinister individuals with the allure and gravitas of Deep Throat.”

In short, he said, PropOrNot is itself “prop.” Or counter intel, and the Post’s “big story,” he said, was itself “fake news, a fabulation as grand as any story by Janet Cooke or Jayson Blair. But unlike Cooke and Blair, this was shoddy journalism with a political purpose. It was written in venom with the intent to harm and destroy and apparently still enjoys the full-backing of the paper’s editors and publisher, Jeff Bezos” (of Amazon dot com).

Of course it took Trump about five minutes to start tweeting it out, calling the entire mainstream media establishment “fake news.” And that, of course, was picked up by Fox News and conservative talk radio and pounded through the ears and into gullible listeners’ brains for days.

The tactic is a form of what George Orwell in 1984 called Doublespeak, turning the facts on their head.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

The real media is fake news. The fake news media is the real news.

In Trump’s use of it, and now the MAGA movement, the tactic is to accuse the other side of doing what you are actually doing, like spreading fake news for political propaganda purposes, sowing confusion in the population and chaos in the information and communications system that can be exploited as an existential threat.

This is, by the way, a classic Russian tactic, borrowed by the likes of Bannon and funded by Wall Street billionaire Robert Mercer of Cambridge Analytica. They not only stole the data of millions of users on Facebook to figure out the key words and phrases to use against people. They spent money on ads and boosted posts to spread the fake news all over the social media platform.

How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

Journalism as a Profession

Journalism may seem like a risky career choice these days, but as I told the students, even if some people want to call you “enemies of the people” – the opposite of the truth – journalism will still be needed and important. That is if we intend to keep striving for some form of democracy. A free press was required for that from the beginning, as outlined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

If some people think continuing to strive for a more fair, democratic nation for everyone is just too hard, and turning all the power over to one deranged strong man would be simpler, we could turn the United States into a third-world country with a tin-pot dictator. We tried that from 2017-2021.

See where it got us?

Into a hellscape we almost didn’t escape.

Hellscape 2020: A New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]

Hellscape 2020: Year In Review in Words and Pictures

For the Christian Right, they should really dig deep down into their souls and decide whether they will ignore the warnings of the rise of an anti-christ predicted in their own literature, followed by 1,000 years of hell. If you take the mark of the beast or Behemoth on your forehead, wearing that MAGA cap, you will be banished from the Kingdom of Heaven. Don’t say you were not warned.

NAJ graphic by Glynn Wilson

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