Manufactured Fake News
I like Gordon Lightfoot. Sometimes I listen to him when I write. My favorite song is “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” which is a ballad about an iron ore ship that sinks in a Lake Michigan gale. The ballad ends with a dead ship resting in deep water.
The FAKE NEWS industry routinely issues stories that end up dead — like the Edmund Fitzgerald — and we fail to mourn them. It is really outrageous.
Let’s dissect one of my recent favorites.
Yesterday morning (Wednesday) early, ABC News breathlessly reported as follows:
“U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting. Two officials familiar with the document’s contents” reportedly told ABC News that those concerns “were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI).”
That same day, the Director of the National Center for Medical Intelligence refuted that statement in the following manner:
“As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters. However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”