On Sunday March 26th, 2016, 60 Minutes did a highly rated expose on Fake News: "The phrase 'fake news' has been used by Trump to discredit responsible reporting that he dislikes. But 60 Minutes’ investigation looks at truly fake news created by con-artists."While examining websites which create admittedly fictional hoax stories and Russian bots which can inflate social media statistics - Scott Pelley took aim at lawyer Mike Cernovich, in a segment which only further demonstrated the mainstream media's dishonesty. Link: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-fake-news-find-your-social-media-feeds/Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mullen from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So recently, Mike Cunovic, Southern California lawyer, was interviewed on 60 Minutes.
And they interviewed him actually for about an hour, but they slashed and sliced it down to a tiny box of fairly snipey hit jobbery, which we're going to have a little look at now.
For those who don't know, Mike is a friend of mine.
I've always said that courage is the first virtue because without courage you really can't achieve any of the other virtues.
He does display that virtue in abundance and I just wanted to put that out up front.
So to open the segment, which was about fake news, which, interestingly enough, has become a huge issue for the media after Donald Trump won the election.
Does anyone seriously believe that the media would be ringing themselves into Victorian Gordian knots about fake news if Hillary Clinton had won the election?
No, no.
It's a competitor to the traditional influence of the mainstream media throughout American life and throughout the life of the West.
There's a new competitor to the media, which is what's called the alternative media or the unbiased media or the unbought media or the customer-focused media or the has variety and diversity media, whatever you want to call it.
So they're facing this challenge.
And so.
So, the piece opened.
We're Scott Pellet saying, So, but assaulted, you see, assaulted, that is a loaded gun phrase, right?
I mean, not, well, there were people out there with opinions that were different.
There were people out there with some unsourced data, which, of course, is the mainstream media, but there are anonymous sources all over the place.
But you're being assaulted, you see.
It's not that there's information out there that you're going to have to sift through and come to your own conclusions about.
You're being assaulted.
That's already loaded.
It's already fake news.
He goes on to say, Oh, Scott.
Oh, Scott.
Oh, Scott.
The American media used to be a little bit more diverse.
It's kind of been boiled down to the six major corporations, which now own 90-plus percent of the American news organizations and the American news outlets and so on.
Tons of conflicts of interest in the American media.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon owns the Washington Post and has a fairly untrumpeted $600 million deal with the CIA, which may affect security coverage.
Carla Slim...
Robert Barron in Mexico owns significant portions of the New York Times and he has a goal to push illegal immigration or legalization because people from Mexico go to America and then send back remittances which are then used to buy Carlos Slim's products in Mexico.
So lots of conflicts of interest.
So...
The idea that, particularly in Washington, where the vast majority of reporters donate to the Democrats, they are on the left.
The idea that these true echo chambers of mainstream media, at least if you're in the alternative media, you have to research the mainstream media.
If you're in the mainstream media, you're just all talking back and forth to each other and it's a real echo chamber.
So the idea that these Democrat reporters in Washington have no interest in influencing the outcome of an election, come on.
The idea that reporters or anyone in the media or anyone who's breathing And doing anything in the remnants of the free market might want profit, might want to make a buck.
Christ Almighty, to actually view this 60 Minutes thing, I had to sit through a whole bunch of ads.
Oh no!
I wonder if reporters who are significantly left want to influence the outcome of an election or make a buck.
See, they can't help themselves.
This projection from the left where they accuse you of what they themselves are doing now.
They don't even know it and it's so predictable.
But it gets even worse.
Scott goes on to say, the president uses the term fake news to discredit responsible reporting that he doesn't like.
Huh.
All right.
So we're talking about fake news.
We're talking about real facts, verified facts, professional news organizations, which we're going to get into in a moment.
And he starts off by saying, the president uses the term fake news to discredit responsible reporting that he doesn't like.
Huh.
See, again, they can't help themselves.
They're talking about real news versus fake news, opinion journalism versus fact-based journalism, because opinions, you know, doesn't have to be sourced or anything.
It's just what you think.
I like ice cream!
Look, there's my contribution.
Where's my Pulitzer for reporting?
But when they say the president uses the term fake news to discredit responsible reporting that he doesn't like, where the hell is the source for that?
Where the hell are the facts about that?
That's not sourced.
That's pure opinion journalism.
In 60 Minutes, where they're talking about an examination of fake news.
Do you understand?
They can't help themselves.
It's weird compulsion.
So there you go.
Scott Pele, 60 Minutes, goes on to say, but we're going to show you how con artists insert truly fake news into the national conversation with fraudulent software that scams your social media account.
The stories are fake, but the consequences are real.
Before we get into the details, this is a big picture, right?
There's survey after survey after survey showing that the American public does not trust the mainstream media.
It's abysmal.
Don't trust the American media.
So they're going elsewhere for their facts.
The second thing is the people on the left have a very, very big problem in that they predicted that Hillary was going to win, particularly the mainstream media on the left.
Overwhelmingly, confidently predicted that Hillary was going to win and Hillary lost.
So there's a huge crack in the narrative.
And how on earth are you going to maintain any credibility when you keep getting things wrong?
Let's just be as nice as possible.
Let's not say it's lying.
Maybe they truly believe it.
When you keep getting things wrong and getting things wrong and getting things wrong and getting things wrong, why on earth should people believe you?
Well, when you're doing badly in the marketplace, when your demographic, the people who watch you are all dying off because they're old, and when people don't believe anything, That comes out of your mouth.
Good evening, lied the mainstream media.
Well, what do you do?
Well, you can either improve your own product or you can attack your competitors.
So let's be very, very clear about what is going on here.
So Scott Pelley, in describing Mike Cernovich at DangerAndPlay.com, said he reached Twitter followers 83 million times last month.
And Mike said, that was a slow month, too.
We hit 150 million sometimes.
Now, in one of the other segments, the overtime segment, they said, they reported from 60 Minutes, that 60 Minutes gets 3 million Twitter impressions, right?
150 million Twitter impressions for Mike Cernovich, 3 million Twitter impressions for 60 Minutes.
So, this is supposed objective reporting, When there's a clear conflict of interest in that 60 Minutes is attacking a competitor and a vastly more successful competitor in Twitter impressions than they are.
So imagine that you're running some failing restaurant.
Some fantastic restaurant opens across the street.
And they're taking away your business and you're going down.
And people don't want to eat at your restaurant anymore because they don't trust the quality of the food.
People have gotten sick.
People aren't...
So imagine you're the owner of the failing restaurant.
Massive successful restaurant opens across the street.
And then you claim to write some objective review about the food in that restaurant.
Come on.
Come on.
Everybody knows it's not objective.
They're hitting out at a competitor who's outstripping them.
And rather than improve their own internal processes, rather than say, hey guys, real echo chamber in here.
Let's get some libertarians in here.
Let's get some conservatives in here.
Let's mix things up a little.
Let's find a way to appeal.
To all the people who voted for Donald Trump.
Gave him a massive electoral college victory.
Let's shake things up in here.
Let's redo things.
Let's figure out where we've gone wrong, what we did wrong, and really improve our product.
No, no.
Let's not do that.
Let's just call everyone else fake news.
Yeah, that's really going to work.
Because we never redefine things ourselves.
We never call illegal immigrants undocumented migrants or whatever, right?
Now, they complain a lot, of course, about people are falling for this fake news.
And as Mike points out later, it's an epistemological problem.
How do you know what is true and what is false?
It's a big, challenging problem.
Metaphysics, the study of what is real.
Study of reality, what is reality.
Epistemology, the study of truth, what is true.
The ethics, the study of what you should do, what is moral, and so on.
So they have a big problem with people not being able to differentiate fake news from real news.
Strange to me why people on the left who seem to be big fans of government education would bemoan and mourn a population that has had 12 years of government education, at a minimum, and yet don't seem to have any clue about how to differentiate truth from falsehood.
And it's even worse.
It's even worse on the left.
On the left, the consumers of, quote, fake news as they define it, tend to be more educated, higher educated.
So more education from government schools seems to lead to more susceptibility to what 60 Minutes calls fake news.
So wouldn't you want to examine government education, maybe switch things up, change how things are done, how people are educated or not educated in America?
No!
No, because, of course, government teachers through their union, sometimes voluntary, sometimes involuntarily, while they shovel a lot of money at the Democrats, right?
So, has there been a problem with fake news in the past?
Dan Rather in the past ran with a phony story about George W. Bush's Air National Guard service that he ducked out, and all these documents he had were supposed to be from the 1960s, but it was very clear that they were generated using a 2004-era word processing software, using the fonts and analysis.
So, this is something that even a cub reporter, even Jimmy Olsen in diapers, would have been able to figure out.
Are you a member Brian Williams?
He was the anchorman at NBC News.
His career had a bit of a period after he was accused of, you know, lying repeatedly over many years.
About taking enemy fire while helicoptering into Iraq back in 2003 from the soldiers who were actually aboard the helicopter.
And Williams was repeatedly told these stories over and over again.
And then he was finally called out.
Strangely enough, after all of this, he still has, Brian Williams still has a career in journalism.
There was a story...
That some professor created some final, authoritative, well-researched list of fake news websites.
Mainstream media reported this from end to end.
Turned out that the fake news website's authoritative list was, in fact, a fake news story.
He was just some nutty left-wing activist who put it all together based on his own particular whims, you know, which way his cats were pointing that day.
There was no rigorous process, no academic review, just made up, right?
There's Photoshop, there's dubbing, there's all of this kind of stuff that happens to pictures all the time.
Anderson Cooper faked Syrian war footage by...
He dubbed in sound effects and was playing these madcap chaotic war videos next to a Syrian correspondent.
Conan O'Brien, a comedian, talk show host, he compiled, like, you see this happening all the time if you watch the media.
What he did was he compiled these tragic comic examples of local news broadcasts that are all repeating verbatim these same talking points in dozens and dozens of markets nationwide.
Like, they get their talking points, he's dark, right?
They get these talking points and they repeat them.
That's not news.
Back in the 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy got a whole presentation on The Truth About McCarthyism, you should check it out.
McCarthy was vilified and remains vilified to this day for saying that there was significant communist infiltration of the State Department and other government departments in the 1940s and the 1950s.
Well, when the Soviet cables were decrypted in the Venona Project in the 1990s, a lot of this stuff was confirmed to be true, but you'll still hear the media talking about McCarthyism.
Now, the fact that the media opposed and vilified and ended up destroying McCarthy for pointing out communist infiltration, the fact that they didn't take up these stories, the fact that they promoted communism in many, many ways, Led fairly significantly to the fact that communists infiltrated the State Department, infiltrated relations with China, and ended up influencing the government, the American government, to hand over China to the communists, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
So yeah, fake news has real consequences.
Remember George Zimmerman?
I've got a presentation, one of my biggest, on the truth about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
NBC edited an 1-1 phone call of George Zimmerman, the guy who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, and they edited it down to make him sound like a racial profiler when he was, in fact, responding to questions from the dispatcher.
NBC back in the day said, GM trucks explode!
And they had very dramatic footage of it.
And as it turns out, they'd actually, the NBC consultants had set off explosive miniature rockets beneath the truck just right before the crash.
And that was not informed.
The viewers were not informed of that recreation.
The UVA University of Virginia rape hoax, right?
Rolling Stone.
They retracted the story.
They've now been successfully sued about this, about sexual assault on the campus of the University of Virginia.
People got harmed when this came out.
People were attacked.
People were assaulted.
Fake news has real consequences, right?
Michael Brown, liberal journalist and other activists, the story that Michael Brown had hands up before being gunned down.
Don't, you know, hands up, don't shoot.
And this was all false.
You know, it was one of the things that sparked off the Black Lives Matter movement.
And there was violent rioting in Ferguson and other places around the world.
Now, the forensic facts of the case showed that this hands up, don't shoot.
False.
And that police officer Wilson was justified in shooting Brown, who was charging him down after trying to grab his gun.
Right?
So fake news!
Yes, it has real consequences.
People get really harmed.
And if you look at the amount of anger that was raised in the black community by this argument, continually, or this perspective put forward by the mainstream media, that black officers are just shooting down young black men for sports, for fun, well, police officers have been shot in response to this.
Yeah.
Fake news has real consequences.
You know, when you keep trumpeting out, Donald Trump, he's literally Hitler!
It's going to be a disaster!
It's going to be the end of the world!
Well, when people get angry, they go and beat up protesters.
There are real consequences.
Way back in the day, this is one of the worst.
This is one of the worst.
New York Times reporter Walter Durante.
Ugh, wretched.
So, he actually helped Joseph Stalin, right?
Communist Russian dictator, conceal what's called the Holodomor, right?
Which is one of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated, at least in the 20th century.
This was the forced starvation of over 1.5 million people in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.
And he actively covered this up, got a Pulitzer, which has never been rescinded.
Just astounding.
In the conversation between Mike and Scott, which is pre-saged, right?
What comes right before it is a guy who openly says that he makes up stuff and doesn't believe what he says, and he's writing fiction and making money out of creating stories about, you know, Ebola quarantines and stuff like that.
So that is, of course, that's fake news, but that's completely admitted to be fake news.
It's all clickbait.
It's made up stuff.
And the guy says he's writing fiction.
He's making stuff up.
Now, in the same category, of course, they put Mike.
See, they put that first to make you think, oh, this is what fake news is, just people making stuff up.
And then they put Mike in.
This is all manipulation and nonsense, right?
The question around Hillary's Parkinson's Quote, diagnosis, right?
So there was a doctor out there who, you know, claims he has some experience with Parkinson's who says that he thinks Hillary Clinton has Parkinson's.
And, you know, Mike Cernovich republished this and he said, you know, critique this and review it and so on.
And this is brought up in the conversation between Mike and Scott from 60 Minutes.
And Scott says that this story, quote, got so much traction, it had to be denied by Clinton's doctor and the Parkinson Foundation.
Because the problem is, of course, that this doctor had not examined Hillary Clinton.
Obviously, Hillary Clinton's doctor had examined her, but the Parkinson's Foundation had not.
So, if it's wrong to provide medical advice or information without examining someone, then why bring up the Parkinson's Foundation rejection of the claim that she had Parkinson's when they have not examined her either?
And, oh, did the mainstream media get really, really upset at the significant number of mental health, quote, professionals who claimed to be able to diagnose Donald Trump's mental illnesses from a distance?
He's a this, he's a that, he's a the other, and I should, you know, believe me, because I have a PhD in this, that, and the other.
Were they calling this fake news?
Come on.
Hillary's health was an issue.
She's fallen over.
She's coughing up half a lung sometimes.
And she herself claimed memory loss from a head blow when she was talking to the FBI, as she seemed to do every other day.
So, yes, there was an issue with Hillary Clinton's health.
Now, Scott says, when she fell over right at the 9-11, after the 9-11 speeches, she fell into the van.
Scott said, she had pneumonia.
Like it's a fact.
Of course, the fact is within the same day.
First of all, she goes and stays at her daughter's apartment where there are kids around and then she's hanging out with a kid later.
You know, if you've got pneumonia.
No, no, no!
It was the non-transmittable kind.
So Scott says she had pneumonia.
It's a fact, which denies the Parkinson's diagnosis.
And Mike said, asked quite reasonably, how do you know that?
Who told you that?
And Scott says, the campaign.
Oh, Scott, don't go in with Mike without being aware of this kind of stuff.
Mike says, in the headshot heard around the rhetorical world, why would you trust the campaign?
Why would you trust the campaign?
Have the campaign examined?
That's the end of the quote, right?
Have the campaign examined physically or not?
She has pneumonia, and I know it because Hillary's campaign told me.
Why would you trust the campaign?
Perfectly legitimate question.
Scott does not answer it.
Pivots.
The point is, he moves on to something else.
And everyone can see that he's not answering.
He's not answering the question.
And the way to dispel any questions about Hillary's health would be for Hillary to release her health records.
Now, the media was all over Donald Trump releasing his tax records so that they can provoke class envy and so on.
What about Hillary's health records?
Is that not a little bit more relevant when she seems to be showing signs of some potentially significant illness?
It seems to be the case.
Now, then they turn to bots.
And, of course, it has to fit Marussia narrative.
So they talk about bots that you can buy from Russia to boost your Twitter retweets and so on.
And, yeah, you can.
And what's funny is that even when they go and buy a couple of thousand bot retweets, they still can't get their story to trend for 60 minutes because they sort of do this live as an example.
But what's interesting?
I mean, it's so predictable.
Oh man, 60 minutes.
You don't even know what a world of hurt you're in for because now everyone's going to go over everything that you've ever said that was false and retweeted as fake news and everyone's going to go through all of your archives, going to focus on Scott Pelley.
Oh man, you don't know.
You don't know what bear you have poked because you've been in the driver's seat for so long you don't realize that pretty soon you're going to be the metaphorical equivalent of the snitch tied up with twine in the backseat of Joe Pesci's car.
So...
So people went to look this up.
Because, see, it's really, really bad that you can have fake media accounts, that you can influence numbers with people who aren't even real.
So, of course, people went and looked this up.
Now, four years ago...
The 60 Minutes Twitter account only had 63% real users, right?
63, which means more than a third were indicative of bots.
There's no proof for sure, but 63% real users as of four years ago.
Mike's Twitter account has 93% real users, so a lot more real than that.
Now, they did update, just before I did this, I checked it, and they just updated it recently.
And it's no longer 63% real users, because that was four years ago.
So 60 Minutes has updated their verification of real versus fake users.
And again, this is not perfect, but it's an indication.
And instead of 63% real users as of four years ago, now they have 61% real users.
So they've, well, they've gone the wrong way.
They've gone the wrong way.
Now, the question is that they keep using these adjectives, right?
It's professional.
It's fact-checked and so on.
Professional news organizations.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that, I guess, what does it mean?
You've gone to school and you've learned in the social justice warrior paradise of reporting school how to hate white people.
I don't know.
But yeah, six corporations control 90% of the news.
Now, do these corporations have any kind of agenda?
The fact that Democrat Central newsrooms, do they have any kind of agenda?
Pushing race baiting, for instance?
Pushing feminist narratives?
Hiding crimes from particular demographics?
And pushing crimes of other demographics?
Do they have an agenda?
Ooh!
How about the fact that they rely on advertising and advertisers?
Do the advertisers ever have an agenda for them to avoid the more challenging and controversial topics?
The media has become not only false and predictable in my view, but incredibly bland.
Don't you already know what they're going to say, what their stand is going to be on just about any subject under the sun?
You know, pick up a liberal media and race relations, global warming, national debt, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans.
You know what they're going to say.
The alternative media...
Is winning because we're not boring.
We'll actually take on challenging and difficult topics.
We'll bring on people who disagree with us.
We will not, you know, lick the legs of one guy and then try and sucker punch the next guy because we don't like him.
I mean, it's...
We're not boring!
We're not boring!
We're interesting.
We're actually able to do challenging, controversial topics.
Now, of course, certain outlets are trying to shut that down with demonetization and so on.
Too controversial!
Too interesting!
Too factual!
Blah!
So, of course, I mean, saying that your enemy has an agenda is indicating subtly, maybe not so subtly, that you don't have any kind of agenda, which is nonsense.
I mean, one of the things that is said about people not on the left, and I think it's true, and they'll say it themselves, is that people on the left claim to have no bias, no agenda.
We're objective.
It's facts.
It's objective.
And people on the right say, we have an agenda.
We have a bias, and we're open about it.
Who's more honest?
And then he complained in the segment about internet echo chambers.
Ooh, internet echo chambers.
Boy, wouldn't it be tragic if the newsrooms in America didn't even remotely reflect the spread of political opinions in America.
Boy, wouldn't that be a real echo chamber.
So then we get to the meat of the matter.
And maybe I've had a bit of an influence on my friend, and maybe he came to this by his own speed and motor, but it comes down to the fundamental question.
And I am so happy that this fundamental question is being asked in such a widely disseminated platform as 60 Minutes, because it's really the meat of the matter.
So Scott Pele asks, Mike, how do you decide if something is true?
And Mike says, how does anyone decide?
That is an epistemological question.
Beautiful!
Beautiful!
First time that word has reared its head in the mainstream media since, I don't know, the trial of Socrates.
No, actually Socrates would never use the word epistemological either.
But anyway, that is an epistemological question, says Mike.
What is the nature of truth?
How does anyone ascertain what is true or is false?
It's a big question.
Billions of man-hours have been burned up over thousands of years to try and corner that question.
It's a moving target.
It's a challenging target.
And we need the rigid discipline of reason, evidence, philosophy, and so empiricism to hang on to the truth, which is a soap-slippery son of a bitch, frankly.
What is the nature of truth?
How do you know what is true and what is false?
What is epistemological...
What is epistemologically valid?
Great question.
And Scott...
And it's a trap.
Because if Scott says, well, it's really hard to figure out what is true and what is false, then that's honest.
But then the whole segment on fake news collapses.
So Scott has to say, has to say...
That it's easy.
So Scott says, well, you ask questions, you verify the information.
It's not that hard.
Asking questions is...
What does that mean?
What are the hit dice of an adult red dragon in second edition AD&D rules?
You ask questions.
You verify the information.
How do you verify the information?
How do you even choose which segments to run?
It's a big question.
How do you choose when and how you're going to do a story on fake news?
What's your agenda?
What's your purpose?
What's your goal?
What can you talk about in terms of your agenda, your purpose, and your goal?
What do you have to hide?
How are you going to organize things?
How are you going to present things?
What questions are you going to ask?
How are you going to edit the interview?
How are you going to boil it down to the essential issues?
It's a very big question.
He says, when you ask questions, you verify the information.
Now, of course, epistemology is the question, how do you verify the information?
How do you verify the information?
Scott's answer is not even a tautology.
You verify the information.
How do you verify the information?
You verify the information.
Yeah, I'm going to some investors.
And they say, I say, I'm going to cure cancer.
Give me a billion dollars.
And they say, well, how are you going to cure cancer?
And I say, I'm going to cure cancer.
No, no, no.
How are you going to cure cancer?
How is it proven?
I'm going to cure cancer.
What do you not understand?
Give me the billion dollars.
You understand?
How do you know what is true?
Well, you verify.
Well, that's just a synonym for true.
Anyway, enough about my upcoming book, The Art of the Argument, where I talk about this in more detail.
So, Mike, incredulous, incredulous, beautiful moment.
Finding the truth is not that hard.
Scott, I do it all the time.
Sorry, that was prejudicial mocking, but it's true.
I do it all the time.
I find the truth all the time.
Hmm.
The fact that the mainstream media may have set in motion events that are taking down Western civilization, you'd think would give them some pause about how they process truth, what they, right?
So the mainstream media was cheerleading the invasion of Iraq.
There are weapons of mass destruction.
How do you know?
The government told us!
Because that, you ask questions, you verify the information.
But hey, if the government tells you stuff, it's true.
Oh, creepy creep.
Creepy, creepy, ice-chilled squid arms reaching out to rip out your heart and mind from the chilled spinelessness of leftist jellyfish indoctrination.
So, good lord, start the war in Iraq.
War in Iraq leads to massive disruption and destruction in the region.
Leads to terrorism.
Arguably leads to Syria.
Destruction of Syria.
Destruction of Libya.
Founding of ISIS. Floods of migrants into Europe.
I mean, come on.
Is there no humility?
No sense of what the hell did we do wrong?
No guilt?
No shame?
No horror?
How do these people get out of bed in the morning?
And Mike rightly points out that there are two worlds, which is around what the definitions of truth are.
What the definitions of truth are.
That is fantastic.
The fact that different definitions of truth lead to different worldviews that are utterly irreconcilable is exactly right.
I've been saying it for years and years and years.
I've got a whole 17-part Introduction to Philosophy series, which you can find right here on YouTube.
That is an excellent question.
Once people understand the definitions of the essence of civilization, what do you define as moral, as right, as true, as good, as civilized?
Definitions are all that we have to deal with each other in a peaceful way.
When the definitions crack, society cracks.
When the definitions become oppositional, society becomes oppositional.
And we better get this stuff sorted out and damn quickly.
