The True Story of Fake News: How Mainstream Media Manipulates Millions, by Mark Dice ★★★★
Mark Dice is best known for his documentation of the Illuminati and the Bohemian Grove,and thus is often accused of being a “conspiracy theorist”. I’m not sure such accusations logically follow and consider the accusation that Hillary Clinton is a conspiracy theorist holds more credibility than such accusations against Mark Dice.
In this book, Mark Dice attacks mainstream media. By that is meant not only the standard media channels like CNN, ABC, MSNBC, CBC, etc., but also the internet social media and reference sites, such as Wikipedia.
Dice first goes after social media. I would have thought that social media would have been fairly free of bias, but the contrary is mostly true. Google has the ability to manipulate how searches are performed in order to favor a liberal bias. Facebook tends to have a horrid bias in how it censures conservative vs. liberal media. Dice’s complaint about U-tube is in how it manipulates advertising revenues based on the “offensiveness” of content, and offensive is often deemed as anything of a conservative nature. Since Dice depended heavily on revenues acquired with U-tube, it has affected him most heavily.
The attack then rages against the standard media channels. Step-wise through the various media channels, Dice documents many incidents where the media either created the news or manipulated the recording of the news (for instance, editing out segments of comments to make them say exactly the opposite of what was said) in order to provide a strong liberal bias. Sadly, he does not include Fox News, which has also manipulated how it reports the news in order to force a bias in the direction that Fox News wished. I am sure that the examples provided by Dice are just the tip of the iceberg in how our news is manipulated to heavily biased ends.
The book is slightly tedious to read. His short last chapter provides a brief overview summary of the problems in fake news. This is where I know Mark Dice could have used his book as a springboard to discuss the problem of news bias and what to do about it. 1. What alternatives do we have in attempting to gain news without a distorted slant? 2. How do we live with the news swamp that is currently given to us? 3. What other sources of news are available? 4. What ways can we protest social media in an effective fashion? Is boycotting social media the best action? 5. What grass-roots efforts are available that seem to be effective at forcing more responsibility with the news media?
Since news will always be biased, we cannot simply demand news without “bias”. The reporter holding a world view similar to our own would be helpful. The only effort that I am aware of to provide more conservative newsagents has been the World Journalism Institute, though even it has had somewhat of a neo-conservative bias reflected by the parent news magazine, World Magazine. Reporters of a conservative bent have found it overwhelmingly challenging to live in the liberal shark tanks of the liberal press. Too often, like Ross Douthat, they have caved and showed themselves mostly as liberals in sheep’s clothing, perhaps having a pro-life stance, but otherwise being rottenly liberal to the core. Hopefully, Mark Dice will think through and provide a better scheme that conservatives could use to confront the liberal (and lying) press.
