Polish president slams fake news CNN

[Dill]

(07-07-2017, 05:05 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: I love how quickly the original point of this thread, that a major news network was called out by a world leader for pushing something that is instantly and easily *verified* false, changed.... to authoritarianism.

All because someone one response into the thread wanted to derail it off topic to avoid facing some truths they don't want to face.

The topic has not changed at all. Authoritarian leaders, from Hitler to Putin, "call out" the free press in part as a means of deligitimizing opposition points of view. 

The blanket term "fake news" is one tactic in the war between authoritarian leaders and the free press in liberal democracies. In the US case, it seems to involve a plain double standard. Trump tweets false information and innuendo on a daily basis. But he holds the MSM to a different standard--sort of.  E.g. what he calls "fake news," our intel agencies call "fact." If he can get voters to agree, then his accountability is diminished.

There is a similar situation in Poland. For people who prefer democracy to authoritarianism, the problem there is not that some reporter might have sent a little TWEET about a matter of protocol, but that the state has begun to limit and censor the free press. This is part of a pattern, which we see in countries like Hungary now, and Russia, and Turkey among others.

If Trump could control this thread, he would not let me make these points. He would encourage everyone to focus on a "fake news" tidbit and on that basis also distrust reports of Russian interference in our elections and obstruction of justice and the absence of any evidence of widespread voter fraud.