. It is just possible that the burgeoning fake news industry made chumps of Americans who elected a narcissistic boob president, while reading lurid tales of satanic, murderous, sex – crazed Hillary Clinton. Sixty two percent of Americans get their ‘news’ from – Facebook. An untold number go straight to the source and get their info from sites that manufacture the tales. Even sources such as Fox News have been duped by fake stories, as outlandish as ‘spirit cooking’ a tale made up in a fevered imagination, that spread like wildfire. Tweeter-in Chief, Donald Trump, who believes a tweet is equal to the New York Times in veracity, lends credence to the wild tales for his followers.
The origins of fake news might be darkly comedic if not for the tragic influence that fact-free journalism has had on the recent presidential election. On the bright side, Google’s Adsense incentives helped revitalize a village in Macedonia. Creative teens who man 100 sites in a small village, quickly found that bizarre stories about ‘bad Hillary’ pay much better than truth, when writing for the American market.
I wonder what we have done to ourselves? When people rely on a steady diet of lurid stories which serve only to enforce their personal views, they’re certainly entertained. But when they don’t know how to tell facts from lies, don’t they become vulnerable to con men who dabble as ‘entertainers?’