1 00:00:02,520 --> 00:00:07,420 You’ve probably heard a lot of people recently screaming and yelling about Fake News. 2 00:00:07,420 --> 00:00:13,000 Charges fly from all points on the political spectrum: this story is mistaken — it’s Fake News; 3 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:16,060 that statement is incorrect — it’s Fake News. 4 00:00:16,060 --> 00:00:19,220 But to my mind, these arguments miss the point. 5 00:00:19,220 --> 00:00:25,260 Mainstream American news is ALL fake because the major news outlets are so consistently 6 00:00:25,260 --> 00:00:30,320 biased toward the left that whether any given story they report is factual or not, their 7 00:00:30,320 --> 00:00:34,300 overall reportage is essentially leftist propaganda. 8 00:00:34,300 --> 00:00:39,090 You can complain about the right-wing slant of Fox News all you want, but left-wing ABC, 9 00:00:39,090 --> 00:00:46,480 CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN have, combined, almost ten times the viewers. 10 00:00:46,480 --> 00:00:51,500 Look, the chief journalist at ABC is former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos; the 11 00:00:51,500 --> 00:00:56,380 president of CBS News is David Rhodes, the brother of a former senior Obama staffer. 12 00:00:56,380 --> 00:01:00,640 Comcast, which owns NBC, is run by a major Democrat donor. 13 00:01:00,640 --> 00:01:05,660 Same for the leadership at CBS and Time Warner, which owns CNN. 14 00:01:05,660 --> 00:01:10,180 Only seven percent of American journalists identify as Republican. 15 00:01:10,180 --> 00:01:15,650 And while a lot of news outlets forbid their reporters to donate to candidates, 96 percent 16 00:01:15,650 --> 00:01:19,860 of those who did donate last time out gave to Hillary Clinton. 17 00:01:19,860 --> 00:01:24,780 These journalists claim that despite the fact they’re all Democrats, they can be objective. 18 00:01:24,780 --> 00:01:26,170 It just ain’t so. 19 00:01:26,170 --> 00:01:30,770 Psychologists have shown that when people associate almost exclusively with those who 20 00:01:30,770 --> 00:01:35,900 agree with them, they suffer from groupthink and confirmation bias and lose their ability 21 00:01:35,900 --> 00:01:37,700 to see events clearly. 22 00:01:37,700 --> 00:01:42,420 Now, it’s not that these journalists are liars, exactly – it’s that their bias 23 00:01:42,420 --> 00:01:45,520 skews their reporting in very specific ways. 24 00:01:45,520 --> 00:01:50,160 Let me give you Andrew Klavan’s Three Rules of Mainstream Media Journalism. 25 00:01:50,160 --> 00:01:55,420 These can transform any story, whether it’s true or not, into Fake News. 26 00:01:55,420 --> 00:01:59,600 Rule Number One: Whenever left-wing prejudices are confirmed 27 00:01:59,600 --> 00:02:03,840 by a single event, that event is treated as representative. 28 00:02:03,840 --> 00:02:09,000 But whenever left-wing prejudices are contradicted by a single event, that event is treated as 29 00:02:09,000 --> 00:02:13,920 an isolated incident – and if you treat it as representative, you are deemed to be hateful. 30 00:02:13,920 --> 00:02:17,420 So, for instance, a white cop shoots a black suspect. 31 00:02:17,420 --> 00:02:22,360 The mainstream media treats that story as representative of general police racism 32 00:02:22,360 --> 00:02:28,200 even though studies show cops don’t use deadly force more often on blacks than on whites. 33 00:02:28,200 --> 00:02:32,800 On the other hand, if a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, and someone is bold enough 34 00:02:32,810 --> 00:02:37,400 to point out that the terrorist act is, in fact, representative of the daily acts of 35 00:02:37,400 --> 00:02:42,430 Muslim terror around the world, this is considered Islamophobic. 36 00:02:42,430 --> 00:02:46,650 The leftist media cherry-picks when an event illustrates a larger narrative. 37 00:02:46,650 --> 00:02:48,840 That’s Fake News. 38 00:02:48,840 --> 00:02:53,239 Rule Number Two: When a scandal breaks on the right, the news 39 00:02:53,239 --> 00:02:54,489 is the scandal. 40 00:02:54,489 --> 00:02:58,400 When a scandal breaks on the left, the news is: who wrongfully disclosed 41 00:02:58,400 --> 00:03:00,300 that scandalous information? 42 00:03:00,300 --> 00:03:04,720 Thus, when the media wanted to raise suspicions that Donald Trump was somehow in league with 43 00:03:04,740 --> 00:03:10,280 the Russians, they freely quoted illegally leaked information from intelligence sources. 44 00:03:10,280 --> 00:03:15,460 But when Congressman Devin Nunes announced he had information that the Obama administration 45 00:03:15,470 --> 00:03:21,040 might have misused intelligence against Donald Trump’s transition team, the story became: 46 00:03:21,040 --> 00:03:22,960 How did Nunes get that information? 47 00:03:22,960 --> 00:03:24,770 And did he do it legally? 48 00:03:24,770 --> 00:03:28,920 The scandal meter is heavily weighted to fall to the right. 49 00:03:28,920 --> 00:03:30,200 Fake News. 50 00:03:30,200 --> 00:03:35,000 Rule Number Three: Individual extremists on the right are highlighted, 51 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:38,680 but the overall extremism of the left is ignored. 52 00:03:38,680 --> 00:03:43,880 In one of the fakest Fake News stories in recent history, the mainstream media rose 53 00:03:43,890 --> 00:03:49,599 up as one to tar conservative Tea Party members as racist, when all they really wanted were 54 00:03:49,600 --> 00:03:52,460 lower taxes and less government spending. 55 00:03:52,460 --> 00:03:57,980 Reporters gave the Tea Party disparaging nicknames; represented their almost universally peaceful 56 00:03:57,989 --> 00:04:02,739 gatherings as “ugly” and “violent”; and whenever an individual Tea Partier said 57 00:04:02,740 --> 00:04:07,980 something wrong, it was cited as evidence that the movement itself was tainted. 58 00:04:07,980 --> 00:04:14,200 Meanwhile, the continually violent, vandalizing, anti-Semitic socialist movement that went 59 00:04:14,200 --> 00:04:20,120 by the name of Occupy Wall Street was hailed by journalists as an important social development 60 00:04:20,120 --> 00:04:22,400 right up to the moment it vanished without a trace 61 00:04:22,400 --> 00:04:26,760 (except for the piles of litter its protesters left behind). 62 00:04:26,760 --> 00:04:32,460 Peaceful Tea Partiers wanted the small government prescribed by the Constitution, so they were radicals; 63 00:04:32,460 --> 00:04:36,940 violent Occupiers wanted the widespread government intrusion of socialism, 64 00:04:36,940 --> 00:04:38,460 so they were heroes. 65 00:04:38,460 --> 00:04:40,140 Very Fake News. 66 00:04:40,140 --> 00:04:45,540 Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas was once criticized when his magazine essentially convicted some 67 00:04:45,550 --> 00:04:50,440 white Duke University lacrosse players of raping a black woman — a rape, it turns out, 68 00:04:50,440 --> 00:04:53,300 they did not commit – because it didn’t happen. 69 00:04:53,300 --> 00:04:59,259 Thomas defended himself, saying, “The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.” 70 00:04:59,259 --> 00:05:04,130 The mainstream media almost always get their left-wing narrative right, whether the facts 71 00:05:04,130 --> 00:05:05,600 support it or not. 72 00:05:05,600 --> 00:05:08,460 That’s called confirming your own prejudices. 73 00:05:08,460 --> 00:05:09,760 It’s called bias. 74 00:05:09,760 --> 00:05:12,220 It’s called Fake News. 75 00:05:12,220 --> 00:05:15,660 I’m Andrew Klavan for Prager University.