Fake News

By John Stossel Fake News! shouts our president calling out CNN The New York Times and others. I love it. Although its not really true -- not the way President Donald Trump means it. The media rarely fake anything. Over time they generally get the facts correct. But the president makes a good point: The smug lamestream media spin left but wont admit it. At ABC News my colleagues acted as if I was the only guy in the building with an opinion. Everyone else was in the middle. This was nonsense. Almost all were leftists. They constantly pushed big government. Their bias was revealed in questions they asked the experts they chose to interview and their endless calls for political correctness and new regulation. Unfortunately Trump is now just as ridiculous claiming that crime is reaching record levels when its half what it was 25 years ago. He claimed We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban and that he had the biggest electoral college win since Reagan and so on. This is absurd. Facts are facts. Trump shouldnt make things up. But I still love his Fake! tweets because much of what media spew is misleading. I did it myself. On 20/20 my consumer reports covered exploding coffee pots and risks posed by pesticides used on lawns. (Danger in the Grass!) These werent lies. A few personal injury lawyers did have clients injured by coffee pots. One mans skin peeled off after he played golf on a freshly sprayed course. The injuries were horrible. But in terms of consumer protection this news was irrelevant and misleading. Its a big country. Rare and horrible things happen. I wised up eventually realizing that those threats distract people from real threats like driving in the rain drinking too much smoking etc. But my peers continue to terrify people about trivial or nonexistent threats from power lines hair dye saccharin NutraSweet Teflon pans electric blankets computer terminals cellphones killer bees and more. They win awards for it. In 1999 the media said planes would crash because computers couldnt handle the switch to the year 2000. Now they claim global warming will drown us if we dont honor meaningless climate treaties. They imply that polar bears are vanishing although scientists studying 13 polar bear populations found 12 stable/increasing and one declining. Friday Trump varied his attack calling The New York Times NBC ABC CBS and CNN the enemy of the American people. Enemy? Maybe Trump said that because hes a narcissist who thinks he is the American people and the media run antagonistic headlines like: Doomsday Clock Ticks 30 Seconds Closer to Global Annihilation Thanks to Trump Scientists Say -- NBCNews.com ...Trump will Destroy the Environment... -- The Intercept Trump Will Destroy Public Education If We Let Him -- Huffington Post op-ed Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy? -- New York Times How Trumps Speech to the CIA Endangered America -- The Atlantic These claims are a mix of opinion and click-bait. All are possible. Trump could be the infantile petulant authoritarian some of us fear. Terrible things may happen. But they havent yet and much of whats written deserves the label fake news. The press is depressingly shallow. They blow up little things speculate about conspiracies and constantly obsess about whos winning? Offensive remarks are taken out of context and amplified. Days later its forgotten and the media move on to the next sensational accusation. They rarely explain the policies at stake what those policies cost past success or failure or the laws of economics. As a result we miss the real news: the big important changes that happen slowly. Remember the coverage of the beginning of the womens movement the invention of the computer chip Google Facebook etc.? No? Thats because there wasnt any. But the growth of Facebook alone changed lives more than the election of any politician. Wages rise -- inflation-adjusted household income rose $7000 over the last 30 years. But the media claim that the middle class and the poor get poorer. We live longer than ever. Crime is down. But Americans are fearful and pessimistic because what they read and see on TV makes them believe lifes getting worse. When the media do that they are indeed enemies of the people.