in the web
Researching this week’s news holds is not as easy as it sounds. Part of the problem is defining the parameters to find the items I was looking for, but the Real problem was discovering how many sites exist which present the most outlandish news.
Trump and not Trump
The decision not to write about #Donald Trump, but to talk about the week that was became an unexpected Odyssey. Beginning with a search for “news headlines” on Google took me to hundreds of pages talking about the 45th President, Michael Flynn and Russia that I wanted to avoid dealing with for at least one day.
A search for fun and then strange news items them became truly unreal as the search engine took me into surreal world that would have made Rod Serling happy to include in his ‘Twilight Zone’.
From UFOs to cannabis and conspiracies
The change of parameters took me away from the at times frightening and confronting news with the serious headlines about wars, bus crashes, assassination and military activity to a nether world that does not belong to our world.
One headline with an obviously manipulated image promised a report of a dogfight between UFOs and military jets. I did not bother to read the link. Another site seemed filled with links to articles from around the world about cannabis, its persecution and its decriminalization.
Other sites then took to fun and “cute” images of animals and/or children, then information about unusual diseases and presumed very imaginative cures of serious diseases. The one thing that surprised me was that I found no links to chem trails, but I suspect it was simply because I gave up on these parameters after only a few minutes.
Wierd and wonderful
These discoveries made me understand that "fake news" does not exist in the sense that many politicians use nowadays to refute articles that may harm their image or programmes. The Fake News is that world of imagination that many use to present the most outlandish and looniest theories of conspiracies, black flag operations and snake oil remedies that no serious newspaper would ever report.
Donald Trump and the other politicians would do well to understand that the “fake news” they refer to is simply the right of the Press to report that the messages they give are short on details, or simply wrong in the facts. At the same time the journalists themselves also have ethical and legal responsibilities on how they report the news and press conferences.
New weapon
But these battles are not new, they have existed since time began and will continue for eternity. The term “fake news” is simply a new weapon that the White House has found to combat this war of words.
If the Oval Office truly wants to see what “real fake news” is, they simply have to search for it on the internet and it is truly weird.
