Mainstream Media: Purveyor of Fake News

Over the weekend The New York Times performed an about-face and debunked the regime change casus belli that Venezuelan troops set fire to aid trucks stuck at the Colombian border (see "Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Nicolás Maduro Burned Aid Convoy"). Max Blumenthal had already debunked the Maduro-burns-aid-trucks canard in real time.

Glenn Greenwald has a masterly write-up in "NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda" where he concludes that

What we have here is classic Fake News – spread on Twitter, by U.S. officials and U.S. media stars – with the clear and malicious intent to start a war. But no western proponents of social media censorship will call for their accounts to be cancelled nor call for their posts to be deleted. That’s because “Fake News” and the war against it is strictly a means of combating propaganda by U.S. adversaries; the U.S. and its alliesmaintain extensive programs to spread Fake News online and none of those anti-Fake News crusaders call for those to be shut down.

And the next time claims are made about Venezuela designed to fuel regime change and wars, the independent journalists and analysts who were absolutely right in this instance – who recognized and documented the lies of the U.S. Government weeks before the New York Times did – will again be ignored or, at best, mocked. Meanwhile, those in the media and Foreign Policy Community who uncritically amplified and spread this dangerous lie will be treated as the Serious People whose pronouncements are the only ones worth hearing. With rare exception, dissent on Venezuela will continue to be barred.

That’s because the U.S. media, by design, does not permit dissent on U.S. foreign policy, particularly when it comes to false claims about U.S. adversaries. That’s why skeptics of U.S. regime change in Venezuela, or dissenters on the prevailing orthodoxies about Russia, have largely been disappeared from mainstream media outlets, just as they were in 2002 and 2003.

"Classic Fake News" methods of mainstream reporting are spreading to cover larger sections of the daily newspaper. Brexit, the trade war with China, the occupation of Afghanistan repeat the same talking points endlessly, so much so it is hard not to ignore them (which is likely the intention).