The media is wildly casting about for someone to blame for Hillary's defeat. Racism. Sexism. James Comey. Facebook.
That last one is the convenient thesis of Max Read at New York Magazine. Specifically he's blaming Facebook's tolerance for fake news sites. The 'almost parody' ones and the 'fake clickbait' ones.
The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news.... All throughout the election, these fake stories, sometimes papered over with flimsy “parody site” disclosures somewhere in small type, circulated throughout Facebook: The Pope endorses Trump. Hillary Clinton bought $137 million in illegal arms. The Clintons bought a $200 million house in the Maldives.
It's really awful when the professional purveyors of fake news get beaten by amateur purveyors of fake news.
When it comes to left-wing fake news clickbait, New York Magazine is good at it. Like the time it widely circulated Katie Zavadski's clickbait lie about the Hamas murder of 3 Israeli teens titled, "It Turns Out Hamas Didn’t Kidnap and Kill 3 Israeli Teens After All".
That piece of fake news, courtesy of fake news outlet BuzzFeed, went hugely viral. It was a lie. But it fit what the left wanted to believe. Despite repeat complaints, entreaties and attempts to communicate with New York Mag staff, the piece remains largely intact.
So does the BuzzFeed piece.
Katie Zavadski was rewarded with a job at the Daily Beast. Sheera Frenkel still works for BuzzFeed. As the Rolling Stone case demonstrated, it takes a lot of work to hold media fake news sites accountable for their fake news.
Why shouldn't people believe fake news sites? Remember the time the media 's fake news sites tried to depress the vote by insisting that Hillary Clinton had a lock on it and that Trump couldn't possibly win?
When the left decided to turn the media into fake news sites pumping out viral social justice content, they gave up the right to complain about other fake news sites pumping out viral content. If the media wants to go back to the days when fact checking meant that reporters checked their facts, instead of being used to mean attacks on your political opponents disguised as fact checks, it's welcome to.
But for now it has no right and no credibility.