Monica Lewinsky
disambig --> SEP 1 26
see bimbogate
---
1019 start on legit node here sparked by drudge reminder
---
mofo pow
jason foster mofo staffer:
- House Government Reform Committee (1997-2003)
*Senior Counsel
---
an 6 24
Monica Lewinsky calls for Judge Aileen Cannon to be impeached — but is that possible?
---
"trolls, conspir.." seattle alt
THE WEB OF CONSPIRACY
History has a pattern.
An advancement in communications technology hands liars the means to lie louder and spread those lies further.Look at the 1830s, when the invention of the steam printing press and other paper-making technologies produced the rise of the “penny press.” Newspapers became cheaper, more independent, more widespread, more competitive, and eager publishers found the power of the 19th-century version of clickbait. The New York-based Sun put out a series of entirely fictional stories that purported that “man-bats” and other exotic creatures were scurrying around on the moon.
Soviet-born British TV producer Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, argues that when tech rips open the floodgates of communication, the bad guys always find a way to exploit it. Dictators quickly harnessed the power of radio. Joseph McCarthy, as a U.S. senator in the ’50s, used television to spread his anti-Communist conspiracy theories.
Yet for decades, the internet was heralded as a new frontier that allowed “citizen journalists” to take on the stodgy media elite.In 1998, the Drudge Report, a right-wing news-aggregating website, broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal when Newsweek got cold feet. In 2004, when Dan Rather and 60 Minutes put out a 1973 memo purporting to show that President George W. Bush had received special treatment while in the Texas Air National Guard, Drudge elevated the conservative bloggers who persuasively argued the memo was a fake written in Microsoft Word.
An “Army of Davids” — as some bloggers dubbed themselves — swarmed to debunk flawed media accounts, trying to counter bias wherever they saw it. The gatekeepers were being overthrown, the drawbridge had been flung open and the villagers could storm the castle.
But the villagers had their own standards for newsworthiness. Drudge also sent his readers to darker corners, where sketchy websites claimed Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen and Bill Clinton had a secret love child. Drudge even provided fuel for “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy that drove a man in 2016 to fire an AR-15 inside a pizzeria, because the internet told him that they were harboring child sex slaves.
Conspiracy theorists used to spread their gospel through books, newsletters, public access television shows, and by standing on street corners and handing out fliers. But the web gave every community a niche — no matter how fringe — and allowed them to spread their message in only a few keystrokes. On the internet, the corkboard is infinite and the spool of yarn used to connect pictures of shadowy figures never runs out.
The internet, Warzel says, handed fringe figures like Alex Jones of InfoWars a powerful new megaphone.
“He was one of the early pioneers of internet radio and video,” Warzel says. “It was a way to get around the notion that it was hard to sell advertising around some of his kooky ideas.”
An audience of millions repeatedly tuned into Jones’ red-faced rants about 9/11 being an inside job, Obama chemtrails turning frogs gay,and the Sandy Hook shootings being faked. Drudge repeatedly linked to him.
Social media sites only accelerated the spread of misinformation. It’s easier than ever for a single comment, particular an untrue one, to go viral. In ancient times, the opinions of quacks were largely quarantined to a newspaper’s page of letters to the editor.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and racist Twitter randos with names like “@WhiteGenocideTM” are all simmering in the same stew together. Both, after all, get retweeted by the president.
==
---