Nick Cohen on the charlatans who use the "Fake News" narrative

Nick Cohen has a good piece in the Spectator,

Charlatans succeed by pretending the media always lies.

He accepts that journalists make mistakes and sometimes "herd" in the direction of selecting stories based on a journalistic consensus, and therefore there are rational reasons to be sceptical about the mainstream media narrative.

However he then points out how unscrupulous charlatans of  right and left alike, from Trump to the Corbyn supporters of Momentum, take advantage of genuine concerns that the media might not get everything right to create a "Take News" narrative that the media always lies, and thereby insulate their supporters against any possibility that an inconvenient truth might disturb their comfortable beliefs.

Definitely worth a read, Not least because all of us are wise to ask ourselves whether we might be falling into the same trap.


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