When our mainstream news media tell you what's happening in the nation and around the world the prudent response is skepticism. Donald Trump's "Fake News" slogan has become famous (or infamous), but he certainly has good reason for distrusting what he sees on tv.
A recent example of the willingness of the media to manipulate both the news and their viewers is the decision by ABC to show a video, purporting to have been taken on site in Syria, and alleging to be evidence of the Turks slaughtering Kurds.
The ploy was quickly exposed as an absurd sham, however, when the video was revealed by viewers to actually have been taken at a Kentucky gun range. In fact, anyone watching it can see that it's not what the producers and news reporters told us it was.
There are trees in the scene, recorded at night, which would be anomalous in the deserts of northern Syria, but even worse, there is an audience of people clearly visible in the foreground, starting at the 28 second mark, casually recording the "carnage" on their cell phones.
Either ABC simply titled this video "Slaughter in Syria," and threw it onto their broadcast without even looking at it, in which case they're extremely irresponsible, or they knew what it was and thought their audience wouldn't notice, in which case they're contemptuous both of their viewers and the truth.
Here's the vid:
Whatever their motivation, the mainstream media continue to demonstrate that they simply can't be trusted to give us the truth.
This article at The Federalist gives a couple of other recent examples of media mendacity.
