Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Every year, Rachel Bronson, President and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who has a degree in political science from Columbia, gets up in front of a fake clock to announce that the world is doomed. And the media eagerly covers the annual imminent warning of doom as if it came with an open bar. Bronson is not an atomic scientist. Or any kind of scientist. Unless you believe politics is a science. And if politics is a science, then Bronson is the Lysenko of the field, predicting doom out of bias and ignorance. This year, the Doomsday Clock had its hands set forward to 100 seconds to midnight. After setting the clock at 2 minutes to midnight in honor of President Trump two years ago, it’s all out of minutes. Now it’s down to seconds. At this rate the fake clock will soon be down to negative numbers. If you don’t believe Rachel, maybe you’ll listen to Jerry Brown, former California governor and executive chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Jerry is not a...

In the middle of March,  The Guardian , a British lefty tabloid, rolled out a fake scandal that has dominated the media. Its original article claimed that Christopher Wylie, a "whistleblower", had revealed how Cambridge Analytica, the company he had worked for, had helped Trump win by illegitimately harvesting large amounts of Facebook data and then exploiting it to target users. The story has since fallen apart in every conceivable way that a story is capable of falling apart. Obama’s people had also harvested data from Facebook friends. "We ingested the entire U.S. social graph," his media analytics guru  had boasted . But so had everyone else. A platform operations manager at Facebook  estimated  that hundreds of thousands of developers had gotten access to friend data. So much for  The Guardian’s  claim that, "information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale". Free online services are part of a data marketplace. That’s the real busines...

The Fake News crusade began with BuzzFeed, more than any other member of the media, and it deservedly ends there. It began with BuzzFeed faking news to kick off a crusade against Fake News. The fake news that BuzzFeed faked was about the threat of Fake News. The numbers were wrong. But that didn’t stop BuzzFeed from warning that what it called Fake News was beating real news. And that’s probably true. BuzzFeed’s discredited Trump dossier story outperformed the NBC story discrediting it. The Fake News meme was already fading even before BuzzFeed dragged CNN down with it. The Washington Post’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, had claimed that the term was “tainted” and needed to be retired; much like her paper. Sullivan warned that non-liberals were using it to attack the media. There was a complaint from the New York Times that conservatives had “appropriated” the term. Meanwhile Sullivan had cited claims about Fake News from BuzzFeed arguing that “something has to happen”. On the ...