George Rebane

[Apologies for the late posting of this commentary.  My writing workflow always has several pieces in concurrent development, and sometimes one of them with time-dependent content gets overlooked for too long, but one that I still want to have archived as part of RR’s record.]

California’s passing of a racial diversity law that prescribes the composition of boards of corporations headquartered in the state.  This new legislation, now signed into law, is one the most blatant racist mandates by government that the morals-bleating Left have imposed on residents.  (more here)  This law joins the gender-biased legislation that requires female representation on boards and takes another step away from merit-based make-ups of publicly traded corporate boards.

There is no question that such laws continue to hobble the engines of wealth creation in California, but wealth creation has never been the objective of socialist governments.  The state has assumed the mantle of leadership in the Union for destructive collectivist initiatives designed to fundamentally transform America from a capitalist economy and society to one of comprehensive government planning and control.

Along this road to autocracy, we encounter questions raised for years on RR.  Now others are beginning understand the societal benefits of more culturally coherent societies, as we witness the daily destruction of every aspect of America’s traditions, cultural values, and institutions (more here).  Our Fourth Estate has long abandoned their traditional role in bringing reliable and timely news to their audiences.  They all are invested in one or the other side of a terminally polarized citizenry, and there is less and less of the ‘other side’ remaining in the cadre of media outlets.  No conservative broadcast outlets remain.  There is only Fox News which used to be a solidly “fair and balanced” outlet that also gave conservative voices a podium.  That stance is now fading as FN succumbs to the fear of being left behind in the virtue signaling competition, as it includes ever more liberal talking heads and left-tainted news copy.  When Rupert made his liberal son Lachlan CEO of Fox Corporation that owns FN, he started revamping both the Fox News and Fox Business cable outlets.

According to its CEO Suzanne Scott, FN now attempts to serve the desires of its expanded audience which, for obvious reasons, has attracted liberals to its traditional conservative and mid-road audiences.  Her “focus is on business” (i.e. no longer selling but giving them the rope) and with the new liberal cohort making up FN’s audience, this means that programming now has to reflect their jaundiced worldview.  Nevertheless, Scott claims that she will not deflect the main thrust of programming and news presentation to satisfy the recently arrived audience segment from the Left. (more here)  However, as a dedicated FN viewer of many years, I will beg to differ with the lady – the network, with liberal commentators like Chris Wallace and the compliantly weak-kneed Bret Baier, is definitely drifting to the left as it creates unneeded stress in its news presentations and interviews with conservative guests.  In short, FN now stands on the boundary of manufacturing fake news to satisfy its legions of liberal critics and timid, virtue signaling sponsors.

An example of this occurred recently when FN, joined by the WSJ, was busy putting out the story that the ‘White House Gives Mixed Signals on Trump’s Health’.  The WH was putting out no such signals.  All that happened was that hours before, some anonymous staffer had opined to a reporter that President Trump was probably more ill than was put out to the public.  But after that, a phalanx of Walter Reed physicians treating Trump assembled en masse and pronounced the president to be doing extremely well while not being on a ventilator as had been surmised by the anonymous source.  This welcome report was the latest and up-to-date on the condition of our chief executive. (more here)  Yet FN, with the help of Chris Wallace, insisted on repeating the ‘mixed signals’ version of what was then old news (rumor), and strongly implying that we really didn’t know what the true medical condition of the president was, and also that his attending medicos could not be trusted.  Now that is manufactured fake news pure and simple.

To put a technical bow on my interpretation, in the modern study of causality and Bayesian inference when you get reliable new information that overwrites what might have been in the past, your job is to take that as the updated ‘state of the system’, and start treating it as the previous understanding (i.e. the prior) to which you now will appropriately append new inputs and calculate the updated understanding.  If you don’t abandon the dated priors (like yesterday’s anonymous report), then you must give specific reason why you retain and reincorporate that old information, and allow it to influence your present beliefs.  FN and Wallace did none of this.  They just continued to spin their ‘mixed signals’ story to artificially maintain audience interest and stress levels.  In short, ignoring the latest reliable report and rehashing possible conflicting past reports to maintain viewer interest is one popular way to fabricate fake news.

This has long been among the MO of the lamestream media, has already been adopted by the politically flipped Drudge Report, and is now being busily incorporated into the Fox empire.  We still have some balance left in the op-ed pages of the WSJ, and the stalwart Epoch Times, which remains as a reliable print and online news source and purveyor of conservative opinions and interpretations.