Fake News: Scott Pelley Says Hillary Clinton's Health Must Be Great Because Hillary Clinton's Campaign Said So

Great piece by Ed Driscoll on an exchange between Scott Pelley and Mike Cernovich, the agitator/journalist who actually broke the Rice-requested-unmasking story.

Pelley says Cernovich is guilty of spreading "fake news" because he claimed Hillary Clinton had Parkinson's. Well, there was speculation to that effect, but that hasn't been proven one way or the other. A physician claimed that after watching some of Hillary's tics and odd pauses while speaking.

The doctor is a partisan (it seems to me, anyway), and his second-hand, inferential diagnosis is far from being proof. (FWIW, I've tended to buy into the idea that Hillary has some type of neurological impairment, whether Parkinson's or something else, but I have no actual proof.)

Seems an open question, to me. Cernovich's headline -- Physician Confirms -- is wrong, because the physician in question is not in a position to confirm, but only to speculate (informedly). So yes, a headline that greatly oversells the "news."

What's interesting in this exchange is that Pelley takes it as the Word of God that Hillary's health is impeccable -- because another partisan source (Hillary's campaign) says so.

First Driscoll quotes this:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I'm a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.

Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What's the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let's find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That's the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That's not a narrative I'm familiar with. Who's narrative is that?

Does anyone believe that Scott Pelley is not "familiar" with that narrative, or does not know who is propagating it?

It's hard to take journalists as reliable sources when their first words to you are spectacularly false.

"Hello," they lied.

Later, they discuss the Parkinson's story:

Scott Pelley: You wrote in August a story about Hillary Clinton's medical condition the headlines said, "Hillary Clinton has Parkinson's disease. [Physician] confirms." That's quite a headline.

Mike Cernovich: Yeah, Dr. Ted Noel had se-sent a story to me anonymously, that I checked out, analyzing her medical condition. And --

Scott Pelley: It isn't true.

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, she doesn’t seem to have any signs of Parkinson's disease.

Mike Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day caught by a citizen journalist.

Scott Pelley: Did you, well, she had pneumonia. I mean --

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, because that's what was reported.

Mike Cernovich: By whom? Who told you that?

Scott Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.

Mike Cernovich: Why would you trust a campaign?

Amazing, isn't it? One story for which there is a claim but no proof is dismissed breezily -- "It isn't true," Pelley says confidently -- but another story -- that all Hillary had was walking pneumonia, despite us all seeing her have a seizure on video -- definitely is true, no questions, because "that's what was reported" in the media, who in turn relied upon Hillary Clinton's team's very self-interested claim that she's in the pink of health.

It seems that the primary difference between "news" and "fake news" is that the former comes from progressives the media votes for or with and the latter comes from conservatives the media votes against.

The quality of news being "fake" or "real" is not a property of the news itself, but of the person relaying the news.

Just as in every aspect of American life, the extremist left is determined to create a caste system in which some people are allowed to speak, and some people are not, and some people are to be believed, no matter how absurd their claims, and others are to be dismissed -- even if they're telling you you didn't see the seizure your Fake News Eyes tell you they saw.

posted by Ace at 02:42 PM

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