Fake News

El Chapo, they are not.

A meme about nothing.

You've been bamboozled.

No truer now than it wasn't last year.

Call it satire if you’d like, but it’s false information.

A picture is worth a thousand fake narratives.

Photoshop.

A simple rumor weed.

When ill-conceived jokes become false information.

Not a McNaughton painting.

“Time is a flat circle.”

Yes. And no.

Obvious fake news churns out real threats.

Greetings from the Midwestern Bureau of TWS. We’re dark this week, as regular readers know, but we’re not taking the week off! The website must go on. A number of Standard writers and editors are back in their non-swamp ancestral homes for the Fourth. I’m in Saint Louis, where I went to college…

A recent New York Times piece took aim at Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (and occasional TWS contributor). A lot of Beltway policymakers are upset at Dubowitz, mainly for his scathing criticisms of the Iran nuclear deal over the last several years but also for the…

How fake news enters the mainstream.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, editor-in-chief Stephen F. Hayes, contributing editor Charlie Sykes, senior writers Michael Warren and John McCormack, and reporter Haley Byrd come to you live from the Weekly Standard Midwest Conservative Summit in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Journalists in the mainstream media often sound as though they have no idea why anybody would entertain skepticism about the news media. The term “media bias” is, to them, a ruse. Complaints about “fake news” are evidence of stupidity or delusion.

Missouri's governor is facing invasion of privacy charges related to a sex scandal, but a wholly separate claim about computer tampering will be tricky to get out of.

Amtrak ends charter rides. Did you know that you can hitch your own train cars to an Amtrak train? Granted, not many among us have privately-owned rail cars, a novelty for the richest among us, but some do. Anyways, this practice, the Wall Street Journal reports, is going bye-bye:

During a televised hearing before the Homeland Security Committee last week on natural disasters in 2017, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama made a joke that thousands of people online perceived as a racist jab.

On his website, John Laurits (a self-identified communist based in Oregon) claimed that there is “no evidence” that Russia was involved in the poisoning of former Russian spy and double agent, Sergei Skripal.

TWS Fact check is aware that there are few things less funny than explaining a joke, but fact checking one comes close.

The website POTUS WDC posted a false story with the bogus headline, “Catholic Archbishop Says Pedophilia Is ‘Spiritual Encounter With God.’”

“Seattle Police Begin Taking Citizens Guns Away, No Warrants or Charges,” a headline from the website Neon Nettle claimed early Wednesday. Multiple blog sites reported the same.

“Michelle Obama Just Received LIFE-SHATTERING News From The Doctor,” or so the website “nyfoxnews.co” (a domain extension widely used in Columbia) would have you believe.

Internet hoaxes, like bad stand-up comedy or chain restaurant themes, often struggle with originality. That’s why you’ll see old stories re-emerge year after year.

If ever a snare were set for a conspiracy theorist, it would most certainly be the "Steele dossier" released for public consumption by BuzzFeed in January of last year, alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It has the perfect ingredients for a conspiracy: opposition…

Amid the flurry of rumors stemming from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has faced accusations that she had an affair with Donald Trump, accusations which she has denied.

Caricature-extraordinaire Alex Jones claimed on Tuesday to have in his possession THE secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) memo that congressional Republicans are calling to be declassified so as to demonstrate surveillance abuses.

Retiring senator Arizona Jeff Flake accused President Donald Trump of reckless disregard for the truth Wednesday, saying that the White House had launched an “unrelenting daily assault on constitutionally protected free speech.”

After Oprah Winfrey’s explosive Golden Globes speech, the internet has been abuzz with Oprah-related chatter, attracting fake news and false information.

A question of grammar is at the center of President Donald Trump’s latest battle with the media.

Did the Supreme Court uphold a “1952 Law Outlawing Islam in Government”?

While Donald Trump postponed plans to hand out “Fake News Awards” on Monday (we’re kind of hoping one of the grownups in the White House caught wind of the scheme and is working to shut it down completely), that did not stop the Committee to Protect Journalists from its own silly contest, as the…

Pope Francis has told Catholic media that his annual World Communications Day speech, watched by tens of millions around the world, will be dedicated to addressing “fake news.” Journalists are “fundamental” to democratic society, said the pope, and in doing their job “shouldn’t fall into the ‘sins…

The end of free speech? Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason has an excellent cover story about how "the left eats its own and the right shows its true colors." Here's my favorite part:

Iraqi prime minister Haider Al-Abadi took to Twitter on October 13 to dispute rumors that his forces were mobilizing to take over areas under the control of Iraqi Kurds, particularly the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. “The fake news being spread has a deplorable agenda behind it,” he wrote. As with most…

A reader alerts TWS Fact Check to a "news" story that the Supreme Court has banned public schools from teaching about Islam. The post, which has been making the rounds on Facebook for several weeks, claims that Justice Neil Gorsuch issued the deciding opinion in an April 10 ruling to restrict…

Please see the editor's note at the bottom of this piece.

At her confirmation hearing Tuesday, Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos fought back against allegations that her school reform efforts in Detroit were a failure.

Scottish teenager Kate Hume was no stranger to tragedy. By the time the great European powers hurtled into war at the end of July 1914, her older brother had already been dead more than two years: Violinist John "Jock" Hume was a member of Wallace Hartley's eight-man orchestra that had played on…

Scottish teenager Kate Hume was no stranger to tragedy. By the time the great European powers hurtled into war at the end of July 1914, her older brother had already been dead more than two years: Violinist John “Jock" Hume was a member of Wallace Hartley's eight-man orchestra that had played on…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on the media's handling of the 'Trump dossier.'

"Fake news"! The phrase was such a handy hammer for liberals to pound the heads of conservatives—until conservatives grabbed the hammer and started pounding liberals, pointing out some of the fakery that liberals had fallen for. How dare they? So now the liberal mantra is: We must retire that…

It's come to this. Facebook has been so bullied over the "fake news" narrative since the election that they're actively appointing a panel of censors to police speech on Facebook: