I sat and read an Austrian newspaper this morning....the Kurier.
The article? For weeks in Austria....various news outlets have been talking about fake news, and usually the finger of blame either goes to the Russians or the FPO Party in Austria (the right-wing guys).
The Kurier? They interviewed FPO's boss.....Heinz-Christian Strache.
He kinda laid out the criticism of is party, and the fake news business.....but he then flipped it around and noted various times in the past couple of years that the government itself worked up fake news articles.
The unemployment numbers.....statistics which were done in varying ways to prevent negative public attention? Yeah.....that was fake news.
Police reporting which declined to identify the background or nationality of the offending guy? Well.....yeah, that was fake news as well....or at least manipulated news.
The 2014 drug trafficking report for the nation? So fakeness to the report helped to lessen public frustration.
Here's the thing....everyone in Europe....from left to right, and down through the various government agencies, and onto various platforms of journalism....have learned how to manipulate and write fake news. It's not exactly a recently developed or KGB-orchestrated business. It's been around, for a fairly long time....not just decades, but hundreds upon hundreds of years.
Eventually, some idiot will wake up and say that it's a real shock....that Italian ice cream shops in Austria are manufacturing fresh ice cream daily with the home-made-Italian sticker, but find that all the materials are from Slovenia or Romania. Or, some government official will admit that cops were told never to ask for passports or ID when interviewing suspects.
We live in an era where manipulation of the public is a hour by hour event, and necessary to prevent the public from firing people for incompetence. You can look at the Austrian Presidential election and how screwed up the whole thing was.....yet no one was fired.
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