60 Minutes Dissects The Fake News Industry [VIDEO]

Last night 60 Minutes interviewed fake news promulgator and ardent Trump supporter Mike Cernovich, who with Alex Jones and other far-right crackpots earned millions of hits with their Pizzagate conspiracy claims and invented stories about Hillary Clinton’s health. CBS News reports:

Cernovich is a southern California lawyer who runs the website Danger & Play. He describes himself as “right of center politically,” and 60 Minutes reported that Cernovich has become “a magnet for readers with a taste for stories with no basis in fact.” Cernovich’s online articles include a bogus report that Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s disease and a fake sex cult story about Hillary Clinton’s “inner circle.”

Cernovich told 60 Minutes, however, that he believes everything he publishes is true. “They’re definitely not fake,” he tells Pelley of his stories. “One hundred percent true.” During the interview with Cernovich, the 60 Minutes team realized that the very definitions of words like “true” and “false” were not agreed upon by everyone in the room.

“Getting into an argument about it is like going down the rabbit hole,” Radutzky says. “And it wasn’t our job to go down the rabbit hole. It was our job to interview him and understand how he makes the decisions he makes.” The editorial decisions Cernovich makes apparently have a broad influence, thanks to his daily commentary streams and social media posts. He reached Twitter users 83 million times last month alone.

The clips below also includes an interview with a guy who freely admits that his wildly popular fake news site is full of completely false stories.