Fake News

Media Matters has the transcript of today’s show: So we have a teacher barricaded in a classroom with no students. No children. No students anywhere around. And starts firing some shots. Barricaded in the classroom. And then here comes some cops and nab the guy is in custody and we got a breaking new stories: “Teacher in Custody After Georgia …

Yesterday the father of Parkland student Colton Haab admitted that he “accidentally” doctored the email which he had claimed showed that CNN “scripted” the questions for last week’s town hall on gun control. Last night Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson both issued brief “corrections” to their claims, which had inflamed right wing sites. Carlson said, “For the sake of honesty …

The Huffington Post reports: Chuck Johnson — a far-right troll and occasional adviser to Trump’s administration who is famous for publishing the home addresses of reporters whose work he doesn’t like, suggesting an Amtrak crash was caused by the engineer’s sexuality, questioning how many Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust, and propagating a claim he pooped on the floor …

The Hill reports: Conspiracy theory outlet Infowars is one strike away from being banned from YouTube. The channel said it received an alert from YouTube on Tuesday morning, saying Infowars received a second strike on a video about the Parkland, Fla. high school shooting and will temporarily be unable to upload new content. “This is the second strike applied to …

World Net Daily columnist, racist birther, and 9/11 truther Jerome Corsi, who is also a regular on InfoWars, has a new explanation regarding the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Kyle Mantyla has the quote at Right Wing Watch: “The story is a pedophilia ranch,” Corsi said, “a boy ranch for elite to go on these so-called hunting trips …

Mediaite reports: A day after the Democratic rebuttal memo was released that claims to rebuke the findings of the Nunes memo, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) appeared on Fox & Friends to slam the Democrats’ document while insisting that the Steele dossier was the main impetus of the Russia probe. He also used the Fox News interview to smear the media. …

From the Hollywood Reporter: A YouTube channel run by far right news website InfoWars has received a strike against it after posting a conspiracy theory video about the survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a source has confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. This week, the Alex Jones Channel on YouTube posted a video about David Hogg, …

The Washington Post reports: David Hogg, 17, went from Florida high school student to mass shooting survivor to telegenic advocate for gun-control laws in a few days. And just as quickly, online conspiracy theorists began spinning viral lies attacking the teenager’s credibility. The conservative website Gateway Pundit on Monday posted a picture of Hogg under the headline: “EXPOSED: School Shooting …

Media Matters reports: National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent promoted the right-wing conspiracy theory that the Parkland school shooting survivors who are currently calling for gun regulation are “coached” actors. In a February 20 Facebook post, less than a week after the shooting, Nugent shared a February 19 Natural News article claiming “these kids were coached to repeat scripted …

Via Breitbart: Conservative commentator Pam Geller revealed on Breitbart News Daily on Wednesday morning that her panel on free speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) had been canceled because she refused to remove Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit as a participant. “Late last night, I received a call … demanding that I remove one of the speakers from …

Gizmodo reports: Twitter suspended thousands of accounts overnight and conservatives on the platform aren’t happy about it. Twitter has yet to make a public statement about the issue, but right-wing users believe that they’re being targeted in a mass purge of suspected Russian bot accounts. Conservative Twitter has even started a hashtag called #TwitterLockOut to talk about the purge, with …

Motherboard reports: It’s a vile conspiracy theory we might expect from the host of Inforwars Alex Jones, but right now it is the number one trending video on YouTube. The conspiracy theory is that some of the students who are speaking out against the lax gun control laws that enabled the mass shooting that killed 17 of their peers at …

The Hill reports: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R) on Tuesday lashed out at a “disgusting group of idiots” who made up the claim that students appearing on TV as survivors of last week’s deadly high school shooting were actors. A staffer for Florida state Rep. Shawn Harrison (R) said that the two high schoolers who survived the tragedy pictured in …

The New York Times reports: One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.  “This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that …

Last night Chelsea Clinton fired back at Jim Hoft, the homocon founder of the fake news site Gateway Pundit, who is part of the now-widespread right wing attacks on the survivors of the Parkland massacre. Hoft is taking particular aim at “astonishingly articulate” Parkman survivor David Hogg, whom Hoft accuses of having been “coached” by his retired FBI father because …

Snopes reports: Three disreputable web sites including GotNews.com, FreedomDaily.com and GatewayPundit.com have been named in a federal lawsuit accusing them of defamation for allegedly falsely naming an innocent teenager as the driver who rammed into and killed a counter demonstrator at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Jerome Vangheluwe and his 16-year-old-son Joel had to flee …

Media Matters reports: On February 16, the Justice Department and special counsel Robert Mueller issued an indictment against 13 Russian nationals, along with the Russian entity the Internet Research Agency (IRA), charging them with defrauding the United States and interfering in the 2016 presidential election campaign. The indictment notes, according to CNN, “The defendants allegedly posed as US persons, created …

Politico reports: It looked as if Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward had scored a big endorsement: On Oct. 28, she posted a link on her campaign website and blasted out a Facebook post, quoting extensively from a column in the Arizona Monitor. There was just one problem: Despite its reputable sounding name, the Arizona Monitor is not a real news …

Media Matters reports: Notorious anti-Muslim commentator Pamela Geller uploaded and shared an obviously staged video framing migrants in Italy as anti-police vandalizers in the context of Italy’s highly contested general election. On February 11, Pamela Geller’s “Morning News Report” newsletter featured a YouTube video titled “Migrants in Italy” which was uploaded on February 7 to Geller’s YouTube channel, and shared …

CNN reports: Unilever is threatening to pull its advertising from digital platforms that it says have become a “swamp” of fake news, racism, sexism and extremism. The forceful warning to digital platforms such as Google and Facebook will be delivered at an advertising conference in California later on Monday. “We cannot continue to prop up a digital supply chain which …