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NPR’s alternative facts undermine media credibility

Seasoned NPR employee Mara Liasson asked a question at a White House press briefing the other day, and it has taken me days to accept the brazenness of her bald-faced lie.

Asking Trump Admin spokesman Sean Spicer about allegations of voter fraud, Liasson asserted that Trump had claimed the number of fraudulent votes in the November 2016 election were between three and five million.

Unfortunately, Spicer is new and did not challenge Liasson’s lie. Trump never claimed that number. He did say he believed between one and two million of the votes for Hillary Clinton were fraudulent. How Liasson arrived at five million votes is something only she knows.

But we know why she did it: Mara Liasson is personally opposed to the Trump Administration.

Unfortunately, Mara Liasson is like the other NPR employees, she is a partisan political activist. Her personal politics shapes her professional behavior. Nothing that Mara Liasson does is news reporting, as in reporting of actual facts. Her brazen creation of alternative facts in this one instance resembles her many prior years of alternative facts creation and fake news aimed at her other political enemies.

In one public moment, Mara Liasson has re-opened the worm can of fake news and alternative facts, used to attack and undermine the mainstream media’s political enemies.

And NPR fans wonder why their credibility is so low, and why there are so many loud calls to defund NPR and strip it of the publicly owned intellectual property it manages, like its trademarks and logos.

UPDATE: Fifteen minutes after writing this, I read a New York Times article published today, written by Richard Fausset, another political activist who wears the credentials of a “news reporter.”

What catches my eye right away is the following statement by Activist Fausset:

The scrambling of what’s real and what’s illusion began well before Mr. Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway offered the concept of “alternative facts” on Sunday when commenting on false statements by Mr. Trump and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, and before Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims on Monday that millions of illegal voters cost him a popular vote majority.”
…….Without presenting data or evidence to support his own claim, Mr. Fausset simply asserts that Trump and his spokesman Sean Spicer made “false statements,” and “repeated false claims.”
……..Plenty of recent evidence from Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia show voter fraud. Hell, in November Detroit had more votes than registered voters, and in 2012 some Philadelphia voting precincts reported 100% voting for Obama, and not even one ballot cast for Romney. California issued driver’s licenses to a million illegal aliens, which can be used to cast illegal votes, and the governor of Virginia defied his own state’s laws and issued illegal voting rights to hundreds of thousands of ex-felons.
………So despite lots of up-front, easily accessible evidence to the contrary, and having done no investigation of their own, the New York Times goes right out there and calls President Trump a liar.
………You talk about alternative facts, hell, the New York Times doesn’t need no stinkin’ facts, not even alternative facts. They just simply assert the opposite of what their political opponents say and print it, hoping their zombie-like readers will not check the facts.
……..And the mainstream media wonders why Fox News, Breitbart, and other actual news sources have emerged…it is because the New York Times and its sister mainstream media organizations, like NPR, have zero credibility as honest brokers of news or accurate facts.
UPDATE: 2/1/17 Listening to the radio news over the past week, I have heard a professional CBS “reporter” state that President Trump’s assertion about vote fraud was false, and then mock Trump’s goal of having an investigation into vote fraud, and then complain that an investigation will be funded by the American taxpayer…and the mainstream media wonders why their credibility is so low. This is Exhibit Z, but who is counting….and then yesterday on our local NPR affiliate station, the “news” involved NPR hosts asking softball questions about Trump Admin policies of elected Democrats and leftist activists, with no alternative voice. This means NPR is simply a propaganda outlet for one political party. This means NPR is Fake News.

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