A Prime Example of Fake News

A Facebook Friend put up this poster on his timeline last evening.

London Embassy Tweet

This poster is cruder than much of the press’s publishing, but is concise and close enough to what is being reported for government work. As was discussed in “The Truth Is Hard For The New York Times,” fake news is comprised of inaccurate reporting, not reporting important facts about a news item, and spinning the discussion away from what is important to obscure what is important. This post is firing on all cylinders.

The poster accurately reported the news about what Trump actually tweeted. The rest of what was said in the poster is fake news. The real news of the tweet (besides the fact that Trump is not going to the dedication of the new embassy) is being overshadowed in the press by fake news.

The real news from the tweet is that Trump claimed Obama sold America’s interest in the old embassy property at a deep discount to what it was worth,[i] that the US overpaid for the construction of the new embassy, and he is not going to its dedication. The point of Trump’s tweet was that he wasn’t going because he wanted to distance himself from such terrible real estate transactions. He also wanted to get into the news (raise the suspicion) that the below market sale (it has been estimated the price was $275 million below market) to Dubai was/could have been corrupt.

But look at what the poster made of this real news:

1. The property was not sold by the Obama administration.

An agreement to sell to Dubai was announced on the day Obama got elected (obviously a Bush initiative). “Agreements” are typically announced when an “agreement in principal” (“AIP”) is reached. Hammering out details or even significant changes to deals between an AIP and the closing of a deal are commonplace. Hence the phrase, “No deal, however, is done until it is done.” Moreover, Dubai would not automatically reject an offer had Obama offered to lower the AIP price

Neither the AIP price nor the final price was disclosed at the time. If the deal was corrupt, we cannot know from the available information whether it was Bush or Obama that benefited from the corruption. It is reasonable to assume, however, that the last guy at the negotiating table had the upper hand as to where the benefit went.) Obama had plenty of motive, time, power, and opportunity to lower Dubai’s purchase price in return for “favors” for Obama. Did that happen? I don’t know. Does the news media know whether that happened? No, unless they are withholding the truth of the fact that he did. Whatever, the final deal was not done by Bush’s administration. Consequently, item 1 is fake news.

2. The money generated by the sale was enough to pay for the new embassy.

One would have to work really hard to come up with a more irrelevant comment. This comment is obviously misleading/misdirecting the reader from the real news.

The old embassy should have been sold on the best terms America could get, and the new embassy should have been built on the best terms America could get. If that was a $1 Billion sales price for the old property and a cost of $500 million for the new embassy cost, or vice versa, so what? The relationship between those two numbers is completely irrelevant as to whether either good or bad. If the new embassy could have been built for $300 million, then paying $500 million to build it was a bad deal (that Trump, the real estate mogul would not want to be associated with), regardless of the sales price of the old embassy.

When the real news is that Obama sold American property for too little and spent too much on the new property, then the hogwash of Item 2 is fake news.

3. The old embassy needed to be replaced.

This has nothing to do with Trump’s tweet. Trump did not even hint that the old embassy should not have been sold or that a new embassy should not have been built. He just said that both were done on terms disadvantageous to Americans. Item 3 is fake news.

4. Trump is an idiot and chicken shit.

If so, you couldn’t tell if from the idiocy of this poster.

The press’ bias that induces it to so consistently produce fake news is also revealed by the fact that reporters neither dug into the undisclosed details of these big transactions nor offered up news or speculations about the potential impropriety of the two projects—no such lack of scrutiny has been present in during the Trump administration. On the contrary, the press constantly offers up inaccuracies, irrelevancies, and speculations, such as the ones included in this poster, all of which are designed to put Trump in a bad light. Not only was similar fake news rarely generated against Obama, much of the knowable real news about Obama was obscured or covered up by spinning similar irrelevancies and inaccuracies in order to mislead the reader away from the real news.

🙛

Of course Trump has access to the details of the London embassy deals. What if he knows the two deals were full of corruption? It would be brilliant of Trump to set this trap for the biased media, watch them gleefully jump into it, and then discloses information of the corruption, thereby certifying how fake the “news” from the mainstream media is.


[i] See, “REVEALED: American embassy in London really WAS sold for ‘peanuts’. Building at centre of Trump row was bought by Qatari royals for hundreds of millions less than value experts gave it

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