Ponderable

Sounds just about right,
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Obama aide reveals 'groupie' president fawned over celebs...
 
For the past two years, politicians and journalists have become obsessed with fake news. It’s been blamed for the shock election of Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU. The Pope’s compared it to the snake in the Garden of Eden and the House of Commons decided it was important enough to fly the DCMS Select Committee over to DC to grill Facebook and Google execs. Even Mark Zuckerberg admitted that not addressing it sooner was “a big mistake." His punishment is, as Reason magazine’s Robby Soave puts it, to live out “every young person’s worst nightmare: trying to explain how tech stuff works to the nation’s elderly.”
 
Scapegoating
First, fake news is too useful a narrative. Rather than face hard questions about candidate choice, voter disenchantment and campaign tactics, unsuccessful campaigns can blame social media for spreading misleading news stories. It’s useful for the New York Times to shift the focus on to fake stories about the Pope endorsing the Donald and away from their reporting of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

And it’s useful as well for the other legacy media companies who compete with Facebook, Google and Twitter for ad revenue. It is ironic that Peter Thiel, Facebook’s earliest outside investor, was inspired to invest in Facebook by the theories of French social theorist Rene Girard when Facebook itself has become one of the scapegoats that were the focus of Girard’s thinking.
 
For the past two years, politicians and journalists have become obsessed with fake news. It’s been blamed for the shock election of Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU. The Pope’s compared it to the snake in the Garden of Eden and the House of Commons decided it was important enough to fly the DCMS Select Committee over to DC to grill Facebook and Google execs. Even Mark Zuckerberg admitted that not addressing it sooner was “a big mistake." His punishment is, as Reason magazine’s Robby Soave puts it, to live out “every young person’s worst nightmare: trying to explain how tech stuff works to the nation’s elderly.”
The Pope should have been comparing the fake news of the Pharisees regarding Jesus, instead of the Snake in the Garden of Eden.
 
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