Fake News is Socially Positive Propaganda
"I do as I please, you understand?" In the absence of strong father figures, there is only the mass media to instruct young ladies on the fine art of behaving as a woman ought. This is why we are entertained by women being murdered by men, beaten by men, raped by men. Men are physically stronger than women, and women need to be reminded of this because there is no one else at home to remind them. Otherwise women will prance about the city streets all night long, dressed in a flimsy little silk dress and high heels.
Women are portrayed as victims on TV in order to prevent them from becoming victims in real life. The Public Service Announcements of the 1950's were mocked in a way that today's #FakeNews is not. Daily Fake News (as opposed to the Historical Fake News in Wikipedia) was invented to replace the PSA's of the past, but the purpose remains the same: a dire warning to keep to the straight and narrow.
Drug dealers and gangsters are shot by police, so don't do that. Prostitutes are murdered by Johns and die of disease, so don't do that. Children are kidnapped and groomed by pedophiles, so keep your children close and get involved in their schools. First Responders and soldiers are in danger, so be kind to them. War and poverty threatens, so appreciate the job you've got. Disease and pestilence could strike at any time, so support Big Pharma. Comets, overpopulation and global warming may exterminate civilization, so support international NGO's.
We laugh at #FakeNews because it is poorly written sky-is-falling trash with enough plot holes to sink the Titanic. Yet there is a point behind it. They want to keep us safe. They want to save us from our commutes, so they force employers to allow us to work from home, and if it takes a global pandemic then they will create one. They are breaking up the Liberal teaching establishment, and only #FakeNews could do it. They are using METOO to keep American girls safe from the Hollywood Jewish horror show.
They don't want us to get involved in their faked elections, so they created January 6 to teach activists a lesson. They don't like rioters so they paid Antifa/BLM FBI agents to proactively trash a few downtown areas and give rioters a bad name. They don't like separatists so they pay a few actors to make a white supremacist murder scene for the TV news. Technologies, policies and cultures are promoted or squashed according to ad hoc scripts cobbled together by competing interests and government agencies. Of course it's a mess.
We have gotten used to movies, which generally follow some kind of a plot, and real life, which slowly flows in broad generational cycles. #FakeNews is a little bit of both, since it has a plot like a movie (though clumsily scripted with plenty of continuity errors) and is purported to represent what they call real life. #FakeNews is both professional, in the sense that it is well-financed and supported, and amateur, written by hacks to strike fear into fools. It can't really hurt us and it might actually help us.
I guess it's unavoidable that a little "How Dare You" creep into any serious analysis of #FakeNews. Yes, we have been manipulated our whole lives. But then again we got off pretty lightly. The World Wars, while not what we were told, were certainly heavy-handed. Our parents were terrorized by nukes, serial killers and hijackers. All we get are mall shootings and masks, and yet we are just as traumatized and divided as we ever were. The stimulus is being gradually reduced, and we still get to have cars in space.
Teens everywhere are still being filled with hopeful media bullshit, just as I was. I suppose it's better than the truth. Let them dream of flying to another planet, writing a popular novel, or starring in a Hollywood blockbuster. The public school system does not waste time with trivialities, and is becoming less and less concerned with liberal arts. They will be trained to work in the system as it exists today, just as I was trained for the system of yesterday. The backstory is not important, and it never was.