The news war was officially launched after a liberal professor created a list of fake news sites, which spread like wildfire online. It’s the beginning of the establishment’s war on independent media, disguised as a battle on fake news. To get an understanding of just how biased the fake media list actually is, the only mainstream media sites to make that list favored Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton for president. Of course, the real news sites wouldn’t lie or do anything crooked like their candidate of choice would. Here are five instances where news outlets published outrageous fake news, with consequences catastrophic to civilian lives.

George W. Bush’s weapons of mass destruction is a good place to start. He unleashed the full force of the U.S. military disguised as a war on terrorism following the attacks on 09/11/01. Afghanistan was chosen as a victim because of the supposed identities of the attackers. Iraq suffered the consequences following dubious claims that Saddam Hussein harbored destructive chemical and biological weapons while actively seeking stronger munitions. Judith Miller reported for The New York Times that an Iraqi scientist had seen several extensive caches of such weapons of mass destruction stored somewhere in the country. The Times spent months trying to backtrack on the story after its heavy flaws were revealed. The damage was already done though, since the story caused widespread public support for a war that nobody wanted the military to undertake.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident exemplifies the mainstream media working as an employee of the government, where anything claimed by a U.S. official is reported as fact. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was possibly one of the craziest lies made up to be used as justification for war. The New York Times reported that President Johnson had ordered retaliatory strikes against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam, after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. All the other news outlets took the story as real and published their own. This fiction for war story claimed the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. troops and millions of Vietnamese.

CNN sent reporter Amber Lyon and a crew to Bahrain for a documentary about technology’s role in the 2011 people’s uprising known as the Arab Spring. What they encountered was a repressive and violent regime, which is what Lyon attempted to report on. However, CNN filtered and censored the truth. Many sources that had agreed to speak with CNN either hid from them or had vanished. Regime opponents who were interviewed suffered recriminations. Bahrain’s officials contacted CNN International repeatedly to complain about Lyon’s continued reporting on what she’d seen. Intimidation continued until she was laid off.

Fox News repeatedly interviewed a CIA operative, who had in fact never worked for the agency. For over a decade, Wayne Shelby Simmons made guest appearances on Fox News, supposedly to provide expert insight into various situations. The mainstream media offered up fake insight as the real deal.

Almost 40 percent of all drug arrests in 2015 were for possession of cannabis. Millions of lives were ruined by criminal convictions for possessing a healing plant. The mainstream media publishes false propaganda about cannabis to convince people that it is as dangerous as heroin or cocaine. Despite many media claims that pot is a dangerous drug, 69 percent of the population believes it to be less harmful than alcohol.

Sources:

TheDailySheeple

NewsFocus.org