Just like when “fake news” was the new buzzphrase, and the mainstream media quickly jumped onboard to deflect the accusation from being aimed at them, so are they now as the term “alternative facts” is gaining popularity.
When President Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway uttered those now infamous words to Chuck Todd on Sunday, the self-righteous media immediately let out a collective “See, Trump doesn’t deal in facts” as if they weren't guilty of the same. The leftist MSM would love to distance themselves from the “fake news” moniker and declare they’ve never published “alternative facts” but they can’t no matter how hard they try.
But since pointing the finger elsewhere is what they're best at, news outlets have co-opted those phrases and turned them into marketing ploys. As Mediaite noted, Variety did something similar after Trump insulted them, offering subscriptions to the “‘way down, big trouble, dead’ magazine Trump doesn’t want you to read.” BuzzFeed tried to profit after Trump called them a “failing pile of garbage,” plastering the phrase on multiple items for sale. Now, The New York Times is co-opting “alternative facts” in a subscription promotion captured below in a screenshot:
The NYT promises readers the “truth” can be found in its pages and never alternative facts. But au contraire, The Grey Lady has indulged in fake news and alternative truths aplenty, most recently when two of its reporters fabricated an entire story to paint Rick Perry as clueless about what a secretary of energy does. And that’s after they promised to act like real journalists because they failed so miserably at it during this election cycle.
This is the same paper that is suffering because subscribers are sick of reading biased news. The same paper that just hired Glenn Thrush, the Politico writer exposed by WikiLeaks for sending his articles to Hillary Clinton’s camp for preapproval before publishing. And, yet, it's the same paper that wants us to believe it doesn’t deal in alternative facts.
Nice try, but the secret is out.
