Fake news: It’s all the rage these days, a big step up from when it was just Nigerian princes who desperately needed a bank account in the West. After deliberate falsehoods and manipulation via phone news sites helped to influence presidential election results, combatting these sites became a new mission for numerous outlets, from Facebook (the grand dame of bullshit story aggregating) to news sites themselves. And now that America’s favorite soap opera is watching Sean Spicer and the White House pretend to do the same thing—only in the name of spreading false news themselves—many may be wondering where they could possibly turn to get a hard dose of the cold, unvarnished truth. The answer, you’ll be happy to know, is now simple: You get it from the same place that first informed you Russian forces in Crimea were merely a helpful “citizen’s defense group.” Thank God for the straight-talkers of the world!
The Russian foreign ministry now has a section of its website dedicated to announcing media reports it has determined to be “fake news.” And just like any rigorous fact-checking outlet that is definitely not state-sponsored propaganda, it has devoted itself to spreading the honest gospel of things Putin thinks should be facts. And you know it’s accurate, because the key examples on its site right now include stories from Bloomberg, NBC, and The New York Times, those dastardly spreaders of anti-Russian balderdash. Below each article (helpfully stamped with a red “FAKE” label, as though it were the USDA evaluating ground chuck) is a statement simply reading, “This article puts forward information that does not correspond to reality.” Which is so helpful, because other sites try to confuse you by refuting the evidence with arguments and facts of their own. Not the Russian foreign ministry. It knows you don’t have time for that—you wouldn’t have voted for Trump if you did, obviously—so it rests easy, knowing that its job is done, and the light of truth has once more been brought to bear on these defamatory claims about Russia violating international weapons treaties, hacking foreign governments, and all those other things the country (any country, really, including our own!) definitely doesn’t do.
[via The Verge]