WEST SACRAMENTO CA (IFS) -- The need for each and everyone of us to re-examine stories that were released that were not true, and caused great harm. This writer loved the television show "Dragnet" that starred Jack Webb. His great line in each episode was "Just the facts. . ." In the old days, this was called "The New Reality". -KHS
By Shari Weiss
Whoopi Goldberg revealed on Monday’s “The View” that she’s suing over a fake news story she says endangered her and her family.
During “Hot Topics” on the ABC talk show, Goldberg announced, “Something came out in a fake news website about me. It endangered my family’s life and it endangered my life.” She explained that the untrue story falsely claimed she slammed the Navy Seal widow who was featured in Donald Trump’s speech to Congress. As Gossip Cop reported, “The View” co-hosts did discuss that part of the president’s address, but Goldberg never said a bad word about the woman.
The fake news story, she said, was “created by a guy who just wanted to see how quickly stories he made up would spread.” And spread this did, apparently to the point where people who believed it began threatening Goldberg and her loved ones. She angrily said, “I know you’re in Costa Rica, sir, because you said where you were. If I hadn’t been made aware of this, I could’ve found out about this at the end of a barrel of a gun.”
Goldberg vowed to “get some kind of legislation going” to combat the problem of fake news. “Clearly, you don’t care what could’ve happened to me or to my family,” she said of the unnamed perpetrator, going on to reveal, “Man, I’m telling you, you cost me money because I had to protect my family. Costa Rica isn’t big enough for this lawsuit that’s coming for you.”
The show’s moderator also acknowledged that Trump himself is also a victim of fake news. “Just so we’re clear, just so we’re really clear, I want these protections in place for the current president, for his family,” Goldberg insisted. She went on to say, “Sir, the fact that you don’t give a crap that this endangered me is unconscionable, and I’m going to get my lawyer and I’m coming for you.”
The last year has turned the United States into a country of information addicts who compulsively check the television, the smartphone and the good old-fashioned newspaper with a burning question: What fresh twist could our national election drama and its executive producer, Donald J. Trump, possibly have in store for us now?
No doubt about it: Campaign 2016 has been a smash hit.
And to the news media have gone the spoils. With Mr. Trump providing must-see TV theatrics, cable news has drawn record audiences. Newspapers have reached online readership highs that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
On Wednesday comes the reckoning.
The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the center of the paper-and-ink branch of the news industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago,” as The Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker told me on Friday.
Papers including The Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Gannett publications and others have responded with plans to reorganize, shed staff, kill off whole sections, or all of the above.
No comments:
Post a Comment