In a slideshow piece entitled Don’t get fooled by these fake news sites, CBS News – the network that brought you Rathergate and Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction – lists Infowars.com as a fake news website.
CBS Listed Infowars saying,
“The site is connected to Alex Jones, a radio host and conspiracy theorist who has alleged the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax,” states the blurb accompanying a screenshot of Infowars.
Infowars responded,
In reality, Jones put out a video in which he made it clear that he didn’t think the Sandy Hook shooting was a “hoax”.
The other fake news websites listed in the same category as Infowars include ones like Real News Right Now, which admits on its own “about” stage that all stories on the site are “satire”.
Also listed is The National Report, which contains a disclaimer on its site that reads, “All news articles contained within National Report are fiction, and presumably fake news.”
Also included is the Onion, which is the most well known satirical news website on the Internet.
CBS News is effectively blacklisting Infowars by including it amongst websites which are known to be or admitted to be fake news outlets.
This is ironic given that CBS is notorious itself for spreading fake news.
In 2004, CBS’ 60 Minutes produced documents critical of President George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard in 1972–73. Despite heavily pushing the story, the documents turned out to be complete forgeries and the scandal was so embarrassing that it forced veteran news anchor Dan Rather to resign months later.
CBS News also dutifully spread the fake news before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons labs, a story that turned out to be a completely contrived claim from a notoriously unreliable source.
The difference between fake stories spread by admittedly fake news websites and CBS’ Iraq war propaganda is that CBS helped sell a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of U.S. troops, and ruined a continent.
Read more of Infowars‘ response at Infowars.com
