The father of the 2-year-old Honduran girl featured on Time magazine and emblematic for the separation of immigrant children and parents, told The Washington Post Thursday , June 21, 2018 that the young girl was never separated from her mother.
Denis Javier Varela Hernandez told the Post he recognized his daughter on the cover of Time magazine looking up at President Donald Trump and feared she was separated from his wife. The photographer who took the picture, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Moore, reported that after he took the photo, the child’s mother picked her up and they got into a van.
Moore, along with many on social media, believed they would soon be separated and the child would join the 2,500 other immigrant children placed in detention centers while their parents faced prosecution.
But the mother and child are not separated, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman confirmed.
The Trump era has given rise to a vast alternative left-wing media infrastructure that operates largely out of the view of casual news consumers, but commands a massive audience and growing influence in liberal America. There are polemical podcasters and partisan click farms; wild-eyed conspiracists and cynical fabulists. Some traffic heavily in rumor and wage campaigns of misinformation; others are merely aggregators and commentators who have carved out a corner of the web for themselves. But taken together, they form a media universe where partisan hysteria is too easily stoked, and fake news can travel at the speed of light.
In recent months, some of the most irresponsible actors in this world have proven alarmingly adept at influencing venerated figures of the left—from public intellectuals, to world-famous celebrities, to elected officials with at least tacit cooperation if not outright assistance from what used to be the mainstream media
People like Mensch, Claude Taylor, Andrea Chalupa, Eric Garland, and Leah McElrath feed their followers a steady diet of highly provocative speculation, rumor, and innuendo that makes it sound as if Trump’s presidency—and, really, the entire Republican Party—is perpetually on the verge of a spectacular meltdown.
Liberals desperate to believe that the right conspiracy will take down Donald Trump promote their own purveyors of fake news.
Facebook pages like Occupy Democrats have millions of fans who ensure that every meme, video, and breathless blog post they publish has a good chance at virality. The content plastered across these pages includes standard-issue clickbait (“Trump Just Did Something Awful At His Golf Course”) and hyperbolic headlines (“Queen Elizabeth Just Told Trump To Go F*ck Himself And It Is Perfect”). But these feeds are also studded with straightforwardly fake news which has become a mainstay on CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC.
Reddit and Daily Kos host freewheeling forums that attract the kind of deranged conversations that tend to thrive in those wack-a-doodle environments while the HuffPost contributor platform—an un-vetted, unedited section of the site that operates apart from its “professional journalism”—has been a vehicle for some of the most bizarre, and outright craziest, content to go viral on the left in recent years, (although many times you cannot separate the “mainstream regular crazies from the other really crazy crazies.
One sign of the power in this media universe is the regularity with which stories that originate there end up reaching public figures with real influence and massive followings. These are generally people who have little or no background or expertise when it comes to politics and media, but whose prominence in other fields—academia, history, law, literature—gives them a certain patina of trustworthiness. So when they share stories from the left-wing fringe on Twitter or Facebook, many are inclined to take them seriously.
The MSM is far from blameless. The subliminal effect of relentless, distorted or false anti-Trump headlines for example has been ridiculed or ignored but never satisfactorily explained.
The mainstream media, (radio, television, print media) and the internet outlets, (Twitter, Facebook) are important because the most current news and issues and opinion steering are spread every day through them. What is extremely dangerous is sometimes labeled “The Dune affect” a term coined–after the movie Dune–which explains that those who control and have access to media have access to and potential control of public opinion.
While the responsibility of journalism, whether in print or electronic format, is to inform the citizens of facts , the fact of the matter is that the media are by no means neutral. George Orwell’s novel, 1984 was a warning against a government and a society that robs its citizens of their capacity for critical thinking and reasonable, authentic self-expression. While many of the events and experiences described in 1984 may have seemed absurd at the time at which the novel was written, the reader who pays attention to current events and current media strategies realizes that the world as George Orwell envisioned it is not so different from the world in which we are living. Orwell was right to be concerned about these issues, and so should we all.
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