When “Fake News” Is Actually Fake

In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen what a complete shambles the mainstream media have become. First up, someone at the New York Times was formatting a fake story about watermelons on Mars—perhaps this was a training exercise for a new employee?—but somehow managed to press the “publish” button, and this appeared on the Times website:

Now, I could go a long time on the idea of “fruit aliens.” Wouldn’t they be illegal? Or entitled to DACA status? And wouldn’t this be some kind of code for the whole UFO boomlet going on, namely, that the alien “little green men” creeping in on earth are likely Communists? Why else deposit watermelons, which are green on the outside, but red on the inside. And how come we assume the gender of aliens when we call then “little green men” anyway; maybe the Mars watermelons are the aliens, and they’ve been here on Earth all along, victims of cannibalism.

I suspect many Times readers would have been taken in by this story, but no, they retracted it.

Now if only they’d get around to retracting Walter Duranty, who certainly had the deep redness of an overripe watermelon.

But wait—there’s more! At yesterday’s presser for Vice President Harris in Mexico, a Univision reporter got up and slobbered all over the VP. The Media Research Center has the story, and here’s the relevant part of the transcript:

SYMONE SANDERS: Our next question will come from Maria Fernanda. At Univision.

MARIA FERNANDA: Thank you, Madame Vice President. For me, it’s an honor because I actually got to vote for the first time as a nationalized(sic) citizen. I voted for you. So —

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Thank you.

MARIA FERNANDA: — my question is, what would you say to these women — those mothers and also women of color on both sides of the border, farmers, many of them who I see every day. As a message of hope, but also, what will you do for them in the next coming years?

HARRIS: That’s a great question. And thank you.

There’s only one problem: Univision says Maria Fernanda doesn’t work for Univision. Univision issued multiple statements distancing themselves from Fernanda.

MRC comments:

Given all these elements, we are faced with one of only two possible scenarios which are, by degrees of exponential magnitude, far worse than the original “Univision reporter fangirls over Kamala, says ‘I voted for you’” story:

Coronell’s statement is true, in which case we are talking about a MAJOR security breach and vetting failure from the Secret Service, Mexican state security, and the White House press team (led by former CNN political commentator Symone Sanders)

Coronell is lying, in which case (as my colleague Curtis Houck pointed out) Univision has a major journalistic scandal on their hands.

My question is: never mind whether she works for Univision or not—how can you tell she isn’t just like every other White House reporter, who secretly slobbers over Biden and Harris? In other words, how can you tell a fake reporter from a “real” reporter these days? I think Fernanda’s real offense here is that she said out loud what everyone in the room knows to be true about the press corps. If she hadn’t slobbered over Harris, I suspect Univision might have kept silent about it.

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