… Just about every political lie that has dominated American discourse in the past two decades — the Swift Boaters and the birthers, death panels, the idea that undocumented immigrants pose an existential threat but climate change does not — depended, for its mainstream dissemination, on the Fox News machine.
This makes sense when you look into the scholarship on misinformation. As Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan has pointed out, while it’s reasonable to worry about lies online, what we should really be up in arms about are the lies of “elites” — politicians, anchors, pundits and their spin doctors — who transform latent misinformation into comprehensive narratives of untruth. CONT.
Farhad Manjoo, New York Times