Fake News? I’m Shocked
January 22nd, 2019 Posted by Rabbi Daniel Lapin Thought Tools 10 commentsHypocritically assuming a false mantle of virtue by pretending horror at discovering someone else’s transgression is so unattractive. We all recognized the dishonesty when Captain Louis Renault in the movie Casablanca (1942) said, “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
The hysterical shrieks we’ve been hearing these past couple of years about “Fake News” are equally disingenuous. Until 2016, did we simply accept as reliably true everything we read or saw? Of course not. The rule of Caveat Emptor – let the buyer beware-has been part of the prudent person’s arsenal forever.
Sadly out of print is Robert Spero’s wonderful book, The Duping of the American Voter: Dishonesty and Deception in Presidential Television Advertising in which Spero showed how the television ads as far back as the 1960s and used by presidential candidates Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter were “the most deceptive, misleading, unfair, and untruthful of all advertising…”