The establishment press wants readers, listeners and viewers to believe that the search engines and social media are being overwhelmed by "fake news." Those making such allegations are, with rare exceptions, thinking of conservative and center-right web sites which have been countering their established wisdom and taking readers and dollars away from them.
Well, if that's so, at least in regards to Google and Donald Trump's nomination of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, I'm having a hard time finding evidence of that. Instead, auto-suggested search results provided by the world's dominant search engine on Saturday took me straight to the leftist fever swamps and to a New York Times editorial which might as well have originated there.
At 11:00 Saturday morning Eastern Time, look what happened after typing the first few characters in the second word of "sessions nomination":
The HuffPo item was also the featured result on a Google web search on "Sessions nomination" when I finished typing both words and hit "Enter":
The HuffPo featured item is a pathetic eight-paragraph hit piece which cites publicity hound David Duke and the guy who runs the Daily Stormer website. That's it. Wow, I'm overwhelmed. (That's sarcasm, folks.)
I'm supposed to believe that's the best suggestion Google has?
At 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, I attempted a search on Sessions' full name. This time, I got the following suggestion only after typing "jeff s":
From HuffPo to Salon. Oh boy.
The Salon piece by Brian Tashman is mirrored from the Right Wing Watch website, and at least tries, though futilely, to present an analysis.
To buy what Tashman is selling, you have to believe that the following items, implicitly or explicitly advocated by presidential candidate Donald Trump, are supported by only a tiny percentage of people in the U.S.:
Sessions defended Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims from entering the United States and Trump has embraced many of Sessions’ proposals, like “canceling federal funds to sanctuary cities,” slowing legal immigration and challenging the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
After I typed the rest of Sessions' last name, that same 5:30 p.m. auto-suggested search went back to the HuffPo piece. That was also the case after I finished typing both words, hit "Enter," and reached the first page of results.
The first page returned from a direct search at Google News (as opposed to Google web) at 6:30 p.m. Saturday on "sessions nomination" (not in quotes) was dominated by results from opponents (graphic provided is only a portion of that page).
Finally, after separately typing "Sessions attorney general" in a Google web search at 6 p.m. and hitting "Enter," the featured result which appeared was a house editorial emanating from a certain fever swamp in Manhattan:
We've learned not to expect much of a difference between HuffPo, Salon, and the New York Times. The Old Gray Lady's editorial completely conforms to that expectation. Here are excerpts:
Jeff Sessions as Attorney General: An Insult to Justice
... Under him, the department would most likely focus less on prosecutions of minority voter suppression and more on rooting out voter fraud, that hallowed conservative myth.
Voter fraud is not a myth. It's a serious problem in an electoral system which increasingly depends on a completely misguided (unless your goal is to cheat, win and not get caught) "honor system" mentality.
Continuing, with the tired racism charges we've all come to know and despise:
... Donald Trump ran a presidential campaign that stoked white racial resentment. His choice for attorney general — which, like his other early choices, has been praised by white supremacists — embodies that worldview. We expect today’s senators, like their predecessors in 1986, to examine Mr. Sessions’s views and record with bipartisan rigor. If they do, it is hard to imagine that they will endorse a man once rejected for a low-level judgeship to safeguard justice for all Americans as attorney general.
Erick Erickson at the Resurgent says, "Dream on, lefties":
Seriously Trump?!?! The Pictures of Jeff Sessions They Don’t Want You To See.
Jeff Sessions is going to be the next Attorney General of the United States. The Senate Democrats, having scrapped the filibuster on nominations, have no way to stop him. Will these pictures stop him?
They show Jeff Sessions marching in the streets with… wait for it … no seriously, wait for it… civil rights icon John Lewis. Whaaaaa???
... Senator Sessions spearheaded the effort to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, an Alabama native and Civil Rights icon.
And, brace yourself, when Senator Jeff Sessions was young, he campaigned against George Wallace in Alabama.
Jeff Sessions disagrees on a number of things with the left on policy. But disagreement on policy does not make Sessions a racist. That the left has to attack Sessions as a racist is proof that they have nothing on Sessions — a man who marched with a civil rights leader.
Here's a very troubling question: If Google, other search engines and the social media titans are playing favorites with left-driven news and actually fake leftist news, how is the casual news consumer ever going to know what they really should know about Sessions?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
