{"id":4169,"date":"2017-02-16T11:31:14","date_gmt":"2017-02-16T10:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4169"},"modified":"2017-02-16T11:33:13","modified_gmt":"2017-02-16T10:33:13","slug":"not-news-but-the-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/4169\/","title":{"rendered":"Not the News but the Narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

It wouldn’t be a day at the BBC without a front page article bashing Trump, would it? Their\u00a0latest effort<\/a> is entitled Will Trump’s Russia crisis be bigger than Watergate?<\/em><\/p>\n

The answer, of course, is no. If you follow the link you find not a story about Trump’s alleged “crisis” but a story about former news anchor Dan Rather speculating with a desperate hopefulness that Flynn’s resignation is similar to Watergate.<\/p>\n

Former CBS news anchor Dan Rather has compared the controversy over\u00a0links between members of President Donald Trump’s team and Russia to the Watergate scandal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is what the British<\/strong> Broadcasting Corporation considers front page news.<\/p>\n

Rather, who was for decades one of the best known and most trusted figures in US journalism, said in a Facebook post: “Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What the BBC doesn’t tell us is that this “most trusted figure” saw his career come to an abrupt end<\/a> when he was fired by CBS for pushing a false story<\/a> about George W. Bush’s service record which was based on forged documents.<\/p>\n

The post has been shared more than 88,000 times and has generated nearly 200,000 reactions.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Rather also promoted his post on Twitter, generating more than 13,000 retweets and 22,000 likes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because volume of shares and likes on Facebook and Twitter is an excellent basis for promoting news to the front page.<\/p>\n

This is not a political story at all: it is a non-story regarding the reaction on social media to speculative comments made by a former news anchor with a history of false reporting. But hey, let’s run it anyway because The Narrative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It wouldn’t be a day at the BBC without a front page article bashing Trump, would it? Their\u00a0latest effort is entitled Will Trump’s Russia crisis be bigger than Watergate? The answer, of course, is no. If you follow the link … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,20,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4169"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4172,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169\/revisions\/4172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}