Fake News

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CMD Report "Fake TV News" Triggers FCC Investigation

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Media Matters

(because they cover what's important)

Danny Schechter News Dissector

Why are these organizations my heroes?
History, my dear, history. I'm reading the last chapter of Clifford D. Conner's A People's History of Science (c) 2005and I stumble upon this nasty little gem on pg. 450:

The horrific practical implications of eugenics emerged in political movements in the United States and Germany. The American eugenicists were sufficiently influential to win passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which restricted immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe, The Balkans, and Russia. America must be kept American." President Calvin Coolidge declared; "Biological laws show...that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races." 2
Coolidge was echoing the scientific rationale provided by eugenics movement leader Harry H. Laughlin, who had determined "that eastern European, Mediterranean, and Russian Jews, among others, harbored a large number of defective genes in their populations. " Not coincidentally, those immigrant populations also accounted for a great deal of the labor radicalism in the United States. "For the wealthy benefactors that supported eugenics, such as the Carnegie, Rockefeller, Harriman, and Kellogg philanthropies, eugenics provided a means of social control in a period of unprecedented upheaval and violence."3
Harry Laughlin and his movements also lobbied at the state levels for the passage of eugenics sterilization laws, which would allow individuals in state institutions to be forcibly sterilized if they were judged to be genetically defective. Over 35 states passed, and used, such laws. By the 1960’s when most of these laws were beginning to be repealed, more than 60,000 people had been sterilized for eugenic purposes. In Germany, the National Socialists used Laughlin’s model as one of the bases of their sweeping sterilization law of 1933, which ultimately led to the sterilization of over 400,000 people. 4

It was the Holocaust that turned international public opinion decisively against eugenics. Eugenics was not discredited as a scientific doctrine by means of research generating new evidence but due to momentous events external to the world of science. In 1938, the Nazis’ efforts at racial purification reached their logical, unspeakable culmination in a “euthanasia program” under the supervision of German psychiatrists that condemned tens of thousands of people deemed mentally ill, including children, to execution in gas chambers. Social Darwinism and eugenics were brought into disrepute as their implementation by the Nazis revealed them to be a slippery slope to genocide. 5



2. Quoted in Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. p. 424.
3. Garland E. Allen, “Is a New Eugenics Afoot?”pp. 59-61.
4. Ibid.
5. Two excellent historical treatments of eugenics are Daniel J. Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, and Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940. “