And now the Pope speaks out against fake news in very strong terms.

Media that focus on scandals and spread fake news to smear politicians risk becoming like people who have a morbid fascination with excrement, Pope Francis said in an interview published on Wednesday.

Francis told the Belgian Catholic weekly "Tertio" that spreading disinformation was "probably the greatest damage that the media can do" and using communications for this rather than to educate the public amounted to a sin.

Using precise psychological terms, he said scandal-mongering media risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/08/pope-...liticians.html

The right also believes that if they don't win an election, it's been rigged.

Interesting that you linked to this article. Its an excellent example of WaPp creating fake news. Here's what the article wants you to believe:

A post apparently written by Tracy maintained that Sandy Hook was faked, that no one was killed and that “local co-conspirators” were paid to pretend to grieve their young children.

That claim is not made by the parents, and in fact the professor in question has never claimed that the Sandy Hook shootings didn't occur, never claimed that "no one was killed." Why would WaPo make that claim?

I'm not saying that the folks who question the information that was reported about the Sandy Hook shooting. I've never met him or seen him on news, but from what I've read I strongly believe that Professor Tracy is a crank. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists out there, and Wapo seems to be playing pretty fast and loose with the facts.

Fake news? Yeah, I think so. Is Tracy blameless here? Well, when you push a stick into a hornets nest, you'd better assume you might get stung, or you're and idiot.

Tracy was an idiot to send a certified letter to the Pozner family demanding for them to prove that one of the photos that were circulating out there of the shooting victims was really their son. What the WaPo story doesn't mention is that one of those same photos showed up a photo montage of kids killed in a Taliban school bombing in Pakistan. That montage is what got the Tracy - again I think the guy is a crank - fired up, and why he sent a letter to the parents, thus stirring up the hornets nest.

To me, seems like some key points for WaPo to leave out, especially since Tracy's beef is not whether or not Sandy Hook occurred, but with the reporting of it, and how the inconsistencies in reporting fueled his...ummm...interesting ideas that there was an effort to embellish or omit reporting on elements of the shooting in an effort to push gun control legislation.

If you're interested, here's the video that is Tracy is connected to.

There! Service provided: fake news addressed. :p

The left believes that if they don't win an election, they need to blow up the electoral college.

And there it is. That's exactly what keeps, for example, some folks in this forum animated for months on end about police shootings, and what animates some groups like, maybe, Black Lives Matter.

Reminds me of WC Fields complaining about a card shark: "...And besides, I know what I dealt him."

Fake news is more entertaining.

...and by the way, before you (or the CNBC article you linked to) try to pass the pope off as some great civil libertarian who is interested in freedom and democracy, let me help you with that. He's not. I think what animates this very leftist Pope is the election of Trump, as the last sentence in the article suggests.

This is the same pope who thinks its just fine to have the Chinese government involved in picking church leadership in China. He ignores the "underground" Catholic church in China (which truly believes in the separation of church and state), and supports the "Chinese - approved" church, which is believed to have fewer adherents.

The idea of sinning against God is fake news.

Yes. Often not in so good a way....