The Point About 'Fake News'......

    ...and the rumour mills
about this or that party leader,
is never just that the story is fake in itself.

The point is that the story generates
further rumour and further doubt
like a fire that, once lit, never goes out.

The oldest fake news that most people
half-know about is 'The protocol of the elders of Zion'
a patchwork of documents put together by anti-Semites
circa 1900 to suggest that the Jews,
a people then without a land, had a plan
for taking over all of the world.

Discredited as it is,
in the twenty first century it is easy to find.
Just look online....

 In the UK in the 1924 'The Zinoviev letter'
was cooked up by White Russians
as an instrument against the Bolsheviks.
It was in turn taken up by a mistrustful British Secret Service
against the first elected Labour government.
It was a lie, but it was a lie that stuck
because of mounting domestic fears
and failing international diplomacy. 

In the present day, business confidentiality
and money that launders itself through property,
are what fuels the present day rumours
of which politician is secretly tied
to which government, other than their own.

Who wrote the lie? And who did they write it for?
Which of the politicians enemies-at home or abroad?
should be the points that should be answered
in an effective and free press. 

But by the time the story is that clear
neither the politician nor their enemies,
or the popular press, want to hear any more
of what was never even slightly true in the first place.