“Media hoaxes aren’t new,” explained Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “What’s new in the digital age is the advent of tools that make fraudulent photos, audio and video easy to make and easy to believe – putting words in people’s mouths that they didn’t say, and showing them doing things they didn’t do.” Gillmor added that soon, this process of creating phony videos will become “trivially easy, inexpensive and all too believable.”
“As the power of artificial intelligence increases, counterfeit audio and video files will become harder and harder for people to recognize. In time people (including journalists) will simply not be able to tell a fake video from a real one. That’s a huge problem,” added Eric Newton, also of Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Imagine how many innocent people would be forced to watch their entire careers and reputation be destroyed if this sort of technology became commonly used in the political arena. With just a few quick edits, a video of a candidate running for office could be altered by the opposing political party to make it look as though he or she engaged in some kind of unlawful or immoral act, and it would be incredibly difficult to determine whether or not it was real. Obviously, this would lead to distrust among the American people, hysteria within the mainstream media, and potentially, even more fake information.
Even without this sort of technology, individuals in the media (particularly leftists) intentionally edit video clips and segments to try to make their political enemies look incompetent, unintelligent, and out of touch with reality.
This is exactly what the fake news network NBC did during the 2012 presidential campaign to Republican candidate Mitt Romney. During an afternoon broadcast of “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” NBC played a clip that appeared to show an out-of-touch Mitt Romney talking about how he ordered a hoagie at Wawa. “It’s amazing,” Romney said in the video that was played on NBC. The Republican candidate is then seen telling the Pennsylvania crowd, “You have a touchtone keypad, and you touch that, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your sandwich.”
It was abundantly clear that NBC was trying to make Mitt Romney look like a rich, out of touch politician that is impossible to relate to. What NBC didn’t show their viewers, however, was the nearly three minutes of Romney talking about the difference between the private and the public sector, and how the former is often much more efficient than the latter. Not surprisingly, NBC denied that any deceptive editing took place, which is clearly a flat-out lie. (Related: MSNBC deliberately edited the Sandy Hook testimony to rewrite false history and smear gun owners.)
If left-wing ideologues within the mainstream media are already looking for ways to alter video clips to make their political opponents look bad, imagine what they would do if they had easy access to technology that allowed them to make anyone look like they were doing anything.
Read NewsFakes.com for more coverage of the fake news media.
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