What Fake News Really Looks Like
Some Suffolk residents have been receiving copies of the South Tidewater News delivered to their homes. To call the South Tidewater News a right wing rag would legitimize it too much. It's not even a rag. It's a fake publication printed on newsprint to give its right wing propaganda a glow of legitimacy.
The publishers of this collection of lies are so dishonest they even copied ads from other publications to make it appear more realistic, but a friend confirmed that at least one of those ads was not submitted by the supposed advertiser.
The paper has almost nothing other than a Chicago home address to tell you who distributes it. But the publishers are part of a network of right wing propaganda organizations described in a 2021 article by the Columbia Journalism Review. CJR has a list of over a thousand URLs registered to the network, and Southtidewaternews.com is on that list.
The publications that the network produces are sloppy, with poorly written articles, photos that don't match the content (their Lynchburg publication had two photos of Bobby Scott for articles about Bob Good) and several ridiculously mundane and short stories listing recent tweets by politicians. Much of it, maybe all, is AI generated.
And the pretense is striking. CJR points out that while posing as local newspapers, they often miss significant local news stories.
For example, our analysis found, when a building collapsed in Miami in June, across the local news network, just one story was published, six days after the event, de'spite the network having about 40 Florida-based titles. In August, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, but none of the fifteen-odd Louisiana-based sites even mentioned the Category-4 storm.
The tag line of the South Tidewater News is "Real data, Real value, Real news".
But what do you expect from the right wing? The people who cry "Fake News" when confronted with evidence that doesn't match their beliefs are behind America's most dishonest propaganda outlets which refer to themselves as "national news". Why wouldn't they generate a series of fake local newspapers as well?
The October 21st edition of the South Tidewater News is filled with accusations of Democrats promoting violence, when it's Republicans who spent decades promoting violence against us. They talk about 2nd Amendment solutions to political problems. They wear t-shirts promoting the lynching of journalists. Winsome Earl Sears called for the murder of abortion activists, saying, "Murder is murder, and one day it's going to be your turn." But they accuse Democrats.
They lied about trickle down economics. They lied about covid. Winsome Earle Sears is lying about Virginia's economy. Jason Miyares is lying about crime. And they're lying about the cause of the government shutdown which is causing so much pain for all of us. Take that pain with you to the polls and vote out the liars.
