Can you believe that mainstream news outlets published a story claiming that North Korea was more democratic than many U.S. states? Well, that’s what recently happened, as independent journalism source 1791L notes in this video.
The Huffington Post, Vox, MSNBC and Slate all trumpeted a report put out by Harvard University’s Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), which rated the democratic process of some 27 states worse than that of North Korea, which is one of the world’s worst despotic regimes, whose human rights violations are nearly as bad as Hitler’s or Stalin’s.
But why did these news outlets amplify such garbage? Could it have something to do with the fact that North Carolinians voted for Republican President-Elect Donald Trump and the fact that academic institutions like Harvard University traditionally have been identified as having a liberal bias?
Of course, the fact that the EIP has Harvard’s stamp on it also played a part in why such supposedly respectable journals would take the EIP’s research without a grain of salt and republish its statistics wholesale. The whole phenomenon is called “gullible news” — as opposed to “fake news” — because in this case, the writers are the ones being fooled before readers are as well. Check out this clip to see another great breakdown of why you can’t trust mainstream news anymore.
