Obama’s problem -- and capitalism’s crisis-- is that people no longer
believe the fake “news” and bogus narratives issued by the ruling class
and its corporate and military misinformation specialists. “If we are
not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly
in an age of social media when so many people are getting their
information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t
discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have
problems,” said Obama.
This is the man that told the nation’s assembled bankers, a year
after the Greet Meltdown of 2008, “My administration is the only thing
between you and the pitchforks." When the people come to believe that
the president and the corporate media’s narrative -- that the system can
be fixed with a little tinkering -- is a bunch of “propaganda,” rather
than “serious argument,” then future Obamas will no longer be able to
protect the Lords of Capital from the pitchforkers.
Losing control of the narrative is what happened after Michael
Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, when Black youth stopped listening
to Obama’s fictitious sermon that racism is not endemic in America, a
fake history that candidate Obama had successfully dispensed in his “A
More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, in 2008.
Obama’s targeted handful of phony social media articles generally
favored Donald Trump. But the biggest “fake news” of the recent
campaign, promulgated by virtually the entirety of the ruling class
ensconced in Hillary Clinton’s Supersized Tent, was that the Russians
were scheming to despoil and disrupt the U.S. elections -- crimes
Americans commit all by themselves every cycle through massive voter
purges and other racist conspiracies. To Clinton and Obama’s horror,
this McCarthyite deluge of fake anti-Russian news failed to sway the
very “Middle Americans” that were thought to be the most belligerent,
warlike constituency of all.
-- Glen Ford, "Obama’s Musings on False Narratives and Fake Stories" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).