Courtesy of amazon.com
Recently, I opened my Facebook page to take the temperature of the comments left overnight. At the top of the news feed was an msn.com article someone shared (Click) about North Korea’s continuing efforts to strengthen its nuclear capability. The article came from Fox News. They’d picked up a study by a group called 38 North that monitors activity in that country. (Click)
The individual who posted the article offered it as evidence North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong il, had duped Donald Trump in their recent peace talks. “Little Rocket Man” had no intentions of abandoning nuclear weapons. The thread of comments that followed picked up the patter. They all accused our President of being naïve.
What’s naïve, I thought, was to assume the President is blind to North Korea’s activities. He isn’t. He may not want to hear it, but the Military, the NSA, the CIA and the shared intelligence of allies from around the globe are cluing him in.
What’s funny is that msn.com, a left-leaning news purveyor, was relying Fox News for its information – Fox being a conservative outlet. Funnier still is that anyone would believe the latter had uncovered North Korean “secret”. My guess is someone in Trump’s administration brought the 38 North article to the news director’s attention. Why? I can’t say. Not to make Trump look naïve, certainly. We shall have to wait and see.
More important is the article that follows the headline. Buried in the text is a statement that the Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Chinese Defense Minister We Fenghe have already met to discuss ways to ensure North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. So, what appeared to be a scoop about North Korea turns out to be general knowledge. Only the anti-Trump people on my Facebook pages seem surprised.
Moral of the story: In troubled times, like these, we should be careful about the stories we tell. Otherwise, we risk becoming purveyors of fake news.
