Trump Weird News - FOX News Lying To Its Viewers?

This is one of, if not THE, best April Fools jokes ever, and may even be the very first to air on "serious TV". The prank was aired April 1 1957 at the end of the BBC current-affairs programme “Panorama”.

It was helped by spaghetti being a rare exotic food in 1950s Britain, and narration by the hugely respected journalist and presenter Richard Dimbleby made it utterly convincing.

Afterwards people either got the joke - or didn’t, and wanted to grow their own spaghetti trees. These optimists were told to “place a length of dry spaghetti in a jar of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.

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The entire spoof got it wrong, of course, since free-range organic spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees at all. 

In actual fact it’s a kind of marshland reed, and very seasonal, only available from March 15 (when by tradition the first harvest is made by use of many small sharp knives) through until April 2nd, when it’s officially declared to be stale.

Extruded lengths of flour-water-egg paste - originally called spaghetti finti or spaghetti di casa - replicate these reeds while being available all year round.

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Some humourless pundits indulged in sputtering outrage that such nonsense was part of a serious programme, but "Panorama” producer David Wheeler stuck to his guns, suggesting that viewers needed a more critical attitude to what was shown on TV, and shouldn’t believe everything they saw. 

What would he have said now?

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@dduane​ says that for US readers to understand just how effective it was, imagine the same thing on “60 Minutes”, voiced with equal sincerity by Dan Rather.

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And oddly enough, what we’re having for supper tonight will be...

Probably not spaghetti.

Dan Rather at Steady:

For those of you who seek the truth in these troubled times, what just happened at “60 Minutes” is a 5-alarm fire. But this fire was not accidental. It was arson, and Donald Trump lit the fuse. On Thursday, Bari Weiss, the Trump-friendly opinion columnist put in charge of CBS News, took a match to “60 Minutes” as we know it. She fired two top executives of the broadcast and two correspondents and then hired a new executive producer with no broadcast television experience. Why? The timing might seem odd, but, of course, it’s how Trump & Co. operate. “60 Minutes” just finished its 58th season with a couple of Emmy wins but, more importantly, with viewers’ trust. It’s long been the highest-rated news program on network television, and this year the numbers were up.

According to Oliver Darcy of Status, “60 Minutes” averaged 9.1 million viewers per week, a 9% increase over last season. On social media, Status reports, the broadcast added 17 million new followers across platforms and generated a staggering 2.5 billion views. If anyone else was at the helm of the company or the country, this would be celebrated as a banner year at the venerated news institution. Everyone should get a raise and an extra week off. Instead, this citadel of independent journalism is being destroyed, another victim of Trump’s vengeance campaign. Because he can’t handle the truth, Trump hates the program and has long called for its demise.

I reported on Trump’s first run for president back in 1999 on “60 Minutes.” It was a tough but fair piece, and he hated it. Was Trump really running for president back then, or was it a publicity stunt to make money? We could easily ask the same question today. You will recognize some of the vitriol that’s become Trump’s trademark. Watch it here. Over the years, “60 Minutes” has reported many hard-hitting stories on Trump, much to his chagrin. He walked out on a Lesley Stahl interview a few years ago.

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In her memo to staff justifying the bloodletting at “60 Minutes,” Weiss wrote, “We want stories that break news, expose wrongdoing, widen public understanding, and force accountability from every institution and every center of power. We want journalism that is surprising, agenda-setting, and impossible to ignore.” This is nonsense. What does she think “60 Minutes” has been doing for the last six decades?

The lesson here is not about ratings or profitability. “60 Minutes” has both. This is about making CBS part of a growing right-wing media machine. And if Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. is approved, CNN could suffer the same fate. Cecilia Vega, the first Latina correspondent at “60 Minutes,” was fired yesterday along with Sharyn Alfonsi. They are two courageous reporters who have my respect and admiration. Vega, in a note to colleagues after she learned of her firing, wrote, “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. This is censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the program and dangerous for democracy.”

See BS News under right-wing hacks Bari Weiss and David Ellison have finally fulfilled Donald Trump’s goal to destroy 60 Minutes, as we have seen with the firings of Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

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