Among the Ethics Alarms long-promised essays that have yet to be posted (you never know when one will finally pop up!) is the Ethics Alarms Fake News Directory. A story that has ended up on many MSM news sources reminded me of why what I thought it would be an easy list to compile turned into a chore. It has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Variety, CNN, the Hill, the Chicago Sun -Times, Yahoo!, AOL and dozens—yes dozens— more. The breathlessly urgent story: Barack Obama shared his list of favorite songs for 2023, or, as the Post put it, “Obama’s 2023 bangers include Beyoncé, Burna Boy and Blondshell.”

There was real news about Obama recently: several conservative-leaning news sources like the New York Post and Fox News reported that the ex-President had lobbied Harvard’s governing body to keep unqualified serial plagiarist Claudine Gay as president of Obama’s alma mater. Of course, the “good” media didn’t see that as newsworthy, or felt that the public didn’t need to know about it. Instead, many of them chose to treat Obama’s annual favorite music list as worthy of breaking news treatment.

This is favoritism and propaganda by innuendo. Only a celebrity presumed to be deserving of top of the cognitive dissonance scale status can get such treatment. The publications that printed this non-news as news are pushing readers to adopt their position: this is an inarguably good and great man of iconic stature, and so attention should be paid to his every thought, statement and opinion. It is a familiar media propaganda tactic and was one of the ways the news media propped up Obama during his mediocre terms as President (and I’m being kind) when they treated his college basketball tournament bracket choices as worthy of attention. These same news sources didn’t think the Hunter Biden laptop discovery was news in the middle of a hotly-contested election, nor did it rush to cover an accusation by a former Biden Senate staffer that he had raped her, but the music playlist of a politician with no special expertise in music at all—at least Bill Clinton played the saxophone—warranted coverage.

Treating this non-event as newsworthy is a form of indoctrination. The publications are telling readers that the journalists think Obama is special, and so they should too. It is a relatively subtle way of strengthening Obama’s influence; in fact, such pro-Obama propaganda in most of the news media is a significant reason why he still has enough thwack to persuade Harvard’s woke governors to choke when it should have been obvious that their black, female president needs to go in the best interests of the school as well as higher education generally. The Obama 2023 playlist is fake news not because the facts are misrepresented, but because it isn’t legitimate news, and presenting the story as important makes its subject seem virtuous, wise and important.

Obama’s 2023 playlist evokes from me a reaction akin to playwright George F. Kaufman’s classic response to 50’s crooner Eddie Fisher’s lament on a TV panel show that he was having trouble getting dates with young women as he aged (Eddie was Carrie’s father, you’ll recall). Kaufman said (apparently spontaneously, on live TV):

“On Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope. The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope….if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in this problem.”

One more note: to its credit, the New York Times has not agreed that Obama’s playlist is “fit to print.” But neither has it revealed that he was part of the effort to keep Claudine Gay in her DEI-dictated position.