Cadillac, Snopes, CNN – their similar stories

In the 1960s, the name Cadillac was synonymous with opulent luxury, state-of-the-art, innovation with little regard to cost and people who could afford “the best”. My Dad was attracted to them for all of those reasons. He bought 1-year-old Caddies at auctions and sold them six months later for profit.

They were 19-feet long, weighed 5,000 pounds, drank gasoline prodigiously, with interiors opulent and comprehensive in luxury appointments. Power windows, 8-way-adjustable power seats, automatically dimming headlights, full-six-passenger seating, huge trunks and always serving as test beds for the latest innovations from General Motors. Drivers were separated from the roads they traveled by the mass surrounding them, a ride that numbed-out road imperfections, and heavy sound insulation that isolated the passenger bay from the noisy riff-raff outside.

The General Motors corporate wiz-kids decided their Cadillac customers were fools. In the 70s and 80s they degraded the fundamental automobiles down to putting Cadillac badges on Chevrolet sedans. The bean counters were neither car guys nor psychologists. They didn’t understand Cadillac customers, or for that matter the other marques they destroyed the same way at the same time. Pontiac, Oldsmobile and GMC buyers weren’t as stupid as the overpaid Wall-Street Auto-Wizards thought.

Use of the word “Cadillac” to mean the best, or most luxurious, or opulence simply went away. So did the customers.

That is the state of Snopes and CNN today. The CIA built a News Network out of thin air by having reports from every CIA-created hot spot on Earth. They were the first with news of disruption and violence because they planned and executed it all themselves. Having not only current knowledge, but pre-knowledge made them instant titans of news media.

Snopes used the same “assets”, plus a related army of “researchers” to build a reputation debunking much of what came out on the young World Wide Web. Both of these avoided straying very far from facts that could be substantiated over time… at first, that is.

Now they think of the audiences as “theirs”; that anything they say will be automatically believed.

That is true, but only of a shrinking audience as inconvenient truths have a way of bubbling to the surface on the Internet. With CNN and Snopes being consistently wrong, alert, inquiring, active minds are walking away.

Today you can test your information sources.

They are doubling-down on defending the corrupt Center for Disease Control (CDC) and their lovely DNA-altering vaccine program.

Do a web search. For goodness-sakes, do not use their partner-in-crime GooGoo. Use the honorable DuckDuckGo and ask two questions:

and

Now open your mind and let it do a little work. Which set of answers seems likely to be true? Which news source should never be trusted? Take note. Use your head. Use your instincts. Walk away from the manipulators.