Books have been written on the subject of fake news, and I am not the first to observe that fake news is nothing new. The Soviet Union had two newspapers of record: Pravda ("Truth"), the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and Izvestiya ("News"), the official newspaper of the Soviet government. The saying among the readership was "In Pravda (Truth) there is no news, and in Izvestiya (News) there is no truth." Instead of objective journalists, the publishers of Pravada and Izvestiya were nothing more than Party operatives, reporting only the "news" favorable to the Party and ignoring to the extent possible anything unfavorable. Where it was not possible to ignore unfavorable events, they would simply spin or report false facts to mislead the public. Eerily like their counterparts at Pravada and Izvestiya, a number of today's "journalists" are willing to distort the facts to advance a narrative for their party, even if the result is biased reporting, unreported facts, and outright fake news.

Consider the objectivity of those who edit and deliver the news to the American public. At ABC News, the chief anchor and political correspondent is George Stephanopoulos, a former advisor to the Democrat Party and later White House communications director for President Clinton. In his autobiography, Stephanopoulos wrote that Hillary Clinton was once so pleased with him that she exclaimed, "I love you, George Stephanopoulos," to which he replied, "I love you, too." As one would suspect given his background and his loyalties, Stephanopoulos' reporting is predictably biased as the filters, spins and ignores the facts to advance the agenda of his party.

ABC is not alone. NBC has Chuck Todd, a college dropout who now hosts NBC's Meet the Press and is the political director for NBC News. Like Mr. Stephanopoulos, Mr. Todd is a life-long Democrat Party loyalist. Todd once worked for "The Hotline" under the tutelage of Roger Craver, a "campaigner for progressive causes", before rising through the party ranks to serve on the staff of Democrat Senator Tom Harkin. Now a "journalist", Mr. Todd has admitted he and his colleagues "went easy" on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential campaign, showing both his bias and his knack for understatement.

At CBS, Dan Rather anchored the CBS Evening News for 24 years. His biased reporting culminated with his infamous use of forged documents to impugn George W. Bush's service record during the 2004 presidential campaign. Despite forensic proof that the documents he used were forged, like any good ideologue, Rather stood by his story. That textbook example of fake news eventually cost Rather his job at CBS, but he has since been rewarded with a new home on cable TV where he continues to peddle fake news.

What about print media? The Washington Post still routinely touts its reporting on the Watergate scandal but has twisted itself into knots to ignore, deflect and downplay unfavorable facts concerning the Obama administration's domestic spying operation on the Trump campaign. This latest act of pro-Democrat advocacy by the WP is a continuation of its biased reporting on a string of Obama administration misdeeds so egregious that legal professor and commentator Jonathan Turley remarked that "Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be". If you rely on the WP for "news", you literally will not know a fraction of the facts concerning statements, actions or events unfavorable to Democrats.

Not to be outdone by the WP, the New York Times recently made 'news" by printing an oped by an anonymous "senior Trump administration official", and the entire fake news industry then treated the unproven and politically motivated anonymous allegations as facts.

The cable networks are hopeless in terms of bias, and recent videos of internal meetings at Google disclose they have both the capability and the willingness to manipulate facts to influence elections. Twitter and Facebook censor and suppress conservative speech to manipulate public perceptions and advance the narrative of the left.

We live in a brave new world of sophisticated disinformation and fake news, and somewhere the editors of Pravada and Izvestiya are smiling.