Just a few days ago, the New York Magazine reported that a group of "prominent computer scientists and election lawyers" believed that the loss was a result of hacked voting machines in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania -- citing irregularities such as lower vote counts where voting machines were used. Then in that same article, the confidence in their hacking theory is immediately tempered by this statement:
"While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review."Just last Friday, the Washington Post theorized that in fact a Russian propaganda effort threw the election; along with the hacking of emails from the Clinton camp and the Democratic National Committee. However, as above, the veracity of that story was also weakened when the following was written:
"There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders."The only problem with the above "speculation" is that team Clinton members never disavowed any of the hacked emails as not being "real". All they ever said was that they were being released because Putin wants Trump to be President. Hillary's campaign chief, John Podesta, even "suggests" that Trump had before-hand knowledge of the email hack and data dump in the last few weeks. "Suggests" is not a proven fact, but Time.com thought the story was fit to print.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about "fake news". The implication is that somehow, the political right is the primary "faker" of news stories intended to hurt Hillary Clinton. Well, the above stories are only a few from the mainstream media that are solely based on speculation and not fact, in an effort to undermine President-elect Donald Trump. Maybe the agencies writing these types of stories should think about the fact that a lot of people may only read a paragraph or two of a long story and come to the conclusion the voting machines were hacked; not reading further to understand that this was simply an unproven assumption. Obviously, "fake news" comes in all flavors.
References:
Experts Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html
Clinton Refuses to Disavow Hacked Excerpts From Paid Speeches: http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/clinton-refuses-to-disavow/2016/10/08/id/752349/
Hillary Clinton Adviser Suggests Donald Trump Campaign Knew About Hacked Emails: http://time.com/4528049/hillary-clinton-john-podesta-emails-hackers-russia/