The mainstream media has once again been caught making up news stories, this time with a bogus report about a naked man escaping from a window at Buckingham Palace. Reports indicate that NBC News, apparently unaware that the pre-planned stunt was part of a scene for a drama show on its own network, picked up the story, which quickly went viral, and spread it around as truth before later being outed for reporting a lie.

Sliding down a rope at the official London residence of Britain’s royal families, the mostly naked man was reportedly an actor on the E! Network show The Royals, which is owned by NBC. A crude video clip of the man, which was captured on a shaky mobile phone camera, was apparently uploaded to YouTube as if it were real. And it quickly went viral, eventually making its way onto NBC News as a real event.

But the whole thing was a cleverly designed press campaign that, according to an E! Insider, “tricked even NBC News.” Whether or not this is actually true, or if NBC News knowingly reported the fake event and later played dumb in order to help promote it, is anyone’s guess. But in either case, this manufactured piece of news is just the latest example of MSM news fabrication.

The Washington Post, Brian Williams, Bill O’Reilly and many others all caught making up fake news stories

The Washington Post did the same thing back in 2013 when it erroneously reported that former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin had joined the Qatari-owned news network Al Jazeera as a host and commenter. The original story had appeared on a satirical news website, which WP should have known, and yet the esteemed news outlet reported it as fact.

More recently, former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was caught lying about his involvement in a fire fight during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Williams had claimed that he was aboard a military helicopter that was shot by enemy forces and forced to land, which later turned out to be completely fabricated.

Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly was also caught making up similar war stories on his show The O’Reilly Factor earlier this year. Claiming that he was on-location covering the civil war in El Salvador in 1980 when he supposedly witnessed four nuns get murdered, O’Reilly was later exposed as not even having gone aboard as a correspondent in El Salvador until 1981.

The war in Iraq, Disneyland measles and more: an American legacy of manufactured news

Larger-scale news stories like the supposed Disneyland measles outbreak, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and much more have also had their validity questioned, as the official stories surrounding each of these events are riddled with holes and incongruences. The New York Times actually admitted back in 2005 that the government manufactures fake news stories and peddles them throughout the mainstream media as fact.

At the time, the Bush Administration was doing everything it could to perpetuate the myth that the war in Iraq was a success, and that the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in response to “terrorism” was “one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history.” One news clip that aired at the time even showed what appeared to be an overjoyed Iraqi-American celebrating the fall of Baghdad and thanking then-president Bush for bringing democracy to Iraq.

As it turns out, each of these events and more were completely fabricated by the government, as admitted by the NYT.

“[T]he federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance,” admits the report.

“In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show.”

And if it happened under Bush, it is surely still happening today.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

http://www.politico.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

http://www.nytimes.com