'King Of Fake News' To Electoral College: "Trump Paid Me"

Internet's Most Prolific Hoax Artist Paul Horner Finally Comes Clean:
"The Trump campaign agreed to pay me nearly $2M to flood Facebook with lies, half-truths, and anti-Clinton propaganda throughout the election cycle."
By: PaulHorner.com
 
'King of Fake News' Paul Horner | President-Elect Donald J. Trump
'King of Fake News' Paul Horner | President-Elect Donald J. Trump
PHOENIX - Dec. 19, 2016 - PRLog -- Paul Horner is the indisputable 'King of Fake News,' running a digital mini-empire of several satirical news websites, a la The Onion. The Washington Post calls him 'the Internet's most prolific hoax artist,' and Stephen Colbert identified him as the person 'future time travelers should go back in time to kill.' Horner has made headlines over the past few weeks, for his undeniable role in helping to get Trump elected. But finally, the fuller truth is coming out: Horner claims that the Trump campaign employed him as a 'creative consultant' from June through November to write fake news articles and spread online propaganda about Clinton, Sanders, and other Democratic party leaders. He published a detailed confession on his official website, www.PaulHorner.com, last week. He hopes that the Electoral College voters will learn about his story ahead of their final vote giving Trump the Presidency later today.

Horner writes:

In total, over the course of several months of the 2016 presidential election, the Trump campaign agreed to pay me nearly $2M, as part of its Project Alamo Digital Strategy – an ingenious and revolutionary method of Facebook-based marketing that leveraged the data-driven, analytics-based, approach of Jared Kushner, overseen by Brad Parscale, to spread anti-left propaganda for the alt-right movement.

Finally, major news media outlets have started to report on the political scandal, which threatens to further expose how morally bankrupt Donald Trump truly is (as if anything worse was possible after the leaked Access Hollywood tapes). FOXNEWS (Ersatz Edition) broke the story over the weekend:

Fox News 24/7:
http://www.foxnews247.com/ersatz/politics/2016/12/18/king-of-fake-news-to-electoral-college-trump-agreed-to-pay.htm

Horner's confession provides elaborate details of his initial meeting with Stephen K.  Bannon (now Trump's Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor), as well as how his fake news and satirical writing skills were deployed by the Trump campaign, in its propaganda war against the Clinton machine. Horner had already expressed remorse about his role in the election, telling reporter Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post: "I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don't fact-check anything — they'll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist."

Horner's fake story about the paid protestor went super viral during the campaign, and reached a point of 'believability saturation' that journalism experts regard to be 'past the point of no return.' That is, when a false account surpasses a certain point of dissemination–and it becomes widely believed to be true–it is nearly impossible to reverse that effect, even if the false story is subsequently debunked. BuzzFeed Media Editor, Craig Silverman, has extensively studied the phenomenon of so-called 'fake news,' and its role in the 2016 election. Silverman recently told Dave Davies (sitting in for America's greatest interviewer Terry Gross) on NPR's Fresh Air:

I think that the Trump campaign was so remarkable for so many reasons when we talk about [fake news]… The Trump campaign itself helped circulate false news stories: 100% fake news stories. From 100% fake news websites…. So, the one that comes to mind right away: This is a story that is on a [Paul Horner-operated] website that is made to look like ABC News, but its domain is slightly different. And the story that was published long before the election claimed that a protester had been paid $3,500 to go and protest at a Trump rally… It got a fair amount of engagement. But it was tweeted by Eric Trump. It was tweeted by Corey Lewandowski, who was a campaign manager for Donald Trump. And it was tweeted by Kellyanne Conway, who was his campaign manager not that long before the election. So when you have people in positions of power and influence putting out fake news... it fed into the message their campaign wanted to put out. And it's really kind of unprecedented to think of people that high in a campaign actively putting out misinformation… You would have thought that after one or two of them did it, people would have talked to them. So that piece is really, really remarkable.

[Source: NPR, Fresh Air, "Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them" (December 14, 2016)

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505547295/fake-news-expert-on-how-false-stories-spread-and-why-people-believe-them]

Now it all makes sense. The Trump campaign itself was behind the bogus headlines. Horner's online confession continues:

Nearly everyone I have shared this sensitive information with has wondered if I am trying to pull another prank or hoax. At first, I didn't understand why they wouldn't believe me, because I am actually an honest person. Perhaps it is because the figure of $2M sounds unbelievable. So allow me to clarify. I received $40K monthly for six months (June - November), for a total of $240K. However, I negotiated an additional payment, which was structured as a "victory bonus." Specifically, I was to be paid a one-time, lump sum additional payment of $1.5M IF DONALD TRUMP WON THE ELECTION. Not surprisingly, I never received that money, and both Bannon and Kushner have completely ghosted me since Election Day. Brad finally replied to me with a single, cryptic, three-word text message on November 27, 2016, after my incessant attempts to contact him, saying simply: "We will see." I suspect that he too has been stiffed by the Trump campaign for the "victory bonuses" he too was promised. In retrospect, I guess I should not be surprised; after all, failing to pay contractors for completed work is classic Trump modus operandi. In fact, I have asked my attorney to explore coordinating a legal strategy with [Trump pollster] Tony Fabrizio's counsel, as he too has been stiffed for $750K.

His statement concludes:

In conclusion, feel I have made a horrible mistake. All the money I was paid (or promised) for propaganda online I am now donating to my wonderful, very real, charity: Sock It Forward, where I raise money and collect donated socks for homeless people living around my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Today, I am announcing my permanent retirement from "fake news," or, as I sometimes refer to it, alt journalism, and all my sites will hopefully be shut down by the end of the year. I have learned the hard way the cost of telling lies, and I realize now that I have arrived at the most profound discovery: "Sometimes it takes a lie to tell the truth."



READ PAUL HORNER'S OFFICIAL BIO:
http://www.paulhorner.com/bio

For a more detailed catalogue of Paul's hoaxes, viral news hits, and satirical writings, please visit his personal page at the NEWSEXAMINER.NET website.

Media Contact
Jeremy Higgins, Maroon Colored PR
jeremy.higgins@paulhorner.com

Photo:
https://www.prlog.org/12608654/1
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