Fake News, Conspiracies, and No News is Good News
How and where we get information informing our outlook on the world has become an issue in the wake of the most recent presidential election. People’s lives, reputations and even democracy itself can be endangered.
A cottage industry, some of which masks bigger players with malevolent agendas, is taking advantage of opportunities afforded by social media to mold public opinion.
An analysis in BuzzFeed published shortly after the election revealed “top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined” from August through Election Day. [Read more…]
Media Complicity Is Key to Blacklisting Websites
By Norman Soloman / Common Dreams
We still don’t have any sort of apology or retraction from the Washington Post for promoting “The List” — the highly dangerous blacklist that got a huge boost from the newspaper’s fawning coverage on November 24. The project of smearing 200 websites with one broad brush wouldn’t have gotten far without the avid complicity of high-profile media outlets, starting with the Post.
On Thursday — a week after the Post published its front-page news article hyping the blacklist that was put out by a group of unidentified people called PropOrNot — I sent a petition statement to the newspaper’s executive editor Martin Baron.
“Smearing is not reporting,” the RootsAction petition says. “The Washington Post’s recent descent into McCarthyism — promoting anonymous and shoddy claims that a vast range of some 200 websites are all accomplices or tools of the Russian government — violates basic journalistic standards and does real harm to democratic discourse in our country. We urge the Washington Post to prominently retract the article and apologize for publishing it.” [Read more…]
Chilling ‘Professor Watchlist’ Aims to ‘Expose’ Leftist Educators
By Deidre Fulton / Common Dreams
“I am dangerous not to America but to the people soon to be in charge of it.”
So says one of roughly 200 college professors recently named to a conservative website’s “Professor Watchlist”—a round-up of academics accused of “discriminat[ing] against conservative students and advanc[ing] leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The list is based on “pre-existing news stories,” though readers are encouraged to “submit a tip” if they become aware of “professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”
The list, which first appeared on November 21, is a project of right-wing non-profit Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a group whose stated mission “is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.”
According to a blog post written by the organization’s founder and executive director Charlie Kirk: “Throughout the next 120 days, Turning Point USA will be running ads to make sure students, faculty, and administrators see that these professors made the Professor Watchlist…We believe these people need to be exposed.” [Read more…]
Trump’s Seven Techniques to Control the Media
Robert Reich / RobertReich.org
Democracy depends on a free and independent press, which is why all tyrants try to squelch it. They use seven techniques that, worryingly, President-elect Donald Trump already employs.
1. Berate the media. Last week, Trump summoned two-dozen TV news anchors and executives to the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower to berate them for their reporting about him during the election. For twenty minutes he railed at what he called their “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. According to an attendee, “Trump kept saying, ‘we’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong,’” and he called CNN a “network of liars.” He accused NBC of using unflattering pictures of him, demanding to know why they didn’t use “nicer” pictures.
Another person who attended the meeting said Trump “truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment. He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.” [Read more…]
TinFoil Trump’s Twitter Temper Tantrum
By Doug Porter
Based on the say-so of a conspiracy-mongering website that claims 9/11 was an inside job and the killing of children at Sandy Hook elementary school was staged with actors, the President-elect of the United States now says there were millions of illegal votes cast in the 2016 general election.
Donald Trump didn’t make this claim at a press conference flanked by attorneys ready to force states to throw out those votes; he made it on Twitter. And he didn’t make this claim based on any actual evidence at all.
He followed up this initial lie by naming California (along with New Hampshire and Virginia) as states with serious voter fraud. Again, the claim was made without evidence. [Read more…]
The Truth of the Matter: Worldview, Facts and Climate Change
By Mark Hughes / San Diego 350
One of humorist Will Rogers’ signature lines was: “Well, all I know is what I read in the papers.” In subtext, he’s saying he trusted what he read, so it seems reasonable to believe that in those days newspapers lived and died by getting the story right. What a simpler time; if Will was reading papers and the Internet and watching TV today, depending on the sources he chose, some to much of what he learned would be either misleading or just plain false. The information portal guardians have been overrun by hordes bearing rocket-propelled innuendo, guided missile conspiracy theories, and bandoleers bristling with self-serving lies. But that was only the first wall to fall. In this country, those hordes are no longer raging outside governmental gates; soon they will be the government itself.
Welcome to the newest incarnation of the world. The rules, as they always do, have once again changed, and the eternal response is demanded: what do we do about it? How do we live now? [Read more…]
Black Friday Shopping Tip: Support Good Journalism Everywhere
While right wingers run out and buy guns after elections not to their liking, many folks are spending money on words following the election of Donald Trump.
In the days since the November 2016 election, news organizations like ProPublica, the Atlantic, Mother Jones and the New York Times have all seen a rise in subscription revenue and on-line readership. The average daily readership at the San Diego Free Press has increased by more than 50%.
Between the rise of fake news and the fall of the financial underpinnings of news reporting, supporting honest journalism should now be considered a patriotic act. I’d like to take that one step further by suggesting gift purchases on Black Friday to support a free press in this country. [Read more…]
Facebook’s Complicity in Trump’s New Order
In the 21st century world of social media as a source of news and information, the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Tell a lie on Facebook and you’ll likely be rewarded with a large audience. Tell (for some) an unpleasant truth and the vigilantes of darkness will leverage their technical expertise to get an offending account expunged.
A made up story from a Macedonian site claiming Hillary Clinton had once said candidates like Donald Trump should run for office because they were honest and couldn’t be bought garnered more than twice the response (in a week) of the New York Times exclusive story (over a month period) revealing the GOP nominee declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns.
Diverse media outlets including the New York Times and the MIT Technology Review are examining how much those fake headlines influenced the election. New York Magazine cut to the chase with the headline “Donald Trump won because of Facebook.” [Read more…]
Nobody Saw a Trump Victory Coming! Here’s What’s Next for America
Trump Astounded and Shocked Democrats — and Even His Own Pollsters
Hillary was a shoo-in.. or at least that’s what everyone thought. Hillary had a blue firewall and many paths to 270 electoral votes. Donald had a bunch of heavy lifting including an almost impossible flipping of one or two blue states.
Whaaa hoppened?! What happened was that angry, white rural voters went for the guy that was against free trade (much as Bernie Sanders was) and promised to bring their rust belt jobs back from China and other Asiatic places. You had only to look at the state by state maps to see solid red in rural areas even in blue states with the only blue being in the big cities.
It wasn’t enough for Hillary to win even though she came close, and unmistakably the popular vote by more than two million. According to an article by the New York Times, this 1.5 percentage point surpasses margins by Al Gore, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy . [Read more…]
I’ll Have the Apocalypse Burger, with a Bullet on the Side
The Democratic Party, not the Republicans, died Tuesday night. It took with it to the grave a functional middle class.
From now on smart people will have to find some new ways to avoid the hoi polloi, the downward bound still clinging to their weekend Harleys and storing their AK 47’s in whatever closet they can afford to rent. We’ve watched our tepid and bland Democrats — the Susan Davis’s and Scott Peters — clapping and wiggling their asses to the tunes of corporate advisers for so long that we’ve failed to notice they look and sound just like Republicans.
They just wouldn’t go away, would they? They kept cloning themselves, and droning the same songs of the party of Jefferson. They were forced by political law to live in their districts but we didn’t know where they were, and we knew it wouldn’t be in their local offices. How many pieces of our minds were we unable to give them?
Who’d a thunk the Dems would die first? [Read more…]
2016 Elections: And The Loser Is….The News Media
It’s mid-morning on November 8, 2016, and I have a solid gut feeling about how this election will turn out. Nobody will get everything they want, but the forces of light will stave off darkness, at least for another few years.
I am reminded of Unitarian reformer and abolitionist Theodore Parker’s quote, later modified by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” [Read more…]
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