The "Fake News" conspiracy.

[tapitsbo]

Seems to me like the sources you have often posted would be considered "enemy propaganda" (anti-war, pro-environment, etc.) by this new "insurgent" group of pundits still trying to bring about a Clinton coup...

Sure Trump may attempt censorship himself, and people like Bannon are way closer to "neocons" than Nordic is implying... The Clinton camp were the ones with truly insane goals (destroying Russia and openly backing Al-Qaeda for starters.) It will be interesting to see where they wind up next once they give up on their current efforts

[seemslikeadream]

get back to me when Trump and Alex finds proof of all those millions of illegal voters



Donald Trump is making a strong case for a recount of his own 2016 election win........

[crikkett]

Hi! Long time no see

Trump is getting his news from Alex Jones and refusing to receive intelligence briefings

Says who?

[seemslikeadream]

it's true ....it is absolutely true

Donald Trump’s bogus claim he won the popular vote can be traced back to an Alex Jones-backed theory

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/28/donald- ... lex-jones/

Offered daily intelligence briefings, Trump takes a pass

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show ... takes-pass

Donald Trump Tells Alex Jones 'Your Reputation Is Amazing'

. Jones has developed a relationship with 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has appeared on his show and hailed his “amazing” reputation.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dona ... s-amazing/

Alex Jones: Donald Trump Is A ‘Messenger Of God’ And ‘A King David Of Our Time’
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex ... -our-time/

[Sounder]

SLAD wrote...

So are we bringing back Alex Jones videos here?

I thought we were done with that crap

Where are the Jones vids? Not here, but there is a decent, for a change NPR piece, about total fake news, produced by a true believer, crickets.

what a fuckin bunch of bullshit

Jones got a twenty minute slot at the Republican convention years ago. His is an establishment approved form of fakery, similar to the fakery of the rest of the MSM, just with a bit different audience and purpose.

when a president is getting his news from Alex Jones it is beyond belief...and refusing Intelligence Briefings ....ya that will work

you all want to go for the Alex Jones/Breitbart crowd ..go right fuckin ahead ...go for it

let's just put a link to the Alex Jones Channel pinned at the top of GD

What are you on about here? Who deserves this?

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gi9zFRBCIM


where have you been lately? ....hyperbolic is the norm around here lately....and no one has called anyone else out for it so I thought I'd take my turn

and......



there are a whole lot of things people don't deserve around here ...a whole lot of things.... a whole lot worse than that....you really keep your yap shut about all that crap so why start now?

[0_0]

[Sounder]

Thanks 0_0, that Corbett fellow is sharp, not a faker.




Eventually the internal contradictions of our systems built on poor assumptions we be exposed, if only in the final breaking down of this system.

This system relentlessly tries to break non-conformers, but will itself break as, like the people in South Korea are learning, one can only handle so much fakery.

The MSM is acting desperate and hopefully this will simply accelerate their decline.

[bks]

Your thoughts welcomed. Many links at original:

Making Media Great Again: the Fake News Conspiracy Panic and Some of What's Behind It
NOVEMBER 30, 2016

The burgeoning panic over “fake news” came to an early crescendo on Thanksgiving when the Washington Post trumpeted a report by a shadowy organization calling itself PropOrNot. Its website claims the group is made up of data-minded volunteers devoted to collecting “public-record information connecting propaganda outlets to each other and their coordinators abroad” in order to “act as a central repository and point of reference for related information, and organize efforts to oppose it.” Their “immediate aim” was to bring attention to alleged efforts by Russia to influence the US presidential election.

The Post’s story claimed the group’s analysis uncovered more than 200 websites with a reach of more than 15 million Americans that were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.” PropOrNot created a list of sites alleged to have transmitted propaganda wittingly or as “useful idiots,” one which included decidedly credible outlets like Naked Capitalism and Polk Award-winner Robert Parry’s consortiumnews.com. The list as a whole reads like a Borges-inspired fever-dream, a hodgepodge of sites many of which appear to have nothing remotely in common with one another except for their placement on the list (blackagendareport.com on a list with the nazi d a i l y s t o r m e r?)

PropOrNot has also released a Chrome browser plug-in that flags sites PropOrNot has “identified” as carriers of propaganda:

Screen shot 2016-11-25 at 6.49.03 PM.png

A Twitter account bearing the group’s name has already admitted that PropOrNot lied about some of the groups it claimed were allied with it. At the time of the Post’s story, there was no way to confirm how it came up with the seemingly absurd reach estimates the Post eagerly touted.

A number of journalists were quick to signal boost the story, some breathlessly, and others who should know better initially did the same, either unaware or insufficiently concerned about what they were supporting: Screen shot 2016-11-25 at 1.18.36 PM.png

Some good analyses have been published that cast further doubt on both the motives behind and the substance of PropOrNot’s research and the Post’s dubious decision to publicize it. The whole thing may even be threatening to fall apart. (We’ll update this post with an analysis of the research that was recently – and belatedly – made available.)

Why Media Panic

If the current fake news freak-out were limited to claims that Russia is using social media to influence SU social media channels in low-cost, mostly low-impact ways, there’d be little reason to object. Rival countries do that kind of thing. You may recall the US military sought to achieve a similar set of objectives beginning several years ago which, critics argued at the time, could “encourage other governments . . . to do the same.” Funny how there was no comparable expression of concern at that time in the US press.

Nor was this effort something new in the social media age: US mil/intel is far and away the world’s leader in resources devoted to the science of coercion, happily directing communication-based psyops against foreign governments deemed hostile to US interests as well as nurturing and covertly influencing the domestic manufacture of consent in a variety of ways. The silence with which this history is typically greeted by media outlets reflects a degree of willful ignorance befitting a society that’s too content with its political immaturity.

So let’s offer a working hypothesis about the confluence of circumstances driving the coverage and reception of “fake news.” Stung by 1) the supposed insouciance of the public’s choice of a boorish, deranged plutocrat and family friend of the Clintons to lead the country and 2) the insurgency inside the Democratic party to displace its moribund leadership, a subsection of media outlets ideologically aligned with the Democratic party’s leadership have undertaken a conspiracy panic against entities deemed hostile to it. We’re witnessing an effort to re-contest an election by spreading fear about nefarious foreign influence that’s allegedly being channeled through libertarian and left-leaning news sites. In service of these ends, no concrete evidence need be provided, and no verbal construction of the situation is too dire. In fact, the current dynamics helpfully reveal similarities between partisan liberalism and the forms of political irrationality against which it tries to define itself.

It’s crucial to remember that the panickers aren’t primarily concerned with the sanctity of elections – their relative indifference to the manipulative forms of public management revealed in the Podesta emails, and their lack of outrage over the Clinton-aligned DNC’s leadership pondering ways to sabotage the Sanders campaign make that clear. (And recall the Putin-blaming the Clinton campaign engaged in as an attempt to distract once the DNC’s lack of neutrality was revealed.) Nor do they seem to care much about the long history of public manipulation resulting from truly disturbing “fake news” campaigns brought to us by “genuine news” outlets- the kind that unfold over months or years, engineered by government operatives who capture elite journalists for the purpose of advancing horrifying, or even murderous goals. No, what mostly concerns them is that the bad guys won this time, and therefore those on the margins who are perceived to have gotten in the way must be punished. The PropOrNot list is just the latest form of an ugly brand of dissent management we will see in the weeks and months to come, as the need to produce scapegoats for Trump’s retrograde presidency grows in intensity.

Second, the panic also seems tied an attempt at institutional resuscitation by an industry that has seen much of its revenue soaked up by the social media giants that now dominate it. Facebook is a primary target here. Many digital communication scholars have called for Facebook to become more transparent about the specific determinants of its news feed algorithm and to offer researchers a closer look at the oceans of data it collects and makes available to its customers. I support these efforts, but also believe they’re highly unlikely to succeed until a more honest discussion ensues about how to dismantle the conditions that gave rise to the possibility of these behemoths becoming so dominant in the first place. This is a big subject better addressed in detail at a later time. For present purposes, what matters is the enormous reservoir of anxiety produced by Facebook’s shockingly swift emergence as a news force and the threat it is perceived to pose to legacy news outlets.

For some perspective on the present panic, it’s useful to recall another episode in media history where a new technology (in this case, the internet) was responsible for hand-wringing over future prospects. Twenty years ago, several major corporate news outlets led a conspiracy panic against the San Jose Mercury News and reporter Gary Webb, who in August of 1996 had the audacity to publish a devastating series of articles exposing CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic inside the US. The backlash against the series proved punishing to him. He never fully recovered, and the ruin in which his career was undeservedly left surely contributed to his suicide in 2004.

The substance of the series was explosive enough: CIA assets were shown to have funneled cocaine into America’s inner cities and used the proceeds to help fund a covert war in Central America, with what Webb suggested (entirely correctly) was CIA’s careful cooperation. Far from discrediting the series, the CIA’s own internal investigations eventually revealed far more involvement by the CIA, DEA and other federal officials than was originally suggested by Webb, much of it to shield the CIA assets from prosecution inside the US. Unfortunately the results of those investigations were made public long after Webb’s reputation had been sullied. An indispensible summary of the affair and its aftermath reaching up to the present day can be found here and here.

But what also made the story an incendiary one was its mode of dissemination. The story was posted on something known as the World Wide Web, and visitors from across the planet could view it and click on hyperlinks that opened new pages with documentation for the startling claims being presented. Soon the SJMN website was getting more than 100,000 additional hits per day, and the story could not be contained to the margins of social awareness. Following a massive wave of publicity, the elite journalism-centered backlash kicked in.

As Jack Bratich, author of Conspiracy Panics: Popular Culture and Political Rationality notes:

Any discussion of conspiracy panics, following the moral panics framework, would need to examine the way that the news media articulates these problems and the proposed solutions (as with the classic work Policing the Crisis). But more than looking at journalism as an institutional support for conspiracy panics, this book examines what conspiracy panics do to the support discourse itself. Journalism has increasingly become a subject of concern regarding its public role and its relation to governance. Understanding professional journalism as a discourse that governs at a distance through rationality gives a glimpse into the broader political rationality. (p. 23, my emphasis)

In the case of Dark Alliance, Bratich argues, the corporate press engineered a panic that both characterized Webb and the other professionals at the SJMN as irresponsible conspiracy theorists guilty of violating truth-telling protocols of the profession, and which sought to code the internet as an “anarchic, turbulent, and disorderly” space where dangerous information careened wildly. In this way, the press sought both a reinvigoration of its diminishing cultural authority as gatekeepers of valid information, and a way to incorporate the “untameable, irrational world” of the internet into mainstream journalism in a controlled fashion.

Panic: Making Media Great Again

Today, Trump’s electoral bombshell has a shellshocked media class feeling a need for institutional resuscitation that’s arguably never been greater -but neither is its collective denial over the course of events that’s brought it to this precipice. Understand that a noxious parasite like Trump could never have done this himself – he needed a host from which to draw energy. He found that host in the form of the professional press. And why? Because like the president elect and Richard Nixon before him, the professional press long ago decided it too couldn’t really have a conflict of interest. Contemptible media executives like Les Moonves gleefully jettisoned any remaining public commitment they may have felt in order to turn the election cycle into a bloated, disfigured cash cow while simultaneously rubbing the public’s face in the fact they were doing so. More troublingly, the press as a whole for many years has behaved as if it was no big deal to ingratiate itself to the political class in hopes of joining it, all the while it was supposed to remain adversarial. But it was an enormous problem.

It’s not like this is a secret – even the most cloying, openly partisan and press-identified media critics can see it (even if they are constitutionally incapable of understanding what it would take to remedy it). The requirement to perform faux responsibility ensures its acknowledged, but they won’t emphasize or insist on it, of course, since that would be bad manners and might risk their place on the inside. Yet there’s no way to understand the historic levels of hostility toward the professional press without closely examining how it came to conceive of itself in ways that no longer required true adversarialism, and how it also became determined to let itself off the hook for that failure. This blog project will be a small effort to highlight past work done to illuminate this professional descent and – time and interest permitting – undertake some original work to further explore it.

Judging in part by the mostly bullshit panic over fake news, there doesn’t appear to be much appetite for serious soul-searching in the rapidly emptying newsrooms of a soulless industry. But because journalists must perform a sense of responsibility in keeping with the level of their self-regard, plenty of simulacra (to borrow a phrase) will abound. The studious avoidance of the bottom-most, structural realities attending the fake soul-searching genre is far preferable to actually confronting the ways profit-based media models produce perversities that sicken news culture and the rest of society. Certainly, as Upton Sinclair understood, legacy media won’t be rushing to join a discussion about how failed commercial media models might be overcome. It’s apparently more important they serve up pathetic, contemptible blacklists from a bogus watchdog groups espousing points of view that are mind-numbingly simplistic and openly propagandistic. Good to know.

Let’s not take our eyes off the ball. The hyperventilation over fake news cannot be permitted to obscure the responsibility the “genuine news” industry bears for abandoning the public interest in pursuit of inclusion within the political class. Press-led conspiracy panics offer hyperbolic distractions designed to forestall fearless, ruthless, and needed scrutiny. They also, of course, when effective, can offer opportunities for short-term resuscitation. So expect them. You can also expect a nasty reckoning for media in the months to come as they are dislogded from an assortment of comfortable assumptions they’ve operated under for a long, long time. There will be a lot to watch for as this process develops, and there should be plenty more to say.

But one thing is for sure: panic will not make corporate media great again because, like America, it never was great.

https://mediacriticism.org/2016/11/30/m ... behind-it/

[coffin_dodger]

Very thoughtful of The Washington Post to compile a 'broad-view' list of sites to visit - all in one place!

[seemslikeadream]

fake news or sarcastic tweets?

Federal Ethics Agency Spent the Afternoon Sarcastically Praising Donald Trump
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... itter.html
Ethics Agency Trolls Donald Trump With Bizarre Tweets
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/don ... f37fe27a88

Office of Government Ethics gushes over Trump in tweetstorm
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli ... /94677196/

Government Ethics Office Applauds Trump's Business Announcement, Ignores Potential Conflicts
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/eth ... ts-n690316

[seemslikeadream]

How Rupert Murdoch & Fox Created the Fake News Industry
By Juan Cole | Dec. 1, 2016 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
The concern about “fake news” now sweeping the inside-the-beltway crowd is a little hilarious, since all corporate news (i.e. news for profit) has elements of fakeness.
For instance, cable television news channels almost never cover climate change, and when they do they tend to give equal time to denialists. This is like never covering lung cancer and then when you do, bringing on a tobacco company executive to deny that cigarettes cause it. The reason for the dereliction of duty, which puts the welfare of all human beings at risk, is that the same corporations purveying the news also own a lot of stock in Exxon-Mobil and other Big Carbon companies. Basically, television executives are drowning your great-grandchildren for the health of their stock portfolios. The simple truth is that Exxon-Mobil stock is worthless, since their product is poisoning the planet, and as soon as the public wakes up to this fact, a lot of wealthy people will be bankrupt. (Virtually the entire British upper crust have their retirement funds heavily invested in BP, which I wouldn’t advise.)
Industry professionals have also admitted in interviews that they have been ordered by management not to bring up labor unions. Even large and long-lasting labor strikes tend to be ignored in television “news,” which is the news the business classes permit the public to see.
But those are sins of omission, and even highly professional journalists (and there are plenty working for the corporate media giants) have to put up with that kind of thing if they want to keep their jobs.
The sins of commission are much worse. They are what is now being called fake news. Some have suggested that fake news is just a synonym for propaganda, but I’m not sure that is correct. Good propaganda would probably admit a kernel of truth and then spin it. Fake news is about making stuff up and then purveying the resulting B.S. as the report of a professional journalist.
The most mammoth creator and distributor of fake news is not a few teenagers in Montenegro or wherever. It is an ancient ruddy Australian multi-billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who conspired with shady GOP operative and alleged serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes to create Fox Cable “News” in 1996. As I put it in December, Fox’s “blonde anchors were not so much hired as trafficked.”
Murdoch, one of the more horrible persons ever to have lived, routinely used his prominence as owner of newspapers and television news channels to bully politicians. His is almost single-handedly responsible for blunting an urgent response to climate change, so he is a mass murderer in waiting. He owns the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London and much else besides (having all these outlets in the hands of a single man should be illegal to protect democracy). People very close to him hacked into newsworthy people’s phone message systems to get dirt on them for blackmail or titillating headlines, and it seems a little unlikely that a) this was done only in the UK or b) that people so close to Murdoch could have behaved this way without his knowledge.
Much of what is wrong with Fox Cable News is bias and spin. But it does also simply make things up.
This is the donate button
Click graphic to donate!
Fox routinely declined to cover news conferences by President Obama but virtually became Trump t.v. last summer and fall.
On the making stuff up front, here are some examples:
Fox actually doctored video to make it look as though President Obama encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote (he did urge Latinos to vote). Fox has a long history of doctoring video, which is well documented and should have caused their broadcast license to be revoked.

When Terry Schiavo was lying brain dead and the Republican Party intervened to stop her husband from pulling the plug, Fox actually brought on a psychic to claim that Schiavo was clear about what was going on around her. That is just making stuff up and calling it news. I.e., fake news.
Media Matters has documented 20 years of such steaming piles of B.S. at Fox.
In a three-year study of selected issues, Politifact found that 66% of what Fox presented on these subjects was partially or wholly false, a percentage far higher than any other news network.
Here are some of Politifact’s “pants on fire” findings regarding Fox:
Sean Hannity
“The president said he’s going to bring in 250,000 (Syrian and Iraqi) refugees into this country.”
— PunditFact on Monday, October 26th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
Based on a debunked claim
George Will: “Says President Ronald Reagan “had a month of job creation of 1 million.”
— PunditFact on Monday, April 6th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
Dana Perino: “On climate change, “the temperature readings have been fabricated, and it’s all blowing up in their (scientists’) faces.”
— PunditFact on Friday, February 13th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
Steven Emerson: “There are actual cities” like Birmingham, England, “that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.”
— PunditFact on Wednesday, January 14th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
[See also Informed Comment on this one.]
Donald Trump: “Says President Barack Obama’s recent New York fundraising trip “cost between $25 million and $50 million.”
— PunditFact on Tuesday, October 14th, 2014
Pants on Fire!
Glenn Beck: “John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”
— PolitiFact National on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Media Matters: “Kilmeade: Americans don’t have “pure genes” like Swedes because “we keep marrying other species and other ethnics.” As Gawker noted, on the July 8 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said that Americans don’t have “pure genes” like Swedes because “we keep marrying other species and other ethnics.” Kilmeade apologized for his “inappropriate” remarks on July 20.”
JC: In fact, no one lived in Sweden during the last Ice Age, roughly 75,000-20,000 years ago, what with the three mile high glaciers sitting on it. When the ice finally receded, Sweden was populated in turn by diverse sets of people from elsewhere and Sweden has a high haplotype diversity. Of course, modern human beings came out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, and the people who started going into Sweden around 12,000 years ago were originally Africans. White skin was selected for in Sweden because embryos need vitamin D and in low-ultraviolet environments, darker skin interferes with sunlight getting through to the embryo. Skin color is a minor feature and says almost nothing about underlying genetic diversity).
There are hundreds of these cases, not to mention all the times that Fox has doctored footage of e.g. Obama speeches. These mistakes are not random. They all try to push the narrative in the direction of Neofascism. The entire channel is a propaganda mill, and the majority of “news” items reported there apparently can’t stand up to dispassionate inquiry.
So as pundits go off looking for culprits in the rise of fake news, they should look elsewhere than the former East Bloc. They should look at the Goebbels of Melbourne, the prophet of the new white supremacy and Neofascism, the propagandist for the Iraq War, one Rupert Murdoch– and his henchman, Roger Ailes– and their successors.
And, it is no accident that the incoming Trump administration is largely made up of staples over at Fox, a place where their sugar daddy Murdoch could nurture them like maggot larvae. Not only did they invent mass fake news, they’ve taken over our country with it.
http://www.juancole.com/2016/12/murdoch ... ustry.html

[Joe Hillshoist]

How Rupert Murdoch & Fox Created the Fake News Industry
By Juan Cole | Dec. 1, 2016 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
The concern about “fake news” now sweeping the inside-the-beltway crowd is a little hilarious, since all corporate news (i.e. news for profit) has elements of fakeness.
For instance, cable television news channels almost never cover climate change, and when they do they tend to give equal time to denialists. This is like never covering lung cancer and then when you do, bringing on a tobacco company executive to deny that cigarettes cause it. The reason for the dereliction of duty, which puts the welfare of all human beings at risk, is that the same corporations purveying the news also own a lot of stock in Exxon-Mobil and other Big Carbon companies. Basically, television executives are drowning your great-grandchildren for the health of their stock portfolios. The simple truth is that Exxon-Mobil stock is worthless, since their product is poisoning the planet, and as soon as the public wakes up to this fact, a lot of wealthy people will be bankrupt. (Virtually the entire British upper crust have their retirement funds heavily invested in BP, which I wouldn’t advise.)
Industry professionals have also admitted in interviews that they have been ordered by management not to bring up labor unions. Even large and long-lasting labor strikes tend to be ignored in television “news,” which is the news the business classes permit the public to see.
But those are sins of omission, and even highly professional journalists (and there are plenty working for the corporate media giants) have to put up with that kind of thing if they want to keep their jobs.
The sins of commission are much worse. They are what is now being called fake news. Some have suggested that fake news is just a synonym for propaganda, but I’m not sure that is correct. Good propaganda would probably admit a kernel of truth and then spin it. Fake news is about making stuff up and then purveying the resulting B.S. as the report of a professional journalist.
The most mammoth creator and distributor of fake news is not a few teenagers in Montenegro or wherever. It is an ancient ruddy Australian multi-billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who conspired with shady GOP operative and alleged serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes to create Fox Cable “News” in 1996. As I put it in December, Fox’s “blonde anchors were not so much hired as trafficked.”
Murdoch, one of the more horrible persons ever to have lived, routinely used his prominence as owner of newspapers and television news channels to bully politicians. His is almost single-handedly responsible for blunting an urgent response to climate change, so he is a mass murderer in waiting. He owns the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London and much else besides (having all these outlets in the hands of a single man should be illegal to protect democracy). People very close to him hacked into newsworthy people’s phone message systems to get dirt on them for blackmail or titillating headlines, and it seems a little unlikely that a) this was done only in the UK or b) that people so close to Murdoch could have behaved this way without his knowledge.
Much of what is wrong with Fox Cable News is bias and spin. But it does also simply make things up.
This is the donate button
Click graphic to donate!
Fox routinely declined to cover news conferences by President Obama but virtually became Trump t.v. last summer and fall.
On the making stuff up front, here are some examples:
Fox actually doctored video to make it look as though President Obama encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote (he did urge Latinos to vote). Fox has a long history of doctoring video, which is well documented and should have caused their broadcast license to be revoked.

When Terry Schiavo was lying brain dead and the Republican Party intervened to stop her husband from pulling the plug, Fox actually brought on a psychic to claim that Schiavo was clear about what was going on around her. That is just making stuff up and calling it news. I.e., fake news.
Media Matters has documented 20 years of such steaming piles of B.S. at Fox.
In a three-year study of selected issues, Politifact found that 66% of what Fox presented on these subjects was partially or wholly false, a percentage far higher than any other news network.
Here are some of Politifact’s “pants on fire” findings regarding Fox:
Sean Hannity
“The president said he’s going to bring in 250,000 (Syrian and Iraqi) refugees into this country.”
— PunditFact on Monday, October 26th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
Based on a debunked claim
George Will: “Says President Ronald Reagan “had a month of job creation of 1 million.”
— PunditFact on Monday, April 6th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
Dana Perino: “On climate change, “the temperature readings have been fabricated, and it’s all blowing up in their (scientists’) faces.”
— PunditFact on Friday, February 13th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
Steven Emerson: “There are actual cities” like Birmingham, England, “that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.”
— PunditFact on Wednesday, January 14th, 2015
Pants on Fire!
[See also Informed Comment on this one.]
Donald Trump: “Says President Barack Obama’s recent New York fundraising trip “cost between $25 million and $50 million.”
— PunditFact on Tuesday, October 14th, 2014
Pants on Fire!
Glenn Beck: “John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”
— PolitiFact National on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Media Matters: “Kilmeade: Americans don’t have “pure genes” like Swedes because “we keep marrying other species and other ethnics.” As Gawker noted, on the July 8 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said that Americans don’t have “pure genes” like Swedes because “we keep marrying other species and other ethnics.” Kilmeade apologized for his “inappropriate” remarks on July 20.”
JC: In fact, no one lived in Sweden during the last Ice Age, roughly 75,000-20,000 years ago, what with the three mile high glaciers sitting on it. When the ice finally receded, Sweden was populated in turn by diverse sets of people from elsewhere and Sweden has a high haplotype diversity. Of course, modern human beings came out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, and the people who started going into Sweden around 12,000 years ago were originally Africans. White skin was selected for in Sweden because embryos need vitamin D and in low-ultraviolet environments, darker skin interferes with sunlight getting through to the embryo. Skin color is a minor feature and says almost nothing about underlying genetic diversity).
There are hundreds of these cases, not to mention all the times that Fox has doctored footage of e.g. Obama speeches. These mistakes are not random. They all try to push the narrative in the direction of Neofascism. The entire channel is a propaganda mill, and the majority of “news” items reported there apparently can’t stand up to dispassionate inquiry.
So as pundits go off looking for culprits in the rise of fake news, they should look elsewhere than the former East Bloc. They should look at the Goebbels of Melbourne, the prophet of the new white supremacy and Neofascism, the propagandist for the Iraq War, one Rupert Murdoch– and his henchman, Roger Ailes– and their successors.
And, it is no accident that the incoming Trump administration is largely made up of staples over at Fox, a place where their sugar daddy Murdoch could nurture them like maggot larvae. Not only did they invent mass fake news, they’ve taken over our country with it.
http://www.juancole.com/2016/12/murdoch ... ustry.html

Worth posting twice.

[PufPuf93]

When one considers "fake" news presented to the American (and other) public what about the dissemination of propaganda as fact and "experts" as non-biased in the lead up to the Iraq war.

What about the polling in the 2016 POTUS election that indicated that Trump had a very low probability of success?

What about the marginalization of popular but not establishment politicians such as Kucinich in 2008 and Sanders early on in 2016?

Yes there are "false" narratives and propaganda and slanted news in part because media is no longer subject to the FCC Fairness Doctrine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

One can no longer trust even supposed establishment time tested institutions like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Leads to confusion.

We know the CIA and other intelligence agencies have a long history manipulation.

I see it as a part of a planned dumbing down and fracturing of large portions of the population.

[82_28]

When one considers "fake" news presented to the American (and other) public what about the dissemination of propaganda as fact and "experts" as non-biased in the lead up to the Iraq war.

What about the polling in the 2016 POTUS election that indicated that Trump had a very low probability of success?

What about the marginalization of popular but not establishment politicians such as Kucinich in 2008 and Sanders early on in 2016?

Yes there are "false" narratives and propaganda and slanted news in part because media is no longer subject to the FCC Fairness Doctrine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

One can no longer trust even supposed establishment time tested institutions like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Leads to confusion.

We know the CIA and other intelligence agencies have a long history manipulation.

I see it as a part of a planned dumbing down and fracturing of large portions of the population.

I hate to say it, but I called it in my OP of TRUMP is seriously dangerous thread. I ain't no soothsayer or clairvoyant but I knew it would come to this for fairly obvious reasons. It did. Shoulda bought a lottery ticket.