"Propaganda, Facts and Fake News" - Page 9 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14919775
One of the reasons that Western capitalist countries have so much fake news and propaganda, is that we don't have communities anymore. Because of this, adults are no longer capable of discussing serious subjects regarding governance or the future.

So the children of the current generation will live with all the horrible effects of their parents' stupidity and lack of social connections.

Corporations can tell any lie they want, and many people believe them because... community-less car-isolated workers have no time or disposition for important subjects.

The chats we have on POFO used to be very common among adults who came into spontaneous contact with each other on a daily basis. Now, our daily dose of information and discussion comes from corporate media. Yikes. It's like being the children of opium addicts.
#14929007
On the subject of fake news and spin, here's a blog post from one of my favorite writers (perhaps because I help write the books), who when he is feeling politically chatty on his blog calls himself the Radical Moderate:

I Feel a Social Commentary Coming On.

    An article claims that, when asked “How often do you think news sources report news they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading?”, 72% of respondents said A lot/sometimes.

    The article about the survey is headlined:

    92 Percent of Republicans Think Media Intentionally Reports Fake News.

    It’s become a joke. You’re riding in a packed elevator, when the air is filled with a truly gag-worthy stink cloud. The likely culprit? The smart-ass who quips “Okay, who farted?”

    The irony may be reaching toxic levels, but it makes me smile.

    The thing is that, despite its own spin, the Axios article did a service by talking about it. What did the survey results actually say? That when asked the above question, 72%, nearly three in four Americans surveyed, answered A lot/sometimes. Yes, 92% of Republicans, but also 53% of Democrats and 79% of Independents.

    But Axios spun even this: the actual question asked was “How often do you think that traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading?” (Italics mine). The spin may have been accidental. Traditional major news sources implicates FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc, but leaves direct-to-internet and other newer sources like Axios off the hook, but further into the article Axios uses the correct wording.

    Something else pointed out from the survey; just about half of all respondents who answered A lot/sometimes use Google Search to verify facts they think are questionable.

    This is good. It says we’re becoming smarter about using all of the information resources we now have at our fingertips (literally). It’s a habit I’ve been cultivating myself, although it mostly comes up in the context of Facebook. Ah, Facebook, the ultimate purveyor of fake quotes, fake memes, fake news, true head-banging stuff. If I come across something I think is stinky on my Facebook feed, and have a few minutes, I do a search about it. If it turns out to be true, well awesome, my world is expanded and my assumptions checked. If it turns out to be faked, I may drop a corrective link in the comments while leaving this:

    [center-img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ZlwNWxIVc3usRAGIEM8a_Mufr0ILLyWYSQ25PGnhqY1S9Rnriq-CiC4UaKnxXGu4VxxZRV4CfcH9GYvxVh-VZx3MhGJmcCRHAg0J4E3pJ7cR8lemI69_6AUPy8g_vy6q4BJg1wsqMIjobOSRcNK6SH1RgvGYv8jexnRReEMehRY-mPPaT0CI8ImDMe2HUkip0vwmdFdOjbFp_YxZUkVD2FuVmNdkRF5Uh4NaUhOfDKMFejr9Mfa5VybexXpdthkRT1An-J10L9kUQA_TzLy1zFH1IzRn8l6KverPwYIYIkiw5XybiV3gcGrmdJSn069gPRam_bbKnVHRMxw1ZZxaXapRBj6rkVYO2EsMEk9KtfdyBJtRqUXfS7OSFKRXx0KXDKgc_60qAfumnMiy6ybH1K9gLNp1vFVn9r3ho7Juj8Rm-lCDCbiMiIqSPNdsuwklWy1o4lGN6heMuZz6wtYul-PFrNZeLpTigFr4XX5ake3MJK1449FfbmkmEZnahwGMIUWJXwoUuZo9MeibzDXPwm1HZUFtDasVt9MbJHrIMteKNIT3cZwz1X9Ffahn4ONsiW-RHMjbtf_cP0VHQFajQGG3Cas3VzBKy_CQQmc=w315-h307-no[/center-img]

    I think of it as the Bullshit Award. I don’t award it to entries I think are “spun” wrong or biased; I give it to entries that are wrong on the facts. It mostly goes to viral memes.

    This hardly makes me an infallible diviner of Truth, of course. I’m sure there are Facebook posts I just see and nod at because they confirm my biases without obviously insulting my intelligence; they don’t trigger my skepticism. I think this is why fewer Democrats than Republicans said A lot/sometimes on the survey question.

    So, what should be done about this?

    Trick question. The correct question is, should anything be done about this? The answer is no. Not just no, but Oh Hell no. At least not politically. We already have libel laws and the absolute last thing we need is a Ministry of Truth. We do need to continue on with the solutions we’ve been developing; fact-checkers and a personal willingness to question what we read and even see. As a society we are beginning to develop pretty effective BS-meters. Yes we’re often hypocritical, calling out the other guy’s farts while ignoring our own, but we usually fess up when called out on our own. And although lies can spread pretty fast on the internet, they also leave a record; you can learn pretty fast which news sources are reliable or reliably stinky. You learn who to ride the elevator with.

    Marion G. Harmon
#14929050
The fact 47% of Democrats apparently accept the propaganda at face value explains their ‘automated responses’.
#14929997
ABC News parts ways with investigative reporter Brian Ross


Veteran investigative reporter Brian Ross, suspended by ABC News in December for an erroneous report on former national security advisor Michael Flynn, announced Monday that he is leaving the network.

Ross, 69, had been with ABC News since 1994, and was long one of the network’s highest-profile correspondents. He was suspended for four weeks without pay after the network had to correct his false Dec. 1 report. The story said Flynn was prepared to testify that President Trump had directed him to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign when he was still a candidate.

Ross also suggested that James Holmes, the gunman who killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., might be a member connected with the tea party movement. Ross cited a website page for another man with the same name. The shooter had no ties to the political group.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywo ... story.html
#14934438
MSNBC Does Not Merely Permit Fabrications Against Democratic Party Critics. It Encourages and Rewards Them.

On August 20, 2016, weekend host Joy Reid asked Nance about the supposed “affinity” for Russia harbored by Jill Stein supporters. In response, Nance told MSNBC viewers: “Jill Stein has a show on Russia Today.”

Whatever your views might be about Stein and her third-party candidacy, there is no disputing the fact that Nance’s statement was a falsehood, a fabrication, a lie. Stein did not have a show on RT, nor did she ever host a show on RT. What Nance said was made up out of whole cloth — fabricated — in order to encourage MSNBC viewers to believe that Stein, one of the candidates running against Clinton, was a paid agent of the Kremlin and employee of RT.

Reid allowed Nance’s lie to stand. Perhaps she did not realize at the time that it was a lie. But subsequently, a campaign was launched to urge MSNBC to correct the lie it broadcast, based on the assumption that MSNBC — which is part of NBC News — was a normal news outlet that functions in accordance with basic journalistic principles and would, of course, correct a false statement once that was brought to its attention.

The media watchdog group FAIR repeatedly documented the lie told by Nance and urged MSNBC to issue a correction. The Intercept wrote about this falsehood on several occasions and also noted that MSNBC was refusing to issue a correction of what everyone knows is a false — but an obviously quite significant — claim. Multiple tweets were directed at NBC News, MSNBC, Nance, and Reid asking them to correct the fabrication to their viewers:

To date — almost two years later — neither NBC News nor MSNBC, nor a single journalist who works for either one of those media outlets has corrected this significant falsehood, despite obviously knowing that it was broadcast to their viewers. In other words, NBC News and MSNBC know that they told viewers something that was materially false, and yet refuse to correct it. Please, defenders of this network: Tell me what that says about its integrity, about its real function, about whether it is a real news outlet.

Worse, not only was Nance never sanctioned in any way for the lie he told, but he was rewarded: He has since gone from “MSNBC contributor” to “MSNBC intelligence analyst,” and is far more pervasive on the network, and its hosts have spent the month aggressively promoting his new book on how Vladimir Putin is destroying U.S. democracy.

On MSNBC, lies are not corrected; they are rewarded, provided the lies are designed to smear the reputations of Democratic Party critics. Is this not definitive and conclusive proof of that: that this is not a news outlet but a political arm of the Democratic Party? What else could possibly explain, let alone justify, behavior like this? I’m asking that earnestly.

I bring this up again now not because I think MSNBC will ever correct its lie — it has made clear that lies designed to destroy the reputations of Democratic Party critics are perfectly permissible — but because a very similar event happened on Friday night involving the same MSNBC analyst.

Obviously, anyone is free to criticize people who decide to visit Russia. Anyone is free to denounce those who speak with RT (such as Stephen Hawking, whose RT interview can be seen here, though I’d love to hear from those holding such views why it’s permissible to speak to think tanks such as Brookings and Center for American Progress, which are funded by Gulf state tyrannies). And, needless to say, anyone is free to attack or dispute any statements or views that I, or anyone else, express as part of such discussions.

Nance did none of that. What he did, instead, is exactly what he did on MSNBC to Jill Stein in August 2016: In two tweets, he outright lied about me on purpose, telling his 420,000 Twitter followers that I am “an agent of Moscow” and “deep in the Kremlin pocket.” He further lied by stating that I “helped Snowden defect” and that I “reports into [my] masters in Moscow.”

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/08/msn ... ards-them/

#14935998
You can't fairly make this claim without reading/watching the outlets in question. The people making these claims BOAST that they don't. So they have no way of knowing!
#14936110
Godstud wrote:He asked them, directly. Are you going to deny reality like all your ilk, or are you simply into lying?

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-can ... y-s-emails

That's not fake news. That's reality, :moron:

That's not a crime. Everybody knows what he said. Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump! That just never gets old. That crazy old witch melted down like the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz, and Donald Trump made it happen.

As if that's not enough, social media has totally fucked the corporate propaganda apparatus and the establishment is now trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Tech firms should be made liable for 'fake news' on sites: UK lawmakers
They are facing a complete loss of credibility.

Godstud wrote:One is facts. The other is opinion(eg. Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, etc.).

The opinion guys are often much more entertaining, even funny. They also often are way ahead of the press. Hannity was way ahead of every pundit in recognizing Trump would be a factor, just like I was here. You can't moderate that away, because I'm just recognizing the the dynamics of politics in the US. I'm not shaping it. For example, the so called "news" facts you believe are things that Rush Limbaugh lampoons to great comic effect.

For whatever reason, I decided to tune in to PBS news on Friday night, and heard this guy claiming that 4.1% GDP growth was driven in part by Soybean exports to China, which were accelerated in lieu of later post-tariff purchases. You can try and sell yourself on that sort of thing, but it is comically funny to people like Limbaugh who are tearing that narrative up and making fun of the people propagating it.
Drive-Bys Claim 4.1% GDP Growth Is Built on Soybeans!

Rush Limbaugh wrote:You know what the left’s excuse for the GDP being 4% is? Soybeans! Yeah. That’s right. It’s just a one-time thing. It’s because Trump sold so many soybeans to the European Union and to the ChiComs. That’s all it is. It’s unsustainable. The experts are telling us this can’t continue, it won’t go on — and yet it can get better. It is sustainable and it can continue to grow.
...
You know, I’m not kidding. The mainstream media, the Drive-Bys are saying that the spike in GDP is a one-time spike because of Trump’s trade tariffs. They are claiming that the one-time rise, the 4.1% growth in GDP was caused by — Ready for this? — farmers rushing to sell their soybeans before the tariffs hit the ChiComs. I mean, this is economics malpractice. This is media malpractice, what these people are doing to try to explain this. You know as well as I do why the economy is growing this way.


Limbaugh even goes back to the "facts" Fake News CNN. Trump promises 4% growth. Economists say no way.
Is it a fact that the economy cannot grow at 4%? No. It's a fact that economists say that Trump's promise is impossible. Yet, it just happened. So it is fact that Trump promised 4%+ GDP growth, and it is fact that economists said it couldn't be done in 2016. It's also a fact that Trump pulled it off. The components of GDP that mattered were consumption and investment. In otherwords, soybean exports had nothing to do with it. The reason that story probably has any legs is that they are going to have to explain why the Democrats will lose in November.

Godstud wrote:MSM networks print retractions when they make these errors, and they don't happen on a daily basis.

That's wonderful Godstud. When a newspaper prints its retractions on page 1 headlines, maybe they'll regain some trust.
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