A Tsunami of Fake News Supporting the Political Left (and Right)

Andrew Sullivan offers a long litany of stories that the left-leaning legacy media got extremely wrong. So incredibly wrong that it reveals more than journalistic malpractice. It reveals a news media industry that treats its readers like children who it thinks are incapable of making good decisions based on complex real life evidence. It's a new media that systematically makes shit up and hides stories that run counter to its narrative, its mission, which on the left side of the news media is to elect Democrats. It is the mirror image of FOX on the right. Both of these news "teams" violate many of the journalism rules of ethics promulgated by the Society of Professional Journalists. For instance,

– Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.

– Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.

– Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.

– Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable. Give voice to the voiceless.

– Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.

– Recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government. Seek to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open, and that public records are open to all.

On the Democrat news media, recently concocted stories described by Sullivan involve: Kyle Rittenhouse:

Money quote from the defense lawyer: “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun (and your hands down) pointed at him, that he fired? Right?” To which Grosskreutz answered: “Correct.” Here’s how the NYT first described this a year ago, on August 26: “Video footage from the scene of the shooting appears to show Mr. Rittenhouse running and then firing his gun, striking a man in the head. He then flees and is chased by bystanders before tripping, falling to the ground and shooting another man.”

Here are many examples of how the news media are intentionally (or at least recklessly) misunderstanding the rule of law and our system of justice relevant to Rittenhouse.   One of the favorite tactics of Democrat media is to mention that Rittenhouse is "white" (how is this relevant?) while failing to mention that the three people he shot are also "white" (what's good for the goose . . . ) (See here and here). You might rightly think that the news media is revving up conflict pornography (stoking race conflict) in order to sell advertisements.

Other recent wretched excuses for journalism include:

Almost everything reported on the left about Trump and Russia, Rachel Maddow doing disgraceful reporting on this topic for years - See here and here.

Claims about the Covington Boys;

Claims that there were bounties on U.S. Soldiers;

Claims that the Lab-Leak origin of COVID was a conspiracy theory;

Claims regarding the motives of the Pulse Mass Shooting and the Atlanta spa shooter;

Claims that attacks on Asian-Americans were by "white supremacists," when they were "disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill;

The claim that Officer Sicknick's skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died;

The claim that a laptop was not property of Hunter Biden but, rather, it was Russian disinformation;

The claim that inflation was not increasing dramatically;

The claim that vaccines would end the pandemic;

The claims that critical race theory isn't in high schools and grade schools when CRT teachings are being pushed in hundreds of schools and school districts.

I could add a few things.  For instance, from the NYT/NPR/WP center of the news universe we heard almost nothing about extensive nightly riots and looting in the wake of George Floyd's killing.  Rather, we were told about the "mostly peaceful protests."  More specifically, it was as though Seattle CHAZ/CHOP and Portland Oregon didn't exist.

How do media outlets get away with these lies and corruption?  Here's my simplistic answer:

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

Andrew Sullivan's article is titled: "When All The Media Narratives Collapse: In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong." As Sullivan notes, all of these false stories he listed favored Democrats.

Sullivan, sounding demoralize, concludes:

And at some point, you wonder: what narrative are they pushing now that is also bullshit? One comes to mind: the assurance that the insane amount of debt we have incurred this century is absolutely nothing to be concerned about because interest rates are super-low and borrowing more and more now is a no-brainer. But when inflation spikes and sets off a potential spiral in wages to catch up, will interest rates stay so quiescent? And if interest rates go up, how will we service the debt so easily?

I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology. But with this kind of record, how can I not?

We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight. This is humanly understandable. It is professionally unacceptable. And someone has got to stop it.

Here's the "news media" getting it extremely wrong once again, a few days ago, on the Rittenhouse case, on of the ubiquitous intentional/reckless articles we are seeing from the Official Democrat News Media:

The NYP quotes Andrew Sullivan:

Some mistakes are natural, but “when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem,” warns Andrew Sullivan at his Substack. Agenda-driven reporting on the Kenosha shootings “effectively excluded the possibility that [Kyle] Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool . . . who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense,” so testimony that he did just that “came as a shock.”

Bonus Evidence: When Barack Obama visited Mount Rushmore, CNN described Obama's visit:

“Obama arrived there late last night and got a good look around Mount Rushmore — it’s quite a sight if you haven’t seen it,” said CNN anchor Rob Marciano.

“Barack Obama is in South Dakota today. He arrived there last night. Take a look at this. He got a good glimpse of the majestic Mount Rushmore,” fellow CNN anchor Betty Nguyen said later in the same broadcast.

A few days later, CNN’s Jim Acosta described Obama’s visit to Mount Rushmore like this: “It’s a fitting campaign stop for a presidential contender looking to make history. Standing before Mount Rushmore over the weekend, Barack Obama was asked whether he sees his face joining the likes of Washington and Lincoln.”

When Donald Trump visited Mount Rushmore, CNN had this to say:

“President Trump will be at Mt. Rushmore where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans told that [they are] focusing on the effort to, quote, tear down our country’s history,” reported CNN Leyla Santiago on The Lead with Jake Tapper.

Last year I would have thought that Glenn Greenwald's rhetoric (below) was over the top, shrill, hyperbole. No longer. I'm there too after seeing the unending flow of false news--fake news--from the left.

Virtually everyone who ends up having first-hand experience with the national media realizes they're amoral liars and smear artists with no scruples, who publish and broadcast things constantly that have no relationship to the truth. And the public knows this, too

On the national level, many news outlets that I formerly trusted no longer deserved any trust. I trust no outlet, whether it be FOX or any of the "good guys" on the political left, who have abandoned all of the principles they were ever taught in J school and now see themselves as servants of their favorite political party.

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The Steele Dossier Story Collapses Because We Failed to Learn the Lesson of Iraq’s WMD.

At Breaking Points, hosted by Saagar and Krystal, Glenn Greenwald explains the early warning signs that the Steele Dossier was fraudulent: 1) It was regurgitated cold war/McCarthyism BS, and 2) the narrative was supported only by anonymous sources touted by the spy state. Now we know the Steele Dossier was absolute bullshit concocted by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and that it went far and wide thanks to a credulous "news media," leading to the Mueller investigation.

The same news media outlets that enthusiastically pushed the Steele Dossier and all the subsequent Trump-Russian connection falsehoods have almost entirely been silent given the blockbuster news that they were pushing major falsehood for several years and that these falsehoods likely affected the way many people voted in national elections. As Greenwald notes, the legacy news media does not care that it got things so wrong, which is evidence that they were intentionally misleading their audience. This conversation begins at about the 1:20:00 mark:

At least after the WMD fiasco, the NYT (which led the charge for the Iraq invasion (e.g., Judith Miller and Thomas Friedman) repented by acknowledging that many NYT articles regarding WMD were poorly researched and that they should not have printed.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ''regime change'' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.

. . . We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.

The new version of the NYT has not learned any of the lessons from the WMD disaster. The now well-recognized collapse of the Steele Dossier is damning information regarding the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the news media.  The left leaning legacy media at out of the hands of the U.S. spy state, failing to track down real information. They wanted to believe the Trump-Russia connection and that was good enough for printing stories they failed to vet.

I resisted using the term "fake news" when I first heard the phrase, but there is no getting around the fact that the left-leaning legacy media engaged in journalism malpractice--fake news--regarding most, if not all--Trump Russia stories that it produced.

Do I need to add that I despise Donald Trump? Even since he appeared on the political stage I have found him arrogant, narcissistic, corrupt and incompetent. I voted for two severely compromised candidates, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden because I concluded that they were far less dangerous than Trump.

Continue ReadingThe Steele Dossier Story Collapses Because We Failed to Learn the Lesson of Iraq’s WMD.

What Shall We Call Your Social Movement, [CRT]?

From Freddie Boer:

You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. . . . And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

Continue ReadingWhat Shall We Call Your Social Movement, [CRT]?

Left Leaning Legacy Media Belatedly and Grudgingly Acknowledge that the Steele Dossier was Fraudulent

How does it feel to now know that left-leaning legacy news media duped you for years on Trump-Russia? Drew Holden offers chapter and verse below, and there are oh so many offenders, including Rachel Maddow, her "reporter" pals at CNN and many many others. This is merely one story of many where the two media teams (the Democrat team and the Republican team) tell you only what they want you to know (and withhold what they don't want you to know). There was plenty of reason to be suspicious about the Steele Dossier before this recent indictment. This widespread journalistic malpractice re Trump-Russia went on for years.

As Glenn Greenwald notes in a related tweet: "NYT & WashPost showered themselves with Pulitzers for their monomaniacal obsession with Russiagate. Even after Mueller admitted he could find no evidence to establish the conspiracy and indicted *nobody* for it, they persisted." But there is a bigger lesson here that pertains to all of us and our failing democracy: consumers of "news" are not getting what they think they are getting. Many of them, including many who will bristle as they read this post, have been as credulous as the CNN reporters.

[[Added Nov 7, 2021]

Greenwald is correct to hammer this story over and over. The media is the only industry specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Without accurate information our Democracy is a sham, an opportunity for tyrants and their sycophants to run the U.S. without regard to the needs and desires of the People. If we are happy with that dysfunction, then we should cancel the Fourth of July because the 1776 revolt from England would be then reduced to a mere exercise in power, not the beginning of an amazing real-life experiment in democracy. One last thing for now: I entirely agree with Greenwald that if the left-leaning legacy media had a conscience, if it were serving the higher purpose that it is pretending to serve, it would prominently acknowledge the false information it published and it would publicly explain the steps it is taking to make sure that this sort of thing does not ever occur again. The worst offending media outlets are refusing to do that in the case of the Steele Dossier, which is strong evidence that it will be business as usual as we approach the next round of elections. What follows is Greenwald's most recent thread on this topic. I wish I could argue with Greenwald on the facts he notes and his conclusions, because they constitute an strong indictment that our system of government/media has largely become manipulative theater, not the ingenious and innovative system for serving the People that many of us learned in civics classes decades ago.

One more excerpt worth repeating:

One key point I omitted: no discussion of the Russiagate fraud and the media's role is complete without highlighting their key partners in all of this: the security state services (CIA/FBI/NSA/DOJ). The most under-discussed media story of this decade is how they all but merged.

Continue ReadingLeft Leaning Legacy Media Belatedly and Grudgingly Acknowledge that the Steele Dossier was Fraudulent

The Difference Between Information and Knowledge

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). It has been a very slow read for me because it is such a impressive and detailed analysis of what is ailing us today. Here is a major distinction that is largely unappreciated. Information is merely "stuff," whereas knowledge must be carefully earned through the use of intricate institutions that coordinate, test and refine human observations and conclusions. This excerpt is from page 125:

What the institutionalization of modern, fact-based journalism did was to create a system of nodes—professional newsrooms which can choose whether to accept information and pass it on. The reality-based community is a network of such nodes: publishers, peer reviewers, universities, agencies, courts, regulators, and many, many more. I like to imagine the system’s institutional nodes as filtering and pumping stations through which propositions flow. Each station acquires and evaluates propositions, compares them with stored knowledge, hunts for error, then filters out some propositions and distributes the survivors to other stations, which do the same.

Importantly, they form a network, not a hierarchy. No single gatekeeper can decide which hypotheses enter the system, and there are infinitely many pathways through it. . .

Suppose some mischievous demon were to hack into the control center one night and reverse the pumps and filters. Instead of straining out error, they pass it along. In fact, instead of slowing the dissemination of false and misleading claims, they accelerate it. Instead of marginalizing ad hominem attacks, they encourage them. Instead of privileging expertise, they favor amateurism. Instead of validating claims, they share claims. Instead of trafficking in communication, they traffic in display. Instead of identifying sources, they disguise them. Instead of rewarding people who persuade others, they reward those who publicize themselves. If that were how the filtering and pumping stations worked, the system would acquire a negative epistemic valence. It would actively disadvantage truth. It would be not an information technology but misinformation technology.

No one saw anything like that coming. We—I certainly include myself—expected digital technology to broaden and deepen the marketplace of ideas. There would be more hypotheses, more checkers, more access to expertise. How could that not be a leap forward for truth? At worst, we assumed, the digital ecosystem would be neutral. It might not necessarily tilt toward reality, but neither would it systematically tilt against reality.

Unfortunately, we forgot that staying in touch with reality depends on rules and institutions. We forgot that overcoming our cognitive and tribal biases depends on privileging those rules and institutions, not flattening them into featureless, formless “platforms.” In other words, we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can be simply emitted, but knowledge, the product of a rich social interaction, must be achieved. Converting information into knowledge requires getting some important incentives and design choices right. Unfortunately, digital media got them wrong.

Continue ReadingThe Difference Between Information and Knowledge