Editors Note: Former President Bill Clinton asked 93 politically-appointed U.S. attorneys to resign in 1993, which didn’t prompt as much media outrage as when President Trump did it.
Dustin Racioppi , State House Bureau, @dracioppiPublished 6:12 p.m. ET March 13, 2017 | Updated 4 hours ago
Gov. Chris Christie called “all this moaning and complaining” by two of the region’s prominent U.S. attorneys “ridiculous,” after they were ordered out of their posts by President Trump.
Christie, the former U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said Monday that those prosecutors – Paul Fishman, Christie’s appointed successor, and Preet Bharara, who led New York’s Southern District office – should have known and prepared for their transition out of their positions months ago. They had been appointed by former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and “they received notice” by the electorate that they would not keep their positions much longer.
President Donald Trump branded Democrats “hypocrites” over calls for an investigation into his administration’s contacts with Russia, posting a photograph on the internet of one of the opposition party’s leaders sharing doughnuts and coffee with Vladimir Putin.
It came after half a dozen Trump officials and advisers were revealed to have met Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to Washington, in the six months before the president took office.
Mr Trump responded by posting the picture on Twitter showing Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the US Senate, smiling alongside Mr Putin during his trip to New York in 2003.
The president said: “We should start an immediate investigation into Senator Schumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite!”
Only 39 percent call media “truthful” in Emerson College survey, compared to 49 percent for new White House
Brian Flood | February 9, 2017 @ 8:37 AM
at the Trump administration is “truthful,” while only 39 percent feel that way about the news media. Worse, for the so-called “opposition party,” 53 percent of those surveyed described the media as “untruthful.”
The poll, released on Tuesday, also showed that Americans are divided on Trump’s performance so far — 48 percent of registered voters approve of the job that Trump is doing, compared to 47 percent who disapprove.
Journalists can’t seem to get their stories straight in the opening weeks of the Trump administration, whether in tweets or in articles where falsehoods have been spread almost daily.
The mistakes have not just been from newer liberal news outlets such The Huffington Post or BuzzFeed, but from legacy media like Reuters, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
What follows are several botched stories or conflicting reports since President Trump took office.
Charles Runnells , The News-PressPublished 8:01 a.m. ET Jan. 22, 2017 | Updated 7 hours ago
People talk about “fake news” like it’s something new.
it’s not.
Media prankster Joey Skaggs has been doing it since the 1960s — long before Facebook, Twitter and the so-called “fake news” crisis. He’s concocted all kinds of bizarre schemes to fool gullible news reporters and their unsuspecting audiences.
Take, for example, his infamous “cat house for dogs” — a brothel for stressed-out dogs that got national attention in the 1970s.
Or his portable confession booth parked outside the Democratic National Convention in 1992, complete with Skaggs disguised as a Catholic priest.
Or his annual Father’s Day Parade that doesn’t actually exist. That is, until a Chinese TV crew decides to visit Manhattan, and Skaggs has to come up with something for them to film, including official T-shirts and actors pretending to be parade participants.
None of those things were real, of course. But that didn’t stop the news media from reporting on them.
Skaggs isn’t sure if those reporters completely bought his hoaxes or if they did the stories with a knowing wink-wink to the audience. But either way, he says, it’s a problem.
“If they were totally gullible, that’s understandable,” he says. “It’s a good story, and I give them good visuals.
“But if it’s wink-wink, why is it wink-wink? What am I replacing that’s more newsworthy? That’s a tremendous problem. They could be covering something more important.”
Skaggs and his hoaxes are the stars of the new documentary “Art of the Prank,” one of more than 50 films being shown next week at the annual Bonita Springs International Film Festival.
The fest features screenings of narrative, documentary, animated and short films. It also hosts workshops and Q&A sessions with the films’ creators and stars, including Skaggs.
“Art of the Prank” couldn’t be more timely, Skaggs says. Fake news is all over social media — bogus news stories designed to sway public opinion or generate page views, regardless of facts, truth or journalistic ethics.
“Of course, there’s a big difference between that and what I do,” he says. “I’m calling attention to fake news, but a lot of people don’t see that. They want to shoot the messenger.”
In the month leaded up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead (see “New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through ‘Oversamples'” and “ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary’s “Lead” Shrinks To 2-Points”). In fact, just 16 days prior to the election an ABC/Wapo poll showed a 12-point lead for Hillary, a result that obviously turned out to be embarrassingly wrong for the pollsters.
But, proving they still got it, ABC/Washington Post and CNN are out with a pair of polls on Trump’s favorability this morning that sport some of the most egregious “oversamples” we’ve seen. The ABC/Wapo poll showed an 8-point sampling margin for Democrats with only 23% of the results taken from Republicans…
Ridgewood NJ, Misleading the American people to advance a political narrative has been a hallmark of President Obama’s foreign and domestic policy. The most recent example is the administration’s attempt to conflate the hacking of the Democratic Party with potential cyberattacks on the US Election.
Last week, federal officials went as far as to tell the Washington Post that malware linked to Russian hackers was found on a laptop at Burlington Electric, a Vermont power company. By Monday the Post had recanted, writing that investigators “are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort.”
The Obama administration and many Democrats as well as Republicans led by Sen. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have ordered hearings and are pushing the Russian hacking story instead of focusing on the hacking of Hillary Clintons unsecured servers and Clinton operative John Podesta being caught in a basic phishing hack giving access to all his emails.
In October the Clinton campaign declined to confirm the authenticity of the WikiLeak documents but called them “stolen, and ” the latest move by Russian operatives they claimed were trying to help Donald Trump.
The problem for Democrats is the WikiLeak released emails, proved unequivocally that the DNC had rigged the primary race against Bernie Sanders, worked in collusion with the mainstream media, the Hillary received debate questions ahead of time, that DNC staffers used inflammatory and derogatory language toward minorities, women and gays, but the most damming was the implication that the entire media appeared to be on the Clinton’s payroll.
Recount efforts failed as Trump picked up more votes and voting irregularities in Detroit pointed to DNC tampering.
Today DNI Chief Clapper took swipe at Trump, Assange as he defended the Russia Hack Intel. This is of course is the same James Clapper who in 2014 the Washington Post featured a story in which a group of congressmen led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) were pushing for President Obama to fire, the director of national intelligence, claiming he misled Congress about the extent of the NSA’s domestic surveillance activity on American citizens.
NBC reported, Clapper without offering any evidence said Russia had “clearly assumed an even more aggressive cyber posture by increasing cyber espionage operations, leaking data stolen from these operations, and targeting political infrastructures systems.”
In mid-December Jeh Johnson head of the Department of Homeland Security explained DHS’s cyber team was ready on election night and they didn’t see “anything that affected the ballot count,” he said.
When pressed, asking whether he could assure Americans that Russian hacking did not affect the outcome of the election.
Johnson said, “We see no evidence that hacking by any actor altered the ballot count for any cyber actions that deprived people of voting,”.
The birth of PJ Blogger .By this time Blogging its seems had become quite the rage and mainstream news anchors such as Dan Rather had questioned the validity of information from nonprofessionals sitting around in their Pajama’s blogging.[13] Mr. Foytlin not a fan of Dan Rather or any of the mainstream media decided to blog under the name PJ Blogger as a play on words and to plant himself firmly in the camp of the new digital media. https://theridgewoodblog.net/today-is-founders-day-for-the-ridgewood-blog-2/
Move comes despite anchor’s own past ethics issues
By Brian Maloney January 4th, 2017, 14:17 EST
Raising eyebrows among some critics, former CBS anchor Dan Rather is now teaching an online course focused on ethics in journalism.
Called “Journalism & Finding the Truth in the News” and offered through Udemy, the class is aimed at both media career aspirants and the general public.
“In this course, Dan teaches invaluable foundations on great writing, the essentials of telling a good story, and how to remain calm and captivating on camera — useful skills for anyone fascinated by the power of the news or anyone who wants to contribute to serious journalism,” reads the course description.
“Dan’s rich history and extensive knowledge of journalism, paired with practical, hands-on exercises, creates a unique learning opportunity and rare insight from an American legend,” it continues.
Though over 2000 students have enrolled, the sign-up fee has been slashed to a mere $10, a 93% discount from the original $150 rate:
IN THE PAST SIX WEEKS, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating Editor’s Note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: the first Note of which was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article, the other of which was buried the following day at the bottom.
The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the Editor’s Note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and that there may not have even been malware at all on this laptop.
Late on Friday, with the US population embracing the upcoming holidays and oblivious of most news emerging from the administration, Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which authorizes $611 billion for the military in 2017.
In a statement, Obama said that:
Today, I have signed into law S. 2943, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017.” This Act authorizes fiscal year 2017 appropriations principally for the Department of Defense and for Department of Energy national security programs, provides vital benefits for military personnel and their families, and includes authorities to facilitate ongoing operations around the globe. It continues many critical authorizations necessary to ensure that we are able to sustain our momentum in countering the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and to reassure our European allies, as well as many new authorizations that, among other things, provide the Departments of Defense and Energy more flexibility in countering cyber-attacks and our adversaries’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles.”
Much of the balance of Obama’s statement blamed the GOP for Guantanamo’s continued operation and warned that “unless the Congress changes course, it will be judged harshly by history,” Obama said. Obama also said Congress failed to use the bill to reduce wasteful overhead (like perhaps massive F-35 cost overruns?) or modernize military health care, which he said would exacerbate budget pressures facing the military in the years ahead.
Remember when The NYT reported that its ad hoc campaign to boost revenue by selling subscriptions in response to the vicious back and forth with Donald Trump, was said to be a smashing success? Perhaps it was subscriptions for the crossword puzzle because it appears the monetary success was not smashing enough, and according to a just released note from executives Arthur Sulzberger and Mark Thompson, the newspaper will vacate at least eight floors in its iconic building, allowing it to “generate significant rental income” because it is “frankly, too expensive to occupy this many floors when we don’t truly need them.”
Maybe the lesson here is that when the newspaper business model no longer works, one can just pivot into a REIT?
The remaining staff will be consolidated on the remaining, redesigned floors in a “more dynamic, modern and open workplace, one that is better suited to the moment.”
Furthermore, the NYT publisher and CEO will lose their corner offices, which they call a “vestige from a different era” and will “introduce more team rooms and common spaces.”
It is unclear if NYT would distribute pink slips as part of the cost-cutting effort, however as the letter adds, “in the end, these changes will impact every employee at 620 Eighth Ave. In the near term, we will have to move about 400 employees out of the building to nearby office space while the first phase of work is completed. We expect that group, which includes parts of marketing, technology, the newsroom, news services, corporate finance and print products and services pre-press operations, to move in the first quarter and return by the end of 2017. Your manager will notify you if your position is affected by this temporary move. We understand and appreciate the disruption this will inevitably cause and we will do everything in our power to mitigate it.”
Katrina Trinko / @KatrinaTrinko / December 15, 2016
Facebook doesn’t think you know what’s “fake news” and what’s not.
In an announcement Thursday, the social media giant said it was going to crack down on fake news through a variety of ways, including letting users report what they deem to be fake news.
>>> The 4 Steps Facebook Is Taking to Crack Down on ‘Fake News’
But one item on Facebook’s list of methods to crack down was particularly concerning:
We’ve started a program to work with third-party fact-checking organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Code of Principles. We’ll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations. If the fact-checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why.
When you look at the signatories on the Poynter list, you’ll find seven from the United States: ABC News, The Washington Post, Snopes, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Climate Feedback, and Politifact.
Aha.
Talk about the devil being in the details. These are hardly unbiased fact-checkers—conservatives have raised alarms about several of them. Let’s go through some examples:
1). Snopes. You may have heard that the terrorist who murdered 49 people and injured dozens more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was a Democrat. That’s for a reason: Omar Mateen was registered as a Democrat. Yet Snopes took issue with that characterization, saying it was “undetermined” because Mateen’s “U.S. political affiliation (if any) at the time of the shooting is unknown.”
Snopes’ Kim LaCapria continued:
However, being a member of any particular political party involves expressing an ongoing allegiance to that party and its principles: one could be pegged as a Democrat (or a Republican, or a member of any other party) if he ran for office as a member of that party, exclusively campaigned or raised money for that party and its candidates, or consistently voted for that party’s candidates. But there’s no evidence that Mateen materially supported any particular political party, nor do we know how he voted (or whether he ever voted at all).
All we know is that 10 years ago he registered as a Democrat, and voter registration is an imperfect indicator that governs nothing more than which party’s primary a citizen is eligible to vote in …
What?
It’s hard to make sense of this, but it basically boils down to: No one can be labeled a member of any party unless they consistently have run for office, donated money, or voted for that party’s candidates (something that could never be proved, incidentally, since we have secret ballots).
Which is a ridiculous standard. Look, I’m someone who is registered Republican to vote in the primaries, and who has plenty of quibbles with the GOP, and yet I would agree if I were identified as a Republican by a news site, it would be true—because I am registered as a Republican.
2). Politifact. Back in June, Donald Trump said, “Crime is rising.” Politifact blasted this claim as “pants on fire.” Then the American Enterprise Institute’s Sean Kennedy looked into the facts, noted Politifact had looked at statistics ending in 2014, and wrote: “The FBI’s preliminary 2015 figures actually do show crime rising in most categories across the country between 2014 and 2015.” Politifact responded … that it stood by its rating.
3). The Washington Post. Here’s a fun one: in 2015, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said that “we, right now, have more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible.” The Post looked at the claim and wrote, “The literally translated King James Version of the Bible contains just over 800,000 words. There are as many as 3.7 million individual words in the IRS tax code.” So Cruz deserves a true rating, right? Wrong—at least according to The Post, which went on to say: “This is a nonsense fact, something that is technically correct but ultimately meaningless.”
So perhaps in the new Facebook era, the Orlando terrorist being a Democrat, Trump discussing the rise in crime, and Cruz saying the IRS code has more words than the Bible would all be buried as “fake news” … despite being true.
Other U.S. organizations listed in the Poynter directory Facebook says it will rely on are Climate Feedback (which I’m not familiar with, but at a cursory glance does not appear to be challenging the liberal groupthink on climate change), and ABC News (home to George Stephanopoulos, who worked for the Clinton White House, and oh, didn’t disclose he had donated to the Clinton Foundation).
There is undoubtedly “fake news” online—and consumers should work to be responsible about sharing information, fact-checking themselves claims that seem spurious.
And Facebook, of course, is a private company that legally can do what it wants regarding its content.
But while Facebook legally can crack down on “fake news,” it’s unfortunate it has chosen to do so, particularly by relying on liberal organizations’ fact-checks as the arbiters.
It’s clear that the system Facebook has announced is much more likely to result in crackdowns on conservative outlets than liberal outlets—which is bad news for all of us conservatives on Facebook.
Facebook is going to start fact-checking, labeling, and burying fake news and hoaxes in its News Feed, the company said Thursday.
The decision comes after Facebook received heated criticism for its role in spreading a deluge of political misinformation during the US presidential election, like one story that falsely said the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump.
To combat fake news, Facebook has teamed up with a shortlist of media organizations, including Snopes and ABC News, that are part of an international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit school for journalism in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Here’s some fake “mainstream” news stories for you to consider:
.
“The Zapruder film:” frames of video footage of JFK’s assassination were reversed, making it appear that Kennedy’s head lurched the opposite direction, spawning a million conspiracy theories about multiple gun men, the grassy knoll, etc.
“The October Surprise:” Reagan supposedly sent Bush 41 to Iran to prevent the hostages from being released until he was elected president. Bush never went to Iran, and his whereabouts on the supposed dates were very public.
“Bush 43 snorted Coke”… according to a Texas inmate whose only known encounter with Bush was when Bush refused to pardon him.
“Laura Bush had an abortion.”
“Proof Bush avoided the draft” was based on a letter publicized by Dan Rather on 60 minutes that was such an obvious forgery, TV viewers spotted fifteen proofs of forgery from their living room couches.
“Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to destroy the Twin Towers” It doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel, but it burns plenty hot enough to weaken it. Ever take metal shop, anyone?
“Mad Max Beyond Superdome” No, after Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana stadium was not filled of desperate people resorting to cannibalism.
“Blame for Katrina” The Bush administration had attempted to use federal funds to rebuild the dykes and levees in Louisiana, but was blocked by local Democrat politicians.
“Tar balls in the Gulf coast” were an entirely natural phenomenon. If they were affected at all by the oil spill disaster it was because there were fewer oil rigs to collect natural seepage, which leak far more oil every year than the oil spillage.
Most contentiously, “Project Veritas” misled America by editing footage to make it appear that Planned Parenthood sold baby parts, PP also arranged to keep child prostitution secret, NPR negotiated with reporters undercover as Islamicists, Clinton staffers coaching on how to commit vote fraud, … except, oh, yeah… Project Veritas released the entire unedited footage with the footage that had been merely edited for time, just like every news story based on recorded footage since the dawn of man. This is contentious, because I suppose it’s partly subjective whether the fact that a PP employee went in the back room to discuss a proposal to smuggle child prostitutes with her manager for several minutes amounts to exculpatory evidence; “obviously” it demonstrates some hesitance.
And some less important, but outrageous ones:
Dateline NBC demonstrated that GM minivans were prone to burn when struck in a collision, but didn’t include “if you overfill them with gas, and you stick bottle rockets where the gas is flowing out of them.”
A Food Lion was busted with old meat in the meat fridge… moments after it was put there by the network reporter who busted them.
The Washington Post accuses dozens of “right-wing” news sites and aggregators of spreading anonymous Russian-sourced fake news stories they found on the web and failed to verify … based on some anonymous probably Ukrainian-sourced fake news stories they found on the web and failed to verify.
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