- He follows up on his own post, in order to make corrections and point out a possible error on his part
- He looks at it from an angle that's way out of his usual frame of reference
This is just good work.
Showing posts with label media criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media criticism. Show all posts
Apr 25, 2024
Today's Ryan
This is excellent is a couple of ways.
Mar 16, 2024
They Get One Right
There is no warm place in my heart or in my mind for Meet The Press. Over the last 30 years, NBC in general, but MTP specifically, have turned their whole tele-journalism thing into a showcase for Press Poodles to pimp their Both Sides bullshit.
Meet the Press Blog
‘MAGA movement’ widely unpopular, new poll finds
Just 24% of Americans surveyed have positive views of the Make America Great Again movement in a new national NBC News poll.
President Donald Trump is still unpopular and so is the political movement created in his image, according to a new national NBC News poll.
The Make America Great Again, or ‘MAGA,’ movement, which takes its name from Trump’s first campaign slogan, was the least popular individual or group tested in the new survey. Just 24% of Americans have positive views of the movement, while 45% voice negative views.
These numbers come as President Joe Biden made Trump — and his movement — the centerpiece of his re-election launch video on Tuesday.
Biden in his video that “MAGA extremists are lining up to take those bedrock freedoms away.” Biden and his fellow Democrats often use the term “MAGA” as a catch-all to describe pro-Trump Republicans who embrace the former president’s more extreme positions, including his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
A slight majority of Republicans — 52% — view the MAGA movement positively, as well as 53% of those who define themselves as conservative.
Independents also rated the movement negatively, with just 12% viewing it positively, while 45% say they have negative views of the movement.
The movement received net-positive ratings across only a few political and demographic groups, finding support among those who make up the Republican base, including Americans who are white, less educated and live in rural areas.
More than a third of rural Americans have positive views of the movement, the highest of any geographic subgroup. And the movement received its highest mark from white Americans, with a 29% positive rating, of any racial subgroup.
Men over the age of 50 were evenly split, with 36% voicing positive views and 37% voicing negative views. And a combined 58% of those with a high school degree or less and those who attended technical or vocational schools view the movement positively.
On the flip side, the movement received its highest negative ratings from groups that make up the Democratic base: the higher educated, younger people, people of color, particularly Black people, and those who define themselves as liberals.
But like Grandma said, even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while.
‘MAGA movement’ widely unpopular, new poll finds
Just 24% of Americans surveyed have positive views of the Make America Great Again movement in a new national NBC News poll.
President Donald Trump is still unpopular and so is the political movement created in his image, according to a new national NBC News poll.
The Make America Great Again, or ‘MAGA,’ movement, which takes its name from Trump’s first campaign slogan, was the least popular individual or group tested in the new survey. Just 24% of Americans have positive views of the movement, while 45% voice negative views.
These numbers come as President Joe Biden made Trump — and his movement — the centerpiece of his re-election launch video on Tuesday.
Biden in his video that “MAGA extremists are lining up to take those bedrock freedoms away.” Biden and his fellow Democrats often use the term “MAGA” as a catch-all to describe pro-Trump Republicans who embrace the former president’s more extreme positions, including his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
A slight majority of Republicans — 52% — view the MAGA movement positively, as well as 53% of those who define themselves as conservative.
Independents also rated the movement negatively, with just 12% viewing it positively, while 45% say they have negative views of the movement.
The movement received net-positive ratings across only a few political and demographic groups, finding support among those who make up the Republican base, including Americans who are white, less educated and live in rural areas.
More than a third of rural Americans have positive views of the movement, the highest of any geographic subgroup. And the movement received its highest mark from white Americans, with a 29% positive rating, of any racial subgroup.
Men over the age of 50 were evenly split, with 36% voicing positive views and 37% voicing negative views. And a combined 58% of those with a high school degree or less and those who attended technical or vocational schools view the movement positively.
On the flip side, the movement received its highest negative ratings from groups that make up the Democratic base: the higher educated, younger people, people of color, particularly Black people, and those who define themselves as liberals.
Feb 7, 2024
Win Or Lose
It can't be much fun to lose the vote to "None Of The Above".
Nikki Haley suffered an embarrassing defeat in Nevada’s Republican primary.
What happened?
In the Democratic primary:
So why is Nikki Haley willing to subject herself to all this?
She might be the most interesting aspect of this election cycle.
- Why is she sticking with it?
- What's her strategy here?
- Is the point just to be a thorn in Trump's side?
- Is she really running for 2028?
- Are we seeing a kind of secret revolt of the GOP Normies?
Nikki Haley suffered an embarrassing defeat in Nevada’s Republican primary.
What happened?
She lost to an option to vote for “none” of the candidates listed. Trump skipped yesterday’s non-binding contest for tomorrow’s caucuses. (See full results here)
In the Democratic primary:
Biden won decisively. It was another step toward renomination, despite concerns about his age and how he’d fare against Trump in November.
Maybe we need to talk about that headline: "...Haley suffered an embarrassing defeat..."
Why can't the Press Poodles step outside their hidebound habit of reporting only on the ground-level obvious, and seem never to dig a little deeper - to ask a few of the questions that occur to some rank-amateur-random-nobody-blogger with no training or expertise?
Jan 20, 2024
Information/Perception Conflict
This may be part of the problem:
Climate report projects continued warming and declining streamflows for Colorado (see story below)
Maybe it's mostly a problem with headline writers or editors who have to be at least as interested in getting clicks-n-eyeballs as they are in getting people well-informed.
And that may be because of the mandates coming down from the C-Suites of a near-totally corporatized media cartel.
And yes, I get it - you can't very well tell people what they need to know if you can't get their attention, and nothing works at all if you don't sell something to fund your endeavors. But c'mon, this thing that looks for all the world like sensationalist WWE-style manufactured-conflict. Is this shit really the best we can do?
Anyway, we've evolved a "system" where the Wacky Leftie Greenies are having to slug it out with the Wingnut Dirty Fuels Gang on the battlefield of public opinion instead of everybody acknowledging that the basic science is in, and the people who know about this stuff pretty much have their arms around the damned thing - so we need to be talking about what we have to be doing now, and not whether there's reason to be doing things.
Fake lord have mercy.
Scientists predict with high confidence that Colorado’s future spring runoff will come earlier; soil moisture will be lower; heat waves, droughts and wildfires will be more frequent and intense; and a thirstier atmosphere will continue to rob rivers of their flows — changes that are all driven by higher temperatures caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
These findings are according to the third Climate Change in Colorado Assessment report, produced by scientists at the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University and released Monday. Commissioned by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the report’s findings have implications for the state’s water managers. Borrowing a phrase from climate scientist Brad Udall, climate change is water change — which has become a common maxim for those water managers.
The report focuses on 2050 as a planning horizon and projects what conditions will be like at that time. According to the report, by 2050, the statewide annual temperatures are projected to warm by 2.5 to 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit compared with a late-20th-century baseline and 1 to 4 degrees compared with today. Colorado temperatures have already risen by 2.3 degrees since 1980. By 2050, the average year is likely to be as warm as the hottest years on record through 2022.
This warming, which scientists are very confident will come to pass, will drive the other water system changes that Colorado can expect to see. As temperatures rise and streamflows decline, water supply will decrease.
According to the report, by 2050 there will be an annual reduction of 5-30% in streamflow volume; a 5-30% reduction of April 1 snow-water equivalent (a measure of how much water is in the snowpack) and an 8-17% increase in evaporative demand (a measure of how “thirsty” the atmosphere is). A hotter, drier atmosphere can fuel dry soils and wildfire risk. Peak snowpack, which usually occurs in April, is also predicted to shift earlier by a few days to several weeks.
“Streamflows are primarily driven by snowpack that melts in the spring,” said Becky Bolinger, CSU research scientist, assistant state climatologist and lead author of the report. “When you are warming your temperatures, you are first changing the timing of when that snowpack will melt. And because we’re losing more to the atmosphere, that means we have less to run off in our rivers and be available for us later.”
Scientists are less certain about whether precipitation will increase or decrease in the future. Dry conditions have persisted across the state over the past two decades, with four of the five driest years occurring since 2000. Most climate models project an increase in winter precipitation, but they suggest the potential for large decreases in summer precipitation. But even if precipitation stays the same, streamflows will dwindle because of increased temperatures.
Planning for less water
CWCB officials hope water managers across the state will use the report to help plan for a future with less water. Many entities have already shifted to developing programs that support climate adaptation and resilience.
“I think we can say with confidence that it is more likely that we will have water shortages in the future,” said Emily Adid, CWCB senior climate adaptation specialist. “I think this report is evidence of that and can help local planners and people on the ground plan for those reductions in streamflow.”
Denver Water is one of those water providers that will use the report’s findings in its planning. The utility, which is the oldest and largest in the state, provides water to 1.5 million people and helped to fund the report. Denver Water has been preparing for a future with a less-reliable water supply through conservation and efficiency measures, reservoir expansion projects and wildfire mitigation.
“Projected future streamflows is a huge challenge for the water resources industry,” said Taylor Winchell, Denver Water’s senior planner and climate adaptation specialist. “The same amount of precipitation in the future means less steamflow because temperatures will continue to warm. … All this leads to this concept of uncertainty. We really need to plan for a variety of ways the future can happen essentially.”
Another finding of the report is that temperatures have warmed more in the fall than other seasons, with a 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit increase statewide since 1980, a trend that is expected to continue. Although it’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause of fall warming, Bolinger said it may have to do with the summer monsoons pattern, which can bring moisture with near-daily thunderstorms, but which have been weaker in recent years. That precipitation is critical, she said.
“First, you’re keeping the temperatures from getting too hot because you’re clouding over and getting storms,” Bolinger said. “And generally, with higher humidity, you’re going to have less evaporative loss from the soil. What we’ve been seeing in recent years is that we’re not getting that moisture in the late summer and into the fall.”
Less moisture and higher temperatures in the fall also leads to lower soil moisture and kicks off a vicious cycle of decreased water supplies. The dry soil gets locked in under the winter’s snowpack, and when spring melting begins, the water must first replenish the soils before feeding rivers and streams. This is what occurred in the upper Colorado River basin in 2021 when a near-normal snowpack translated to just 31% of normal runoff and the second-worst inflow ever into Lake Powell.
Some water-use sectors already experience shortages, especially those with junior water rights. Initiatives set up to support the environment and recreation are also at risk with shortages. And those shortages are likely to get worse in the future. In addition to grant programs, one of the ways CWCB aims to help these water users adapt is with a future avoided cost explorer (FACE) tool, which is outlined in the 2023 Water Plan. This modeling tool can help water managers figure out the costs of addressing — or failing to address — hazards such as wildfires, droughts and floods.
According to the report, extreme climate-driven events such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires are expected to be more frequent and intense.
“That gives you a little bit of perspective to say, ‘Well, what if I invest to mitigate this now, how can I lessen the potential impact in the future?,’” said Russ Sands, chief of CWCB’s water supply planning section. “I’m not trying to scare people; what we’re trying to do is motivate change and help them invest early.”
Despite the near-certainty of continued warming and resulting changes to the water system, Bolinger said there is a bright spot. Since the last time that a Climate Change in Colorado report was issued, in 2014, the world has begun to take action on reducing fossil fuel use and has shifted away from the worst-case scenario. Earlier projections were based on a “business as usual” assumption, with no climate mitigation.
“We do have things that have been put into place internationally like the Paris Accord,” Bolinger said. “We are more along the lines of a middle-case scenario. As long as we continue to take the actions that have been planned out, we are going to follow that middle scenario, which does show warming, but it’s not as bad.”
Mar 25, 2023
Seemingly Simple
Meltdown In Dixie - Trailer
P is for public, but apparently, an awful lot of the content on our "public" broadcast system is buried so deeply behind pay walls, that it's practically impossible to find a link to the shit that airs on "my publicly-funded local PBS station".
You're on your own. Good luck.
Free, my dyin' ass.
Feb 28, 2023
Today's Brian
Brian Tyler Cohen
Here's the Jonathan Weisman piece:
The train derailment in Eastern Ohio has spawned conspiracy theories and contradictory narratives, with politicians from both parties parading through town to further their agendas.
To Democrats, the train derailment and chemical leak in the hamlet of East Palestine, Ohio, is a story of logic, action and consequences: Rail safety regulations put in place by the Obama administration were intended to prevent just such accidents. The Trump administration gutted them.
All of which is actually true, but notice how the phrasing invites the inference that it's really just a political opinion on the part of the Dems.
And that's an important preface, cuz here comes the Both-Sides Razor-Blade-In-The-Apple:
To Republicans, East Palestine is a symbol of something far larger and more emotional: a forgotten town in a conservative state, like so many others in Middle America, struggling for survival against an uncaring mega-corporation and an unseeing government whose concerns have never included the likes of a town of 4,718 souls.
Carrying those irreconcilable narratives, politicians have begun parading through East Palestine with their own agendas to pursue. On Wednesday, it was the former president and current presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, handing out branded water and campaign hats, while assuring the supportive crowd, “You are not forgotten.”
On Thursday, three weeks after 38 Norfolk Southern rail cars carrying toxic chemicals skipped the tracks in East Palestine and, days later, a plume of vinyl chloride was intentionally released over the town, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg arrived, having spent days jousting with Republicans over safety regulations.
“What I’m really proud of is the community that I saw here,” he told a retinue of right-wing reporters shouting questions at him. “You’ve got federal agencies, you’ve got local first responders, you’ve got states, but most of all you’ve got a community that’s been through a lot, that I think is pretty frustrated with people trying to take political advantage of this situation.”
In some sense, both sides are right, both sides are wrong and, in the bifurcated politics of this American moment, none of the arguments much matter.
In 2015, after the deadly derailment of an Amtrak train traveling too fast outside Philadelphia, President Barack Obama moved to mandate the installation of lifesaving automatic braking technology by 2023 over the protests of the largest rail companies. In 2018, as part of a broad regulatory rollback, Mr. Trump repealed the rule.
But, according to the website PolitiFact, the rule would have had no impact on the East Palestine derailment. The Norfolk Southern train would not have been covered because it would not have been categorized as a high-hazard cargo train. Besides, the National Transportation Safety Board initially pointed to the failure of a wheel bearing, not the train’s speed, as the cause of the derailment.
Such details did not stop the White House from issuing a formal statement on Wednesday with the headline, “Republicans, stop dismantling rail safety and selling out communities like East Palestine to the rail lobby.” Nor did it dissuade the anti-Trump Lincoln Project from releasing a video on Wednesday squarely blaming the former president.
Still, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, called the accident “100 percent preventable” at a news conference on Thursday in Washington.
“I don’t understand why this has gotten so political — this is a community that is suffering,” she added.
Republicans have simply ignored that debate, instead pressing the seemingly contradictory cases that the Biden administration cares more about Ukraine than East Palestine and that the White House concocted the downing of three unidentified flying objects to distract attention from the derailment — which would imply that, in fact, officials care a lot.
The derailment’s aftermath coincided with Mr. Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine — by rail — and his speech in Poland, in which he pledged billions of dollars more in military support for Ukraine. That fed the Republican narrative that, for all his talk of caring for blue-collar workers, the president would rather deal with geopolitics than a domestic problem.
Neglect and the late arrival of assistance became the dominant talking points about Eastern Ohio on Fox News and in an array of other conservative news outlets, even as the Biden administration said repeatedly that federal officials had arrived on the scene of the accident within hours.
And in Columbiana County, where East Palestine sits, Republicans have been playing on their home field. Mr. Trump won the county with 72 percent of the vote in 2020, against Mr. Biden’s 27 percent.
“On Presidents’ Day in our country, he is over in Ukraine,” Mayor Trent Conaway of East Palestine fumed this week. “That tells you what kind of guy he is.”
Conspiracy theories have only deepened the trauma, bouncing around far-right podcasts and conservative celebrities’ social media accounts before reaching Congress via Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the once-fringe Republican from Georgia whose alliance with Speaker Kevin McCarthy has brought her to the center of congressional power.
“East Palestine, Ohio, is undergoing an ecological disaster because authorities blew up the train derailment cars carrying hazardous chemicals and press are being arrested for trying to tell the story,” she wrote on Twitter over dramatic footage of the fiery plume and its aftermath. “Oh but UFO’s!”
The Trump campaign on Thursday abetted the narrative with a day-by-day timeline of “Neglect and Betrayal,” including “Feb 5: Shoots the spy balloon down” and “Feb 13: Dodges questions about unidentified objects downed on Sunday,” followed by, “Feb 16: Delivered a response to unidentified objects in the sky and screened the movie ‘Till.’”
Batting down another conspiratorial rumor, the East Palestine fire chief, Keith Drabick, had to spend time this week assuring people that medical identification bracelets being passed out to residents in case they showed signs of debilitation were not tracking devices for the government.
The fever pitch of distrust was understandable for a community that saw what appeared to be an apocalyptic plume of chemicals rise from the wreckage on the rail line, then filmed dead fish and frogs in East Palestine’s streams and complained of headaches, sore throats, coughing and skin rashes — all as government officials assured them the air and water were safe.
But if East Palestine felt ignored in the immediate aftermath of the derailment, its travails are now playing out on a vast national tableau of partisan politics.
The environmental activist Erin Brockovich is planning a town hall event on Friday at the town high school. Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman-turned-conservative-gadfly, took a spin through the town earlier in the week, then rushed to the television cameras to describe it.
The Fox News anchor Bret Baier did concede that visits to train derailments by transportation secretaries, including Mr. Trump’s, Elaine Chao, were rare, especially when the accidents did not cause fatalities.
But more broadly, the derailment has been a chance for Republicans and their supporters in the conservative news media to showcase the white, working-class voters who flocked to Mr. Trump, and whom Mr. Biden has struggled to win back — and the power that Mr. Trump and other celebrities who remain in his orbit still hold in places like East Palestine.
After Mr. Trump on Wednesday praised John Rourke, the owner of the Florida-based company Blue Line Moving, for his relief efforts in Ohio, Tucker Carlson invited Mr. Rourke onto his top-rated cable news show to let him rip into the current president.
“The fact that President Biden has refused to come to this small town when he’s supposed to be Scranton Joe, a small-town hero of the working man, and he can’t even show his face in a town of American citizens that need his leadership, that need the government’s help terribly, he proved what everybody, I think, already knew in this country, is that he’s not the leader for this country,” Mr. Rourke said Wednesday night. “Donald J. Trump is the leader that we all know he is, and he is the leader of this country.”
On Thursday, Mr. Buttigieg showed up after weeks of Republican taunts demanding to know why he had not bothered. But it was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump confidant, who garnered much of the attention from residents and local politicians as he toured the accident site and signed memorabilia.
“Politicians come in and they make a big show and then they don’t come back,” he said, promising, “This is a come-back situation.”
Jan 4, 2023
No Dummy - It's Called Lying
The Press Poodles are not being helpful when they can't figure out that their reporting is actually carrying water for somebody who's straight-up lying about stuff.
Charlie Kirk isn't 'misinforming' people - he's lying to them.
Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't being her usual demagogue-y self - she's lying.
And I don't even know what RFK Jr is doing. But it walks like a lying duck, and it quacks like a lying duck, so it's not unreasonable to conclude it's a lying fucking duck.
Some of the tweets racked up millions of views, after the Elon Musk-owned company rolled back its covid misinformation policies.
The baseless tweets began to circulate within minutes of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s stunning collapse on the field during “Monday Night Football.”
Anti-vaxxers and right-wing provocateurs sought to link the injury that left Hamlin in critical condition and the coronavirus vaccine, without any evidence. Their claims built on years of coronavirus vaccine misinformation that has been seeded across social media.
“This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly,” tweeted the pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk, who leads the youth group Turning Point USA. His tweet was viewed nearly 10 million times as of Tuesday.
“Everybody knows what happened to Damar Hamlin because it’s happened to too many athletes around the world since COVID vaccination was required in sports,” said former Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson, in a tweet that was viewed more than 2 million times and visible under the #DamarHamlin hashtag trending in the United States.
Yet as of Tuesday evening, little information was known about the cause of Hamlin’s collapse. Nor was it known if Hamlin had been vaccinated against covid, though the NFL previously has said nearly 95 percent of players are vaccinated. The Bills announced Tuesday that Hamlin had suffered a cardiac arrest, and two cardiologists told The Washington Post that a blow to Hamlin’s chest may have thrown his heart out off rhythm, disrupting blood flow to the brain. The doctors said they could only speculate after watching video footage of the play.
The tweets’ broad and rapid reach, however, underscores how baseless claims related to the coronavirus can ricochet across Twitter with little friction since new owner Elon Musk rolled back the company’s policy against covid misinformation in November. The company has also restored the accounts of many previously suspended individuals, including multiple high-profile anti-vaxxers. The moves are indicative of Musk’s broader efforts to undo years of work to prevent the spread of falsehoods on Twitter in favor of a “free speech” agenda.
Public health experts and social media researchers warned that the tweets risk creating more fears about coronavirus vaccinations at a time when cases continue to spread in the United States, nearly three years after the pandemic began.
Naomi Smith, a sociologist at Federation University Australia who has researched covid misinformation, said such tweets risk planting “seeds of doubt” at a time when medical professionals are urging the public to obtain booster shots.
Covid misinformation “does actually kill people who take it seriously,” she said in an interview. “It is a problem that has a ripple effect in society.”
The viral tweets were sent as millions of Americans were looking for answers about Hamlin’s condition with news broadcasters and sports commentators having little immediate information about the player’s condition. The information vacuum created a perfect storm for anti-vaxxers, who had already been priming people to believe sudden deaths or sudden collapses could be linked to vaccinations, social media experts say.
Just before Twitter rolled back its covid misinformation policy in November, a more than hour-long video was released on the video service Rumble that promotes a debunked claim that the coronavirus vaccine is causing people to die. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense promoted the film this winter, but its creators generated newfound attention by seizing on the viral footage of Hamlin collapsing.
“It just really fits in with the narrative that was already circulating that any collapse of a person may be vaccine related, no matter lack of evidence,” said John Gregory, health editor of NewsGuard, a company that analyzes misinformation.
The film’s Twitter account quickly tweeted to its more than 200,000 followers, linking Hamlin’s collapse to the vaccine.
“Prior to 2021, Athletes collapsing on the field was NOT a normal event,” the film’s account tweeted, along with footage of Hamlin hitting the field. “This is becoming an undeniable (and an extremely concerning) pattern.” The tweet also included a series of syringe emoji.
Brian Castrucci, head of the de Beaumont Foundation, which advocates for public health, said he watched in horror at the speed at which Hamlin’s devastating injury was weaponized by that account and other anti-vaccine hashtags.
“This is the modern day equivalent of a snake oil salesman,” Castrucci said of the film’s promoters and others. “The problem is the snake oil salesman had to go town to town. They couldn’t reach millions of people with one tweet.”
Under Twitter’s previous leadership, the tweet with the syringes likely would have been labeled with additional context, said a former company employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss content moderation at the company. But on Tuesday, the tweet appeared unlabeled and garnered more than a million views.
Twitter’s enforcement of its covid misinformation policies was imperfect and widely criticized, both by Democrats, who said the company hadn’t done enough to rein in falsehoods, and conservatives, who warned the company had gone too far. The former Twitter employee said speculative tweets would have been “tricky” for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team to handle because they’re often vague and not making claims that definitively could be said to be false.
But researchers say under Musk, it’s now much easier to find covid misinformation than it was before, and there are fewer barriers to its spread.
“It’s right at the top of the pile,” said Smith, the sociologist, referring to people’s timelines. “Previously, before Musk rolled back misinformation policies, these things would have been algorithmically deplatformed or made harder to find.”
Twitter’s decision to roll back its policies could have implications for other social networks as well. Smith warned that the false tweets would likely not remain confined to Twitter, as people would likely screenshot and then share them in more private channels — including messages and Facebook groups.
“It becomes invisible to you,” she said. “These things have a life beyond their platform.”
Just before Twitter rolled back its covid misinformation policy in November, a more than hour-long video was released on the video service Rumble that promotes a debunked claim that the coronavirus vaccine is causing people to die. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense promoted the film this winter, but its creators generated newfound attention by seizing on the viral footage of Hamlin collapsing.
“It just really fits in with the narrative that was already circulating that any collapse of a person may be vaccine related, no matter lack of evidence,” said John Gregory, health editor of NewsGuard, a company that analyzes misinformation.
The film’s Twitter account quickly tweeted to its more than 200,000 followers, linking Hamlin’s collapse to the vaccine.
“Prior to 2021, Athletes collapsing on the field was NOT a normal event,” the film’s account tweeted, along with footage of Hamlin hitting the field. “This is becoming an undeniable (and an extremely concerning) pattern.” The tweet also included a series of syringe emoji.
Brian Castrucci, head of the de Beaumont Foundation, which advocates for public health, said he watched in horror at the speed at which Hamlin’s devastating injury was weaponized by that account and other anti-vaccine hashtags.
“This is the modern day equivalent of a snake oil salesman,” Castrucci said of the film’s promoters and others. “The problem is the snake oil salesman had to go town to town. They couldn’t reach millions of people with one tweet.”
Under Twitter’s previous leadership, the tweet with the syringes likely would have been labeled with additional context, said a former company employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss content moderation at the company. But on Tuesday, the tweet appeared unlabeled and garnered more than a million views.
Twitter’s enforcement of its covid misinformation policies was imperfect and widely criticized, both by Democrats, who said the company hadn’t done enough to rein in falsehoods, and conservatives, who warned the company had gone too far. The former Twitter employee said speculative tweets would have been “tricky” for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team to handle because they’re often vague and not making claims that definitively could be said to be false.
But researchers say under Musk, it’s now much easier to find covid misinformation than it was before, and there are fewer barriers to its spread.
“It’s right at the top of the pile,” said Smith, the sociologist, referring to people’s timelines. “Previously, before Musk rolled back misinformation policies, these things would have been algorithmically deplatformed or made harder to find.”
Twitter’s decision to roll back its policies could have implications for other social networks as well. Smith warned that the false tweets would likely not remain confined to Twitter, as people would likely screenshot and then share them in more private channels — including messages and Facebook groups.
“It becomes invisible to you,” she said. “These things have a life beyond their platform.”
Apr 4, 2022
The Message
Let's make sure those leftie allies get a solid chance to fuck Biden (and themselves, and the rest of us) at every turn. It never fails.
Why Biden’s jobs boom isn’t translating
The U.S. unemployment rate hit 3.6 percent today, as 431,000 jobs were added during the month of March.
It’s the type of data point that should make a White House giddy. And yet, one can’t help but smell the whiff of frustration emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
There is a remarkable disconnect among the American public involving the reality of the jobs market and the perception of it. A little-noticed survey by Navigator Research last month showed that 37 percent of the public thought that more jobs had been lost (yes, lost) over the last year while just 28 percent thought that they had been gained. That was particularly pronounced among Republicans, 47 percent of whom believed jobs had been lost over the last 12 months.
Needless to say, that’s wildly inaccurate: The unemployment rate was 6.4 percent when JOE BIDEN took office.
That these basic facts aren’t translating to the public says a lot about how news is disseminated and consumed. It’s also an illustration about how difficult it’s been for the White House to communicate its successes in light of the setbacks that have come along too.
Inflation continues to blot out most everything else politically, even on solid jobs report days. While Friday’s survey showed strong wage gains of 5.6 percent over the past year, those numbers, as the Washington Post’s HEATHER LONG noted, are “still well below inflation,” which is at 7.9 percent. (That balance suggests we’re not yet in a full-blown upward spiral of wages and prices, but the risks are rising.)
This is not a U.S. phenomenon, as the administration frequently notes. It’s gripping Europe and others too. But political opponents don’t operate in the world of nuance and global context. And Republicans have been eager to lay it all at the feet of Biden, the major Covid relief bill he helped push early in his presidency, and the energy policies he’s pursued in office.
An official with the National Republican Congressional Committee told me this week that of the 30 unique digital ad campaigns that the group has run this cycle, “probably 28 of them” dealt with cost increases for goods and services; an astounding 93 percent.
“Nothing I've seen in my decade of working in politics has been as salient as the inflation message with voters,” said MICHAEL McADAMS, the NRCC’s communications director. “When Republicans are talking about people encountering rising prices every minute of every day versus Democrats talking about bridges that might be built in three years, it’s like an NFL team going against a peewee football team.”
Putting aside the quality of the football being played, what’s clear is that inflation, not jobs, has become more pronounced as a political issue in recent weeks and months.
An NBC News poll released last week grabbed headlines for putting Biden’s approval rating at 40 percent, his lowest yet in that poll. But what was equally illuminating were the numbers behind that topline. The cost of living was the most pressing issue for respondents, with 21 percent of them ranking it their top concern. Just a few months ago, that number had been 13 percent.
The White House obviously is aware of all this. Biden himself has sarcastically hailed how great an electoral gift rising inflation is for his party. As a policy matter, it’s taken incoming from fellow Democrats for its approach — chief among them LARRY SUMMERS, who has bemoaned that the administration won’t do more to lessen tariffs and strip away energy regulations.
The difficulties, however, have been on the messaging front too. The White House went from downplaying inflation concerns, to calling them transitory, to pinning it on corporate greed, to castigating VLADIMIR PUTIN and his invasion of Ukraine for contributing to the costs. In announcing that the U.S. was releasing 1 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves for the next six months in order to help with supply issues, Biden mentioned the Russian leader 14 times during his prepared remarks.
The war in Ukraine and the Biden administration’s subsequent decision to cut off Russian oil clearly has played a role in higher energy costs. But as far as narratives go, Democrats concede the one the White House has built around inflation has been … choppy.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” said one top Democratic operative when asked for his thoughts on how the White House was handling the topic. He paused for about five seconds to think about what to say: “I’m not gonna touch that one.”
As is always the case, somehow it's never the fault of the assholes doing the lying - or the rubes who gobble up every little piece of shit coming out of those assholes - it's always and only the fault of the Dems who are the targets of that shit.
Fuckin' Press Poodles.
Feb 24, 2022
Today's Press Poodle Award
For excellence in trying to manufacture something along the lines of unity as a potentially major blowup occurs in eastern Europe, and a murderous wannabe emperor invades his neighbor.
Biden, bipartisan U.S. lawmakers condemn Russia for escalation in Ukraine
Russia “alone is responsible for the death and destruction” its military action in Ukraine may bring, according to a statement President Biden released late Wednesday after Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced plans to launch a “special military operation” in the country.
“President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” Biden’s statement read. “ … The world will hold Russia accountable.”
Biden also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a phone call, during which the U.S. leader called Putin’s military activities “unprovoked and unjustified.” Responding to Zelensky’s request that the world’s leaders speak out against Russia’s “flagrant aggression,” Biden pledged that the United States and its allies will coordinate their responses in a “united and decisive” fashion.
Biden will meet with leaders from the Group of Seven nations on Thursday morning and address the American people on further sanctions to deter Russian aggression.
As news of Russia’s attack on Ukraine rippled across the Atlantic, officials in both U.S. political parties echoed Biden’s words, vowing to stand with Ukraine. Some offered their prayers, others urged greater action against Russia and still others interjected partisan politics.
“Putin’s decision to invade is an evil, panicked move of weakness and will be his defining mistake,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter. “The Ukrainian people will fight for as long as it takes to secure their nation from this foreign tyrant, and the United States will stand with them in this fight.”
Warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin had plans to use “this crisis to try to divide Americans from each other and to separate America from our allies,” Murphy urged both parties to come together against a common threat to democracy worldwide.
“This is not a moment for politics to trump security,” he wrote.
In an interview with Fox News, former president Donald Trump said Putin had undertaken the military maneuver “because of a rigged election” in the United States. In the days leading up to Russia’s attack — amid escalating tensions — Trump had praised Putin, saying it was a “smart move” by the Russian president to send “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the Ukraine border.
His comments — along with those made by a faction of conservative Republicans, Trump supporters and conservative media figures — caused a rift.
“Kyiv and Kharkiv are being bombed,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter. “The largest invasion on our planet since WW2. Republicans are rooting for the Russians. God be with Ukraine and democracy.”
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, calling Putin “a tyrant” in a statement, urged the United States and its allies to “answer the call to protect freedom” by excluding Russia from global institutions and expanding U.S. national defense.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) said Russia’s actions amounted to “an invasion of a sovereign nation” — one that “cannot go uncontested.”
“I hope you’ll join me tonight in praying for the people of Ukraine and for a unified allied response,” he tweeted.
Echoing some of his counterparts’ calls for a strong stance against Russia, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the assault on Ukraine had brought decades of general peace in Europe to an end.
“While there is still an opportunity for Russia to reverse course, we can no longer hold out hope that this standoff will be resolved peacefully,” Warner said in a statement. “Therefore, we must all, on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Atlantic, work together to demonstrate to Putin that this aggression will not be allowed to go unpunished.”
In an early-hours speech Thursday morning, Putin said his country strives to achieve the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine and end eight years of war in eastern Ukraine, where government forces have been fighting Russian-backed separatists.
Shortly afterward, explosions could be heard in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and Kharkiv, in the country’s northeast.
One Senator and one governor - that's what the Poodles want us to think of as "bipartisan".
WaPo:
Biden, bipartisan U.S. lawmakers condemn Russia for escalation in Ukraine
Russia “alone is responsible for the death and destruction” its military action in Ukraine may bring, according to a statement President Biden released late Wednesday after Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced plans to launch a “special military operation” in the country.
“President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” Biden’s statement read. “ … The world will hold Russia accountable.”
Biden also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a phone call, during which the U.S. leader called Putin’s military activities “unprovoked and unjustified.” Responding to Zelensky’s request that the world’s leaders speak out against Russia’s “flagrant aggression,” Biden pledged that the United States and its allies will coordinate their responses in a “united and decisive” fashion.
Biden will meet with leaders from the Group of Seven nations on Thursday morning and address the American people on further sanctions to deter Russian aggression.
As news of Russia’s attack on Ukraine rippled across the Atlantic, officials in both U.S. political parties echoed Biden’s words, vowing to stand with Ukraine. Some offered their prayers, others urged greater action against Russia and still others interjected partisan politics.
“Putin’s decision to invade is an evil, panicked move of weakness and will be his defining mistake,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter. “The Ukrainian people will fight for as long as it takes to secure their nation from this foreign tyrant, and the United States will stand with them in this fight.”
Warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin had plans to use “this crisis to try to divide Americans from each other and to separate America from our allies,” Murphy urged both parties to come together against a common threat to democracy worldwide.
“This is not a moment for politics to trump security,” he wrote.
What you need to know about the Russia-Ukraine crisis
In an interview with Fox News, former president Donald Trump said Putin had undertaken the military maneuver “because of a rigged election” in the United States. In the days leading up to Russia’s attack — amid escalating tensions — Trump had praised Putin, saying it was a “smart move” by the Russian president to send “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the Ukraine border.
His comments — along with those made by a faction of conservative Republicans, Trump supporters and conservative media figures — caused a rift.
“Kyiv and Kharkiv are being bombed,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter. “The largest invasion on our planet since WW2. Republicans are rooting for the Russians. God be with Ukraine and democracy.”
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, calling Putin “a tyrant” in a statement, urged the United States and its allies to “answer the call to protect freedom” by excluding Russia from global institutions and expanding U.S. national defense.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) said Russia’s actions amounted to “an invasion of a sovereign nation” — one that “cannot go uncontested.”
“I hope you’ll join me tonight in praying for the people of Ukraine and for a unified allied response,” he tweeted.
Echoing some of his counterparts’ calls for a strong stance against Russia, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the assault on Ukraine had brought decades of general peace in Europe to an end.
“While there is still an opportunity for Russia to reverse course, we can no longer hold out hope that this standoff will be resolved peacefully,” Warner said in a statement. “Therefore, we must all, on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Atlantic, work together to demonstrate to Putin that this aggression will not be allowed to go unpunished.”
In an early-hours speech Thursday morning, Putin said his country strives to achieve the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine and end eight years of war in eastern Ukraine, where government forces have been fighting Russian-backed separatists.
Shortly afterward, explosions could be heard in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and Kharkiv, in the country’s northeast.
Sep 3, 2021
On Facebook
When we get busy blaming "the media", let's be clear - and inclusive: Who all we talkin' 'bout here?
Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election, study says
Right-leaning pages also produce more misinformation, the forthcoming study found.
A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources.
The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources, such as CNN or the World Health Organization.
Ever since “fake news” on Facebook became a public concern following the 2016 presidential election, publishers who traffic in misinformation have been repeatedly shown to be able to gain major audiences on the platform. But the NYU study is one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure and isolate the misinformation effect across a wide group of publishers on Facebook, experts said, and its conclusions support the criticism that Facebook’s platform rewards publishers that put out misleading accounts.
The study “helps add to the growing body of evidence that, despite a variety of mitigation efforts, misinformation has found a comfortable home — and an engaged audience — on Facebook,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who reviewed the study’s findings.
In response, Facebook said that the report measured the number of people who engage with content, but that is not a measure of the number of people that actually view it (Facebook does not make the latter number, called impressions, publicly available to researchers).
“This report looks mostly at how people engage with content, which should not be confused with how many people actually see it on Facebook,” said Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne. "When you look at the content that gets the most reach across Facebook, it is not at all like what this study suggests.”
He added that the company has 80 fact checking partners covering over 60 languages that work to label and reduce the distribution of false information.
The study’s authors relied on categorizations from two nonprofit organizations that study misinformation, NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check. Both groups have categorized thousands of Facebook publishers by their political leanings, ranging from far left to far right, and by their propensity to share trustworthy or untrustworthy news. The team then took 2,551 of these pages and compared the interactions on posts on pages by publishers known for misinformation, such as the left-leaning Occupy Democrats and the right-leaning Dan Bongino and Breitbart, to interactions on posts from factual publishers.
The researchers also found that the statistically significant misinformation boost is politically neutral — misinformation-trafficking pages on both the far left and the far right generated much more engagement from Facebook users than factual pages of any political slant. But publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories, the study found. The latter finding echoes the conclusions of other researchers, as well as Facebook’s own internal findings ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, according to Washington Post reporting.
Occupy Democrats, Bongino and Breitbart did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Facebook’s critics have long charged that misleading, inflammatory content that often reinforces the viewpoints of its viewers generates significantly more attention and clicks than mainstream news.
That claim — which has been reiterated by members of Congress as well as by Silicon Valley engineers in films such as “The Social Dilemma” — had gained significant traction during the pandemic. Conspiracy theories about covid-19 and vaccines, along with misleading information about treatments and cures, have gone viral, and may have influenced the views of large numbers of Americans. A recent survey by the COVID States Project found that U.S. Facebook users were less likely to be vaccinated any other type of news consumer, even consumers of right-leaning Fox News.
President Biden upped the ante in July when he said covid-related misinformation on platforms such as Facebook was “killing people,” a comment he later walked back.
But there has been little hard data to back up the assertions about the harm caused by Facebook’s algorithms, in part because Facebook has limited the data that researchers can access, Tromble said.
In 2018, an MIT study of misleading stories on Twitter — a platform whose content, unlike Facebook’s, is largely public — found that they performed better among Twitter users than factual stories. Other studies have found that engagement with misinformation is not as widespread as people might think, and that the people who consume and spread misinformation tend to be small numbers of highly motivated partisans.
Facebook is also increasingly restricting access to outside groups that make attempts to mine the company’s data. In the past several months, the White House has repeatedly asked Facebook for information about the extent of covid misinformation on the platform, but the company did not provide it.
One of the researchers Facebook has clamped down on was the NYU researcher, Laura Edelson, who conducted the study. The company cut off Edelson and her colleagues’ accounts last month, arguing that her data collection — which relied on users voluntarily downloading a software widget that allows researchers to track the ads that they see — put Facebook potentially in violation of a 2019 U.S. Federal Trade Commission privacy settlement.
The commission, in a rare rebuttal, shot back that the settlement makes exceptions for researchers and that Facebook should not use it as an excuse to deny the public the ability to understand people’s behavior on social networks.
Edelson noted that because Facebook stopped her project, called the NYU Ad Observatory, last month, she would not be able to continue to study the reach and impact of misinformation on the platform.
In response to criticism that it is becoming less transparent, Facebook recently published a new transparency report that shows the most popular content on the platform every quarter. But the report is highly curated, and Facebook censored an earlier version of the report out of concerns that it would generate bad press, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. That led critics to argue that the company was not being transparent.
One of the reasons it is hard to tell how much exposure people have to misinformation on Facebook in particular is because so much content is shared in private groups, Tromble said.
To conduct the study, Edelson’s team used a Facebook-owned business analytics tool called CrowdTangle to conduct the analysis. The tool is often used by journalists and researchers to track the popularity of posts. But CrowdTangle has limitations as well: The tool shares how many likes and shares a particular post received, but does not disclose what are known as impressions, or how many people saw the post.
Edelson said the study showed that Facebook algorithms were not rewarding partisanship or bias, or favoring sites on one side of the political spectrum, as some critics have claimed. She said that Facebook amplifies misinformation because it does well with users, and the sites that happen to have more misinformation are on the right. Among publishers categorized as on the far right, those that share misinformation get a majority — or 68 percent — of all engagement from users.
My Facebook feed has changed dramatically just over the last year or so. That could be at least partly due to people dropping out of the thing because it's turned into such a fuckin' cess pit, but I think it has plenty to do with the massive increase in the volume of targeted advertising, and the even more annoying attempts to push me into adding friends - people I don't know from Adam's off ox.
Anyway, somebody threw a study into it, and gee, what a whole big buncha surprises they came up with.
WaPo: (pay wall)
Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election, study says
Right-leaning pages also produce more misinformation, the forthcoming study found.
A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources.
The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources, such as CNN or the World Health Organization.
Ever since “fake news” on Facebook became a public concern following the 2016 presidential election, publishers who traffic in misinformation have been repeatedly shown to be able to gain major audiences on the platform. But the NYU study is one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure and isolate the misinformation effect across a wide group of publishers on Facebook, experts said, and its conclusions support the criticism that Facebook’s platform rewards publishers that put out misleading accounts.
The study “helps add to the growing body of evidence that, despite a variety of mitigation efforts, misinformation has found a comfortable home — and an engaged audience — on Facebook,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who reviewed the study’s findings.
In response, Facebook said that the report measured the number of people who engage with content, but that is not a measure of the number of people that actually view it (Facebook does not make the latter number, called impressions, publicly available to researchers).
“This report looks mostly at how people engage with content, which should not be confused with how many people actually see it on Facebook,” said Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne. "When you look at the content that gets the most reach across Facebook, it is not at all like what this study suggests.”
He added that the company has 80 fact checking partners covering over 60 languages that work to label and reduce the distribution of false information.
The study’s authors relied on categorizations from two nonprofit organizations that study misinformation, NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check. Both groups have categorized thousands of Facebook publishers by their political leanings, ranging from far left to far right, and by their propensity to share trustworthy or untrustworthy news. The team then took 2,551 of these pages and compared the interactions on posts on pages by publishers known for misinformation, such as the left-leaning Occupy Democrats and the right-leaning Dan Bongino and Breitbart, to interactions on posts from factual publishers.
The researchers also found that the statistically significant misinformation boost is politically neutral — misinformation-trafficking pages on both the far left and the far right generated much more engagement from Facebook users than factual pages of any political slant. But publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories, the study found. The latter finding echoes the conclusions of other researchers, as well as Facebook’s own internal findings ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, according to Washington Post reporting.
Occupy Democrats, Bongino and Breitbart did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Facebook’s critics have long charged that misleading, inflammatory content that often reinforces the viewpoints of its viewers generates significantly more attention and clicks than mainstream news.
That claim — which has been reiterated by members of Congress as well as by Silicon Valley engineers in films such as “The Social Dilemma” — had gained significant traction during the pandemic. Conspiracy theories about covid-19 and vaccines, along with misleading information about treatments and cures, have gone viral, and may have influenced the views of large numbers of Americans. A recent survey by the COVID States Project found that U.S. Facebook users were less likely to be vaccinated any other type of news consumer, even consumers of right-leaning Fox News.
President Biden upped the ante in July when he said covid-related misinformation on platforms such as Facebook was “killing people,” a comment he later walked back.
But there has been little hard data to back up the assertions about the harm caused by Facebook’s algorithms, in part because Facebook has limited the data that researchers can access, Tromble said.
In 2018, an MIT study of misleading stories on Twitter — a platform whose content, unlike Facebook’s, is largely public — found that they performed better among Twitter users than factual stories. Other studies have found that engagement with misinformation is not as widespread as people might think, and that the people who consume and spread misinformation tend to be small numbers of highly motivated partisans.
Facebook is also increasingly restricting access to outside groups that make attempts to mine the company’s data. In the past several months, the White House has repeatedly asked Facebook for information about the extent of covid misinformation on the platform, but the company did not provide it.
One of the researchers Facebook has clamped down on was the NYU researcher, Laura Edelson, who conducted the study. The company cut off Edelson and her colleagues’ accounts last month, arguing that her data collection — which relied on users voluntarily downloading a software widget that allows researchers to track the ads that they see — put Facebook potentially in violation of a 2019 U.S. Federal Trade Commission privacy settlement.
The commission, in a rare rebuttal, shot back that the settlement makes exceptions for researchers and that Facebook should not use it as an excuse to deny the public the ability to understand people’s behavior on social networks.
Edelson noted that because Facebook stopped her project, called the NYU Ad Observatory, last month, she would not be able to continue to study the reach and impact of misinformation on the platform.
In response to criticism that it is becoming less transparent, Facebook recently published a new transparency report that shows the most popular content on the platform every quarter. But the report is highly curated, and Facebook censored an earlier version of the report out of concerns that it would generate bad press, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. That led critics to argue that the company was not being transparent.
One of the reasons it is hard to tell how much exposure people have to misinformation on Facebook in particular is because so much content is shared in private groups, Tromble said.
To conduct the study, Edelson’s team used a Facebook-owned business analytics tool called CrowdTangle to conduct the analysis. The tool is often used by journalists and researchers to track the popularity of posts. But CrowdTangle has limitations as well: The tool shares how many likes and shares a particular post received, but does not disclose what are known as impressions, or how many people saw the post.
Edelson said the study showed that Facebook algorithms were not rewarding partisanship or bias, or favoring sites on one side of the political spectrum, as some critics have claimed. She said that Facebook amplifies misinformation because it does well with users, and the sites that happen to have more misinformation are on the right. Among publishers categorized as on the far right, those that share misinformation get a majority — or 68 percent — of all engagement from users.
Apr 12, 2021
Today's Question
And again - why do we have to rely on a late-night comedy show for good journalism and media criticism?
Daily Show - Trevor Noah
May 26, 2020
Admitting The Obvious
It seems some of our Press Poodles really are starting to catch up with Driftglass.
Washington Monthly:
One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.
Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.
But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality, forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.
Media Bias Check:
Washington Monthly:
One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.
Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.
But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality, forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.
Media Bias Check:
Feb 28, 2019
Yay, Media
The Press Poodles get one right.
From Frances Langham, Crooks & Liars:
This moment on Wednesday's Meet the Press Daily should never be forgotten. Kasie Hunt asks Chuck Todd a bonafide introspective question. After noting that the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee focussed all of their attention on calling Cohen a liar, and that they couldn't defend Trump's actions because those actions are indefensible, Kasie said this:
From Frances Langham, Crooks & Liars:
This moment on Wednesday's Meet the Press Daily should never be forgotten. Kasie Hunt asks Chuck Todd a bonafide introspective question. After noting that the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee focussed all of their attention on calling Cohen a liar, and that they couldn't defend Trump's actions because those actions are indefensible, Kasie said this:
"The reality is the President of the United States was paying tens of thousands of dollars to someone covering up an alleged affair with a porn star in the run-up to an election. How did we lose sight of this? It's really unclear to me."
Chuck Todd replied, "It's not unclear. Stating that clearly, as you just said, is something that's useful and something that we need to keep doing."
And then it's on to the next press scrum!
Because it literally does not matter if Chuck Todd says "both sides" three hundred times in an hour or is too hyped up on whatever Donald Trump tweeted today to cover the demise of our democracy. The suits upstairs are in it to sell pharmaceutical advertising.
Dec 26, 2018
Score Card
It's good to know Shep Smith is trying to keep it 100, even though we can't really be sure this isn't just ass-covering.
But I think get it - DumFux News needs some kind of beard; they need plausible deniability; something that muddies up the water a little; something that lets them maintain the illusion that their "coverage" during the day is real news while their prime time programming is all about opinion and blah blah blah.
Anyway, Media Matters For America does some good work once in a while by making these mashups so we can keep track of some of the epic volume of bullshit that flies out of Cult45 at record speed.
But I think get it - DumFux News needs some kind of beard; they need plausible deniability; something that muddies up the water a little; something that lets them maintain the illusion that their "coverage" during the day is real news while their prime time programming is all about opinion and blah blah blah.
Anyway, Media Matters For America does some good work once in a while by making these mashups so we can keep track of some of the epic volume of bullshit that flies out of Cult45 at record speed.
Dec 3, 2018
It's A Wonderment
"I'm not a scientist but..."
That one needs to be added to the big shit can right along with
There's nothing that comes after that kind of opening that anybody should listen to for any reason other than some weird masochistic desire for a little aural pain.
Trevor Noah:
And I ask again: Why do we have to rely on late nite comedy shows for honest media criticism?
That one needs to be added to the big shit can right along with
- "I don't mean to be a jerk about it, but..."
- "I'm all about the women's rights thing, but..."
- "I'm not a racist, but..."
There's nothing that comes after that kind of opening that anybody should listen to for any reason other than some weird masochistic desire for a little aural pain.
Trevor Noah:
And I ask again: Why do we have to rely on late nite comedy shows for honest media criticism?
Nov 18, 2018
Today's Tweet
Well - prob'ly not weird at all.
Weird how more than a week after a Democratic wave electing tons of women and further diversifying our government, the mainstream media isn't giving us lavish profiles of Democratic voters who rejected the GOP and Trump.— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 17, 2018
Cable news needs the catfight. They don't get any nice spikes in the ad revenue chart by running segments on how the majority of voters are actually just normal folk who think normal thoughts.
Nov 2, 2018
Years Late
...but maybe not too late - he mused, wistfully.
Nicolle Wallace is among the pimpiest of the spin pimps in American politics. Her skills as a strategist and communications director have been in service to some pretty fucked up politics over the last 20 years or so.
Most notably, she was a key player in John McCain's campaign in 2008, and ended up refusing to cast a vote for POTUS because of her misgivings about the choice of Sarah Palin.
So anyway, there she is every weekday on my librul TV thingie, bashing away at Cult45 while painstakingly avoiding the reality of her own work making this shit not just possible or probable, but inevitable.
However, when they finally sit up and make the right kinda noise, I think Press Poodles should be acknowledged for trying to do what's right.
PoliticusUSA:
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace wouldn’t air Trump’s remarks on immigration from the White House until she preemptively fact-checked them.
Wallace explained on her show Deadline: White House, “Donald Trump is making remarks in the Roosevelt room this hour. Five days before the midterm elections and a day after admitting to ABC news that he tells the truth only when he can. Today’s remarks come after weeks of engaging in a deliberate strategy of stoking fear about the humanitarian crisis in Central America. A slow-moving caravan of asylum seekers and migrants. They also come after — come days after a war of words with house speaker Paul Ryan about birthright citizenship. Donald Trump’s divisive speech has been cited as contributing to the climate in which the synagogue shooter targeted Jewish Americans and the pipe bomber targeted trump’s critics. Because he’s used immigration in blatantly political ways and in an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to monitor those remarks, fact-check them against his rhetoric and record on immigration and bring you the important news from them.”
Put that together with what's been happening on All In with Chris Hayes, where in the last few days, he's taken to calling 45* out on his lies, using that word. L-I-E-S.
All of this seems like a very good sign. It makes me wonder if Phil Griffin knows he's doing something decent, or if it's just starting to show up in the analytics that people think he's behaved like an unprincipled hyper-capitalistic dickhead, contributing to the demise of our little experiment in self-government.
We'll see.
Nicolle Wallace is among the pimpiest of the spin pimps in American politics. Her skills as a strategist and communications director have been in service to some pretty fucked up politics over the last 20 years or so.
Most notably, she was a key player in John McCain's campaign in 2008, and ended up refusing to cast a vote for POTUS because of her misgivings about the choice of Sarah Palin.
So anyway, there she is every weekday on my librul TV thingie, bashing away at Cult45 while painstakingly avoiding the reality of her own work making this shit not just possible or probable, but inevitable.
However, when they finally sit up and make the right kinda noise, I think Press Poodles should be acknowledged for trying to do what's right.
PoliticusUSA:
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace wouldn’t air Trump’s remarks on immigration from the White House until she preemptively fact-checked them.
Wallace explained on her show Deadline: White House, “Donald Trump is making remarks in the Roosevelt room this hour. Five days before the midterm elections and a day after admitting to ABC news that he tells the truth only when he can. Today’s remarks come after weeks of engaging in a deliberate strategy of stoking fear about the humanitarian crisis in Central America. A slow-moving caravan of asylum seekers and migrants. They also come after — come days after a war of words with house speaker Paul Ryan about birthright citizenship. Donald Trump’s divisive speech has been cited as contributing to the climate in which the synagogue shooter targeted Jewish Americans and the pipe bomber targeted trump’s critics. Because he’s used immigration in blatantly political ways and in an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to monitor those remarks, fact-check them against his rhetoric and record on immigration and bring you the important news from them.”
It's kind of a bold move - calling his bluff.
45* has blustered about how "the press" can't survive without him. And he's been pushing hard, using a very old tried-n-true method that assholes like him have used forever - often with great success - to manipulate people. ie: exploit the self-doubt that often grows out of a dedication to being open-minded.
So, Nicolle Wallace announces a new policy of fact-checking his statements instead of just airing whatever he has to say.
(BTW - fact-checking is kinda what you were supposed to be doing in the first place, dummy)
Put that together with what's been happening on All In with Chris Hayes, where in the last few days, he's taken to calling 45* out on his lies, using that word. L-I-E-S.
All of this seems like a very good sign. It makes me wonder if Phil Griffin knows he's doing something decent, or if it's just starting to show up in the analytics that people think he's behaved like an unprincipled hyper-capitalistic dickhead, contributing to the demise of our little experiment in self-government.
We'll see.
Oct 31, 2018
Vox Finally Gets It
Tengrain over at Mock Paper Scissors said it: "Vox owes Driftglass a drink".
There's too much money in politics and too much CO2 in the air.
Concentrate on those two issues, and the world starts to get better.
One of the greatest achievements in political propaganda is illustrated by the willingness of Americans to shrug and say "Oh well - they're both fucked up - it's an evil duopoly - why bother..."
Concentrate on those two issues, and the world starts to get better.
Aug 13, 2018
Break It Down
In the wake of the far right’s flop and the left’s success, it’s worth looking at how both media and law enforcement have treated white nationalists and those protesting them. Police sheltered the Unite the Right attendees from when they arrived at Vienna Metro station in Virginia, through the rally where they were protected by multiple rows of fencing to after the rally when the attendees were loaded into vans and driven away. That law enforcement wanted to avoid violent clashes is understandable. But contrast this with how other protests are often handled both in the District and across the country. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, “In Ferguson, black protesters had police snipers trained on them. In DC, the Nazis get a police escort.” If Black Lives Matter is going to be treated as potential troublemakers, white supremacists should at least face the same suspicion.
Press Poodles just can't help themselves sometimes. "...the far right's flop and the left's success..." - no fellas, the fact that a gigundous majority of us aren't malignant bigots doesn't make anybody "the left".
Yeah, OK, it can be kinda hard to sort thru it, but your insistence on framing everything in binary terms is a big part of your problem - which you're making our problem.
And that's a fucking problem.
I think we're starting to push you to make some progress towards realizing that sometimes, there aren't two sides at all - that objective fact is a real thing.
2+2=4
Human activity is a big part of what's driving Climate Change
Vaccination works, and vaccines are not causing autismBut sometimes there are many many sides - or maybe we should drop the "sides" paradigm altogether and see if we can get a handle on the concept of 'aspects' or 'facets' or 'angles' - or whatever the fuck gets you out of the idiotic commitment that everything has to be perfectly equalized in order to thread the needle that the Marketing Dept says you have to thread in order to maximize ad revenues because "stoopid people buy boner pills and reverse mortgages too, y'know".
Stop it.
Just. Fucking. Stop it.
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