Jim Hoft: “We've Got” The Trump Administration’s “Word That The Gateway Pundit Is Going To Have A White House Correspondent.” During a January 19 event, Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft announced that the Trump administration promised that his site would have a White House correspondent and Hoft said Lucian Wintrich would fill the position

Fake News propagated by social networks) (interactive graphic, in-depth article.

arikan

The year 2016 marked the post-truth era, what now?

Tactical disinformation, while definitely not a new phenomenon, has never before been this calculated, algorithmic, or organized in the history of mass communication. Today’s media environment is severely impaired by the strategic dissemination of fake news, by trolls herding masses on social media platforms, and by filter bubbles reinforcing already present homogenous zones of consensus.

The liberal promise of the Internet as a distributed mass communication tool thinning the line between the producer and the audience has for once and for all turned out to be just so much hot air. After all, the Internet, especially in the last years, has rather been prone to the broadcast effect in an atmosphere where the line between fact and fiction has been critically blurred. The televisionization of the Internet as such laid the groundwork for the Putins, Erdogans, and Trumps of the world to effectively exhaust our attention spans. What’s more, with central powers having managed to decentralize their reach in the manufactured noise, we now live in an era of “post-truth,” in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than are appeals to emotion and personal belief.

This is because facts are continuously degraded by manufactured doubt through propaganda and misleading information. Who benefits from such doubt? asks Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Center for Civic Media:

"A small amount of “fake news” is better described as disinformatzya. Its goal is not to persuade readers of its truth so much as it attempts to raise doubt in the reader that anything is true. We’re not used to disinformatzya in the US, but it’s been quite common not only in Russia but in Turkey, where Erdogan has manufactured fake news designed to reduce Turkish trust in Twitter, trying to disable it as a vehicle for organized opposition to his leadership. The long-term effect of disinformatzya is reduced faith in institutions of all sorts: the press in particular, but government, banks, NGOs, etc. Who benefits from this doubt? People who already have power benefit from a population that’s disempowered, frustrated, confused. And highly charismatic leaders who promise guidance away from failed institutions benefit personally from this mistrust."

Disinformation provides things that are not necessarily fake, but contain biased or incomplete views of events in order to have a persuasive effect on the reader. When systematically produced, disinformation causes continuous doubt about facts, and over time, such feelings grow into mistrust of institutions. Zuckerman explains the larger effects of propaganda:

"The medium term effect of propaganda is polarization, as we stop seeing our political opponents as reasonable people we disagree with, but as people who are so wrong and misguided that we couldn’t possibly find common ground with them. In the long term, propaganda destroys democracy, because it silences dissent and calcifies the parties currently in power."

Fact checking as a countermeasure to disinformation is practiced by both mainstream and alternative media outlets. Hundreds of fact-checks were published during the Brexit referendum and in the US elections this year. However, none of those checks seemed to matter significantly. As discussed broadly, one reason might be that our polarized social networks increasingly constrain us to live in our own constructed realities, which are reinforced by recommender systems and news feeds curated by black-box algorithms. Filter bubbles on social media are more real than ever, as demonstrated by Gilad Lotan’s meticulous analysis of how bubbles are being developed on Twitter, and MIT Media Lab’s Lab for Social Machines’ mapping of how Trump and Clinton supporters live in their own Twitter worlds. Moreover, even if the facts are aroused enough to leave an echo chamber, moving from one isolated social cluster to another, they evaporate rapidly as a result of organized trolling.

Tim O'Reilly’s article “Media in the Age of Algorithms” clarifies the problems of curating in a world of infinite information and limited attention, arguing that the “truth signal” is in the metadata, not the data. It explains how Google filters disinformation not by looking at the content of the web pages, but by utilizing meta-data signals, which are harvested from links between pages (via PageRank) and behaviors of users, including the ones who are trying to game the system. Meanwhile, the algorithm Facebook uses to curate news feeds seems to prioritize engagement more than truth.The challenge, O’Reilly concludes, is how to build algorithms that take into account “truth” as well as popularity. Indeed, Facebook and increasingly Twitter prefer algorithmically curated feeds over timelines in order to filter the information out of noise. This allows them to save space in a user’s attention span, which makes room for new advertising real estate. And this is only half the problem. Social media platforms are public spaces as much as shopping malls are. Thus, there have been many cases reported of censoring unpleasant facts and shutting down accounts of activists and journalists, especially when the platform is in compliance with oppressive governments.

Reg Chua of Thomson Reuters reminds us of Google’s new feature to promote fact checking in search results by labeling fact-check articles. Google asks fact-checkers to use Schema.org’s “ClaimReview” markup in their article pages so that their sites can be reviewed and promoted accordingly. Asking publishers to use markup is a good direction to take, because it would allow other media platforms to also harvest such markup, getting fact checks in front of even more people.

However, Chua rightly argues that it would barely make a dent in the torrent of misleading or highly partisan news that isn’t susceptible to classic fact checking. Certainly, we have broader problems than just platform biases or fact checkability. How can self-censorship be detected by an algorithm or be treated by a platform policy? How does the curation algorithm judge an established news channel that acts as the voice of the state when the parent company has a large contract with the government? How does an algorithm curate facts that cannot even be published because the journalists are jailed, the media office shut down? These are extreme cases that we see today, for example, in Turkey and in other oppressive states of the world, to such a degree that the daily news agenda is forcefully monopolized by top-down disinformation. In fact, such extreme conditions are starting to emerge elsewhere; Jay Rosen of NYU just wrote winter is coming for journalism under Trump.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/most-students-cant-tell-fake-news-from-real-news-study-shows/

...

A Stanford study found that the majority of middle school students can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news. In fact, 82 percent couldn’t distinguish between a real news story on a website and a “sponsored content” post.

Of the 8,704 students studied (ranging in age from middle school to college level), four in ten high-school students believed that the region near Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was toxic after seeing an unsourced photo of deformed daisies coupled with a headline about the Japanese area. The photo, keep in mind, had no source or location attribution. Meanwhile, two out of every three middle-schoolers were fooled by an article on financial preparedness penned by a bank executive.

It seems that those surveyed in the study were judging validity of news on Twitter based on the amount of detail in the tweet and whether or not a large photo was attached, rather than focusing on the source of the tweet.

The WSJ, which first reported on the study, says that a big part of solving this problem among young people comes down to education, both at school and at home.

But with 62 percent of U.S. adults getting the majority of their news from social media, the responsibility for this issue also lies with the social media organizations themselves, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Both Google and Facebook have made steps toward thwarting the fake news onslaught, including banning fake news organizations from their ad network. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg also posted a number of responses to the issue on Facebook, and gave actual steps toward stopping the spread of fake news on the platform.

That said, the fallout from fake news is not as minor as Zuck originally stated in his first response on Facebook, where he mentioned that less than 1 percent of news on Facebook is fake.

Even in minuscule amounts, fake news has a much greater ability to spread quickly and be consumed by many given the nature of the salacious headlines themselves. Paired with the fact that most adults get their news from social media, and most young people can’t tell the difference, you can see just how problematic this issue is.

Hopefully, steps toward stopping fake news come swiftly and effectively. But until then, it’s important for parents to be diligent in teaching their kids how to determine the difference between a sourced news report and a salacious headline with no evidence behind it.

https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article125143304.html

Albright came to Elon in 2012 to help launch its media analytics major, an unusual focus that allows students to focus on audience analysis, measuring the impact of media messages and using that data to tell stories about how media works.

He was on a research sabbatical this fall when he began the project that would propel him to the international spotlight.

Propaganda machine

As the phrase “fake news” worked its way into the public lexicon this fall, Albright was frustrated that the discussion seemed limited to a few inaccurate articles shared widely through social media.

It was widely believed that these articles, many of which included far-fetched accusations against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, had swayed the presidential election. But Albright wanted to know more.

So he scoured a list of acknowledged fake news websites to see how their articles spread through the web. The result, a map of what Albright calls the “fake news ecosystem,” was enlightening.

Starting with a list of about 300 fake news sites, he mapped which sites were linking to them. What emerged was a network of millions of sites that regularly linked to one another, sharing information at a rate that made them rise to the top of search engines and lists of trending topics on social media.

“It shows the information resources they’re using to promote a certain type of view,” he says. “It’s so large and complex, you can’t put it into a table or a list. Things started to fall into place when I looked at it as an ecosystem.”

His picture included large dots and blue or red, denoting whether they catered to Democratic or Republican audiences; the larger dots had the largest audiences. White dots denoted neutral sites, including many large media and government sources.

The red network was far stronger, and bled into the more neutral networks, he found, while the blue dots tended to be more isolated.

In addition, he found that some sites were tracking individuals, following their “likes” on Facebook and other cues and feeding them targeted content based on those preferences.

“This is a propaganda machine,” he says. “It’s targeting them individually to recruit them to an idea.”

While his research shows the system seemed to benefit conservative media groups during last year’s election, Albright says such methods will likely become more widespread.

He envisions several areas of future research, such as how automated social media accounts are amplifying certain voices and how search engines are distorted by automated promotion of fake news content.

He’s particularly interested in pinpointing instances where this kind of proliferation changes public sentiment. In some cases, he says, data on search preferences and popular topics is likely compromised by this kind of automated promotion.

“A lot of this data is distorted because there are millions of accounts that are like drones and republish information,” he says.

The lessons he draws from his research on fake news is not that there should be restrictions on what should be published where. He disagrees with suggestions that search engines and others should step in to limit the content that is available.

Instead, he says, consumers of information need to consider more carefully where each Facebook post, tweet or article originates – and how that’s affecting their views of the world.

“People should develop the skills they need to understand what’s real and fake,” he says. “They also need to consider looking at the other side or find sources of news that at least permit an alternative point of view. A lot of people are definitely getting a very specific or limited angle on news events.

...

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article125143304.html#storylink=cpy

Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era

Daniel J. Levitin

https://www.amazon.com/Weaponized-Lies-Think-Critically-Post-Truth/dp/1101983825

A field guide to lies : critical thinking in the information age

Levitin, Daniel J., author.

New York, New York : Dutton, [2016]

Location Call Number

McH Stacks BC177 .L486 2016

thehill

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/326467-live-coverage-senate-intel-committee-probes-russian-intelligence

hearing in its investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election. ... lawmakers that Russian Twitter bots tweet at President Trump when they know he ... refute fake news and conspiracy theories when they appear online. ... likely laid the groundwork for the influence campaign before 2016.

rawstory

no link img

Cybersecurity expert testified that Russian “bots” pushed their disinformation campaigns during times when President Donald Trump was likely to be on social media — and he dutifully hyped those conspiracy theories.

Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and counterterrorism instructor at West Point, explained Thursday that Trump as a presidential candidate helped Russia take active measures to interfere with the election, whether he realized it or not.

“Part of the reason active measures have worked in this election is because the commander-in-chief has used active measures at times against his opponents,” Watts testified.

Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and George Washington University, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Trump and his campaign’s use of Russian active measures happened in plain sight — even if most Americans were unaware at the time.

He testified that Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, promoted a bogus story Aug. 14 about a terrorist attack on a NATO base in Turkey, which originated on the Russian propaganda websites RT and Sputnik.

Trump then cited a Sputnik article Oct. 11 about Benghazi that later disappeared from the internet, and Watts pointed out that the president denies the conclusions of U.S. intelligence about Russian election interference.

Watts also testified that Trump claimed repeatedly that the election could be rigged, which he said was the No. 1 theme pushed by RT, Sputnik and other Russian propaganda outlets.

“He’s made claims of voter fraud, that President Obama’s not a citizen and, you know, Congressman (Ted) Cruz is not a citizen,” Watts said. “Part of the reason active measures works, and it does today in terms of Trump Tower being ‘wiretapped,’ is because they parrot the same lines.”

He told the senators that Putin was exploiting the inability of social media users to properly weigh evidence — and he said those efforts were specifically targeted to the most famous and powerful Twitter user in the world.

“I can tell you right now, today, that gray outlets, that are Soviet-pushing accounts, tweet at President Trump during high volumes when they know he’s online, and they push conspiracy theories,” Watts testified.

He explained that Russia planned the operation more than a year in advance and targeted specific groups of voters — both likely Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders voters — in swing states with anti-Clinton propaganda.

“They play all sides, much like how in infantry school about how they use artillery,” Watts testified. “They fire artillery everywhere, and once they get a break in the wall, that’s where they swarm in and focus.”......

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-fake-news-find-your-social-media-feeds/

...

James Alefantis: It went from a few people buzzing about something online or inside of chat rooms that we never would have seen before, to suddenly being blasted to millions and millions of people.

The police say there is no sex-trafficking conspiracy. But millions read about it on dozens of websites including one called “Danger and Play,” which wrote, “Clinton’s inner circle includes child traffickers, pedophiles and now members of a sex cult.” “Danger and Play” is written by Michael Cernovich, a Southern California lawyer who describes himself as “right-of-center politically,” but who has become a magnet for readers with a taste for stories with no basis in fact....

Scott Pelley: Do you believe that, or do you say that because it’s important for marketing your website?

Michael Cernovich: Oh, I believe it. I don’t say anything that I don’t believe.

Scott Pelley: That doesn’t seem like a very high bar.

Michael Cernovich: It’s a high bar because I’m an attorney. I know how to weigh and measure evidence.

Michael Cernovich: Here’s the story of my life.

Cernovich streams commentary daily and publishes on social media. He reached Twitter users 83 million times last month.

Michael Cernovich: That was a slow month, too. We hit 150 million sometimes. What I’m doing is, it’s punchy, it’s fun, it’s counterintuitive, it’s counter-narrative, and it’s information that you’re not gonna see everywhere else.

In August, he published this headline.

Scott Pelley: “Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s Disease, physician confirms.” You don’t think that’s misleading?

Michael Cernovich: No.

Scott Pelley: You believe it’s true today?

Michael Cernovich: Oh, absolutely.

That story was sourced to an anesthesiologist who never met Clinton. It got so much traction it had to be denied by Clinton’s doctor and the National Parkinson Foundation.

Michael Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day.

Scott Pelley: Well, she had pneumonia. I mean--

Michael Cernovich: How do you know? Who told you that?

Scott Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.

Michael Cernovich: Why would you trust the campaign?

Scott Pelley: The point is you didn’t talk to anybody who’d ever examined Hillary Clinton.

Michael Cernovich: I don’t take anything Hillary Clinton is gonna say at all as true. I’m not gonna take her on her word. The media says we’re not gonna take Donald Trump on his word. And that’s why we are in these different universes.

...

Jim Vidmar: Now, it’s 4.4 thousand.

Jim Vidmar: Now real people start seeing it. They start retweeting it, and, you know, responding to it.

Scott Pelley: And it takes off.

Jim Vidmar: And it takes off.

That matters because Facebook and Twitter select articles to present prominently based mostly on how popular they are. They can be fooled by bots. Our imposters expanded the reach of our message 9,000 percent. But our tweet didn’t catch fire the way so much fake news does because our message was not salacious.

Jestin Coler: You need to talk in their language about very specific words that kind of get that emotional response. That’s really the key to it all. The key to all of the fake news.

Jestin Coler says a fake news headline has to make blood boil. He’s not afraid to admit that he made real money on fake news. He’s known for two fake news sites -- one called the “National Report,” the other -- “Denver Guardian” where he pushed people’s buttons on issues such as abortion and Obamacare.

Jestin Coler: We did a piece on RFID chips being mandated through the Obamacare exchange.

Scott Pelley: And what are those?

...

Jestin Coler: Essentially a tracking device. So as part of signing up for Obamacare you had to be implanted, essentially, with this tracking device.

“It’s kind of almost an addiction, right? You kinda see something really take off, and then as it’s coming down you’re kinda lookin’ for that next high, I guess.”

That story was read 1.6 million times. Coler wrote another fake story about an FBI agent investigating Clinton emails, who was killed in a murder-suicide. And then there was a fake army quarantine of a Texas town infected with Ebola got 8 million page views.

Jestin Coler: It’s kind of almost an addiction, right? You kinda see something really take off, and then as it’s coming down you’re kinda lookin’ for that next high, I guess.

His highs were profitable. With each click, he made money on ads—over $10,000 a month he told us, writing fiction posing as fact.

Jestin Coler: Facebook really was key to what we did.

Scott Pelley: How?

Jestin Coler: Well, we would basically join whatever group it is that you’re trying to target on Facebook and once they kind of took the bait so to speak they would spread this stuff around, they would be the ones that would essentially be our bots.

Scott Pelley: What did you discover about the audience?

Jestin Coler: You know, people in general are quick to believe anything that is-- not anything, but-- well, yeah, basically anything that’s put in front of ‘em in a format that is news-ish.

Scott Pelley: Did the environment in this world change during the presidential election?

Jestin Coler: It did. Sure. A lot more players joined the game

Fake news flooded social media during the presidential campaign. This story said “Donald Trump was caught snorting cocaine in a hotel.” Another said: “After colonoscopy reveals brain tumor, Donald Trump drops from race.”

Phil Howard: Part of political campaigning these days involves a very widespread strategy that involved manipulating public opinion over social media. Twitter and Facebook are part of the advertising strategy.

Phil Howard leads the Internet Institute at the University of Oxford which examines misinformation on social media. They’ve analyzed web traffic in the days before the election in the swing state of Michigan.

Scott Pelley: How much of this news on Twitter in Michigan was, as you call it, junk news and how much of it legitimate?

Phil Howard: Well, in the case of Michigan, we found that the proportions were about equal. The junk news with stories that had not been fact-checked and that came from organizations that were not professional journalism organizations, was about as much as the amount of content coming from the professional news organizations.

Scott Pelley: There was as much fake news as there was actual news?

Phil Howard: There was.

To get an idea of who reads fake news we turned to the Trade Desk. The Internet advertising firm that helps companies steer clear of fraudulent sites. Jeff Green is the CEO.

Jeff Green: So the first thing that we found out is that it is definitely a phenomenon that affects both sides.

Scott Pelley: Liberals and Conservatives.

Jeff Green: There is no question they’re both affected.

One fake story, Green examined claimed that the Congress was plotting to overthrow President Trump. He was surprised to learn that right-leaning fake news overwhelmingly attracted readers in their 40s and 50s. And he also found fake-news readers on the left were more likely to be affluent and college-educated.

Jeff Green: That shocked me.

Scott Pelley: Why?

Jeff Green: I think I thought the same way that many Americans perhaps think is that fake news was a phenomenon that only tricked the uneducated. Not true. Just not. The data shows it’s just not true.

Green’s analysis showed fake news consumers tend to stay in, what he calls, Internet echo chambers, reading similar articles rather than reaching for legitimate news.

Jeff Green: What is most concerning is the amount of influence that they seem to have because the people that spend time in those echo chambers are the ones that vote.

After the election, Facebook and Twitter recognized the threat to their credibility and changed their programs to make it harder for fakes to proliferate. Both companies declined to be interviewed.

Michael Cernovich: And we’re back.

Michael Cernovich, whose articles included the fake Hillary Clinton pedophile ring and her bogus diagnosis of Parkinson’s, is watching his audience grow.

Michael Cernovich: I’m a skeptical person. And I know that there’s a lotta people gunnin’ for me. So I’m not gonna be reckless.

Scott Pelley: Who’s gunning for you?

Michael Cernovich: You are! I’m on 60 Minutes! Right?

Scott Pelley: What do you mean we’re gunning for you?

Michael Cernovich: Do I really think that you guys are gonna tell the story that I would like to have told? No. Your story’s gonna be, “Here’s a guy, spreads fake news, uses social media and these social media people better,” I know the story you guys are doing before you do it.

Scott Pelley: What’s wrong with that story?

Michael Cernovich: Because it is an agenda. Another story is, “Here is a person who is able to bypass traditional media outlets, reach people directly, to tell a story. Maybe he’s a good guy, maybe he’s not. I’m not going to serve as a mouthpiece for anybody.”

Never in human history has more information been available to more people. But it’s also true that never in history has more badinformation been available to more people. And once it’s online, it is “news” forever.

fake website orphan?

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/alternative-history-dangerous-byproduct-fake-facts

Fake news has morphed into something far more egregious, fake history. Donald Trump routinely lies about himself, his accomplishments, his businesses and his opponents. This is how he wins the political upper hand and dominates the news cycle. The lying is no longer surprising.

It’s his willful ignorance of history, mirrored by members of his cabinet, that is astounding and, in some ways, even more demoralizing.

Lobbing a Saturday morning tweet at former President Obama to accuse him of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower was outrageous, given there is not a scintilla of evidence that this happened. Revealingly, it also showed that Donald Trump has no sense of the history of the office he holds or its traditions.

President Trump’s ignorance about the fundamentals of US history is compounded by the team surrounding him. In his maiden address to his employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson equated the experiences of slaves and immigrants.

After calling America “a land of dreams and opportunity”, here were the astonishing words that followed: “There were immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder, for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Outrage was immediate. The secretary, who has the most prestigious academic credentials of anyone in the Trump Cabinet, clung to this idiocy in subsequent interviews. On Twitter, he went even further out on a limb, insisting, “You can be an involuntary immigrant.” Later, as the limb was sawed off, Carson finally retreated, this time on Facebook.

“I’m proud of the courage and perseverance of black Americans and their incomprehensible struggle from slavery to freedom,” his post stated. “I’m proud that our ancestors overcame the evil and repression that we know as slavery. The slave narrative and immigrant narrative are entirely different experiences. Slaves were ripped from their families and their homes and forced against their will after being sold into slavery by slave traders.” Despite his prior reference to “involuntary immigrants”, he added, “the immigrants made the choice to come to America.”

The new education secretary, Betsy DeVos, barely eked out her confirmation vote after showing jaw-dropping ignorance of federal education policy. But she managed to top that performance in a display of total ignorance about the history of segregation in higher education.

First, President Trump invited the presidents of historically black colleges and universities to the White House for what they thought was a substantive talk. Instead, they were used for a brief photo op with the president. DeVos then hailed the historically black schools as “real pioneers” of school choice, the issue that is her sole passion. These schools were founded after the civil war because black Americans could not attend segregated schools. Choice had nothing to do with their beginnings.

When her absurd comments caused an uproar on social media akin to the storm that confronted Carson, DeVos, too retreated, releasing a statement saying that the history of black colleges and universities “was born, not out of mere choice, but out of necessity, in the face of racism, and in the aftermath of the Civil War”.

The reaction on the internet to these comments was immediate and intense, showing, thank goodness, that many Americans have absorbed the lessons of the country’s racial history.

Finally, in the biggest irony of the week, CNN broke a story that Trump Svengali Stephen Bannon had defended Senator Joseph McCarthy for crusading against communists. Andrew Kaczynski, a CNN reporter known for digging up previously undiscovered statements by political figures, found a 2013 speech in which Bannon hailed the discredited Wisconsin demagogue for rooting out the Reds in the US government.

“The place was infested with either traitors that were on the direct payroll of Soviet military intelligence or fellow-travelers who were kind of compliant in helping these guys get along,” Bannon said. “I mean, there’s absolutely no question of it.”...

icn

biggest climate invest org in US world/

fake news vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6wiZrjJocU&feature=youtu.be

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette/

lee f

EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election has been largely portrayed as a lucky break for Donald Trump.

By that reckoning, entrepreneurial Macedonian teenagers, opportunists in Tbilisi and California millennials have exploited social media algorithms in order to make money — only incidentally leading to the viral proliferation of mostly anti-Clinton and anti-Obama hoaxes and conspiracy theories that thrilled many Trump supporters. The Washington Post published a shoddy report on Thursday alleging that Russian state-sponsored propagandists were seeking to promote Trump through fabricated stories for their own reasons, independent of the candidate himself.

But a closer look reveals that some of the biggest fake news providers were run by experienced political operators well within the orbit of Donald Trump’s political advisers and consultants.

Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.

Another LifeZette }:video, picking up false claims from other sites, claimed that voting machines “might be compromised” because a voting machine company called Smartmatic, allegedly providing voting machines “in sixteen states,” was purchased by the liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros never purchased the company, and Smartmatic did not provide voting machines used in the general election.The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette’s verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views.

One LifeZette article misleadingly claimed that theUnited Nations backed a “secret” Obama administration takeover of local police departments. The article referenced Justice Department orders that a select few police departments address patterns of misconduct, a practice that, in reality, long predates the Obama presidency, is hardly secret, and had no relation to the United Nations.

Another LifeZette article, which went viral in the week prior to the election, falsely claimed that Wikileaks had revealed that a senior Hillary Clinton campaign official had engaged in occult rituals. Ingraham’s site regularly receives links from the Drudge Report and other powerful drivers of Internet traffic.

But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Brown gained notoriety nearly three decades ago for his role in helping to produce the “Willie Horton” campaign advertisement, a spot criticized for its use of racial messaging to derail Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid. Brown is also the political mentor of David Bossie, an operative who went to work for Trump’s presidential campaign this year after founding the Citizens United group. In an interview this year, Brown called Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a .”

Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he co-owns with his family called Liftable Media Inc.,which operates a number of high-impact, tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown’s sites, Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in the U.S. with 13 million monthly unique monthly visitors, according to rankings maintained by the site Alexa. Another, called Conservative Tribune, is the 50th largest site with over 19 million monthly unique visitors. Liftable Media is run on a day to day basis by Brown’s son, Patrick, who is the president of Liftable Media.

As the fact-checking website Snopes was quick to note, it was no signal of surrender and the bleached white version of the White House logo, complete with a white flag, was not even an Obama creation. The white logo dates back to as early as 2003, under the Bush administration, which used it for official documents.Brown’s sites churn out bombastic headlines with little regard to the truth. One viral piece shared by Brown’s news outlets claimed that President Obama had redesigned the White House logo to change the American flag to a white flag, “a common symbol for surrender, which has many people wondering if Obama was trying to secretly signal to America’s enemies that he was surrendering.” The Facebook post touted the article with the line, “We all know Obama hates the United States, but what he just did to the White House logo is beyond the pale.”

The Conservative Tribune and Western Journalism provide a steady stream of similarly deceptive, eye-catching headlines.

“BREAKING: Muslims Ordered to Vote Hillary,” is the headline for one election post that grossly mischaracterized a mundane article about a Pakistani American activist going to door to door to help Clinton’s campaign. “Obama Urges Illegal Immigrants to Vote Without Fear of Getting Caught,” blared Western Journalism, claiming that President Obama had suggested in an interview on issues facing Latino millennial voters that noncitizens could vote and “will never get caught if they do.” The article left out the part of the Obama interview in which he said noncitizens “can’t legally vote, but they’re counting on you to make sure that you have the courage to make your voice heard.”

The hits go on, with posts on a regular basis making claims ranging from the assertion that Clinton went on a “drug holiday” before the Las Vegas presidential debate to rumors that Obama’s birth certificate is under serious scrutiny.

Thanks to views sourced largely to referrals from Facebook, Brown’s websites now outrank web traffic going to news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and NPR, according to data compiled by Alexa. Both Western Journalism and Conservative Tribune are certified by Facebook as bonafide news providers.

Trump’s relationship with one particularly influential online news site with a history of fabricated stories couldn’t be much closer. Steve Bannon,the chairman of Breitbart News, took a leave of absence from the organization to become the chief executive officer of Trump’s presidential campaign and has been tapped to serve as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Trump himself regularly promoted Breitbart stories, including a tweet used to justify his campaign to prove Obama was not born in the U.S.

Breitbart News blends commentary and journalism with inflammatory headlines, in many cases producing fake stories sourced from online hoaxes. The site once attempted to pass off a picture of people in Cleveland celebrating the Cavaliers as a massive Trump rally. The site furiously defended Trump’s false claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the 9/11 attacks, a claim that multiple fact-checking organizations have thoroughly debunked.

Other conservative content farms, including WorldNetDaily, maintained ties to the Trump election effort. Campaign finance records show that Great America PAC, aTrump-backing Super PAC, paid WND, known as the largest purveyor of Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories, for “online voter contact.”

The surge of fake news has been much commented on in the mainstream media — and its effect on Trump’s election victory has been widely debated — with little mention of the purveyors close to the Trump campaign.

A Buzzfeed News article that came out shortly before the election famously traced more than100 pro-Trump websites to young entrepreneurs in a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, who discovered that the best way to generate clicks — at a fraction of a penny per click in ad revenue — is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook. After the election, New Yorker editor David Remnick described President Obama as “talking obsessively” about that article, and quoted him bemoaning its significance. “[T]he capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal, ” Obama said, “that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

The Washington Post interviewed Paul Horner, the “impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire,” who sounded somewhat aghast when he said, “I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything.”

Another Washington Post story described two Southern California slackers turning their website of made-up pro-Trump clickbait in a virtual goldmine. The New York Times profiled a fake news operation run by three brothers in Tbilisi, Georgia, who experimented with a variety of content, sometimes lifted from other sites, at other times made up from whole cloth, finding that pro-Trump material was the most popular, and therefore the most profitable.

Finally, a Washington Post story this week alleged a Russian government role in spreading fake news to help Trump. But its sources were not remotely credible. For instance, it cited a list that characterized as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” a number of well-established and well-respected websites including Truthdig, a site published by award-winning journalist and long-time Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, Naked Capitalism, and Truth Out.

The growth of fake news isn’t confined to Trump or to conservative sites. A number of left-wing political sites have trafficked in demonstrably false stories, including deceptive pieces stoking fear about vaccines. Earlier this year, when critics called for Clinton to release the transcripts of her three paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, as well as to other interest groups, Daily News Bin, a new liberal website specializing in viral hits, published a piece titled, “Video surfaces of Hillary Clinton’s paid speech to Goldman Sachs, and it’s completely harmless.” The video embedded in the piece, however, was not one of Clinton’s paid speeches; it was a public event sponsored by Goldman Sachs. The article was shared over 120,000 times.

“We live in a time when people don’t care about facts,” said Judy Muller, professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.

During the last three months of the campaign, Buzzfeed News found that the top 20 best-performing hoax stories related to the election had more Facebook engagement than the 20 best-performing stories from major news outlets.

Facebook has responded to the recent outcry over fake news websites with promises to crack down on obvious phony sites. Many critics are still worried that Facebook is not doing enough to counter outright lies promoted by the platform; meanwhile, others are concerned that such efforts risk suppressing critical information.

Muller said that if Ingraham is nominated by Trump to be his spokesperson to the press, she will have to distance herself from her growing Facebook content empire.

But the demand for fake news is unlikely to subside.

A recent study by Stanford University researchers found that students have difficulty discerning between fake content, corporate sponsored advertorial content posing as journalism, and legitimate news.

“People only care about opinions that support their own biases,” said Muller. “So they’re not reading other people’s facts, they’re not checking the facts, and they don’t want to know — and that’s the scariest development to me.”

see carole c gurad uK: ref albright

https://medium.com/@d1gi/data-is-the-real-post-truth-so-heres-the-truth-about-post-election2016-propaganda

too little too late?

politificat:

Fake News

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention a bit about what has become a hot topic since the election, the prevalence of “fake news.” Here, we are not talking about distorted or misleading political rhetoric, but rather outright made-up news.

Fake news stories are nothing new; we have been dealing with viral claims in Ask FactCheck for nine years. But the growth of social media has made it possible to spread fake news farther and easier than ever before. In fact, an entire cottage industry of fake news has emerged, with purveyors in places as far flung as Macedonia making substantial advertising profit by getting readers to click on totally made-up stories.

Nearly a quarter of Americans fessed up to sharing a fake news story, though more than half said they didn’t know it was fake until after they shared it, according to a new Pew Research Center report. About two-thirds of those surveyed said fake news had caused “a great deal of confusion” about “basic facts of current events.”

We flagged a few such stories this year:

Did Obama’s mother-in-law get a $160,000 pension for babysitting her granddaughters during Obama’s time as president? No. Did the pope endorse Trump? He did not. Did President Obama sign an executive order banning the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools? Of course not. Did the Obamas buy a vacation home in Dubai? Negative.:{

All of these bogus stories came from fake or satirical news sites.

Another whopper: the fake medical records for Clinton, which circulated on social media and some conservative websites, purporting to show that she suffers from seizures and dementia. Clinton’s longtime physician — whose name appears atop the alleged “leaked” documents — released a statement to FactCheck.org calling the documents “false,” and reiterating her diagnosis that Clinton was “in excellent health and fit to serve as President of the United States.”

No ‘First Grandma’ Pension, Nov. 9

Did the Pope Endorse Trump? Oct. 24

Obama Did Not Ban the Pledge, Sept. 2

Debunking Obama’s Dubai Domicile, Feb. 10

Fake Clinton Medical Records, Aug. 16

Although Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, scoffed at the idea of fake news influencing the outcome of the presidential election, he acknowledges that fake news spread via Facebook is a growing problem. On Dec. 15, Facebook announced an experiment to try to stem the spread of fake news by, in part, enlisting the help of independent fact-checkers — including us here at FactCheck.org — to flag fake news. Stay tuned.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/12/16/media-matters-kristian-ramos-describes-fake-news-food-chain-and-its-real-world-consequences/214845

KRISTIAN RAMOS: Fake news, I think, is the thing that people really need to start getting wise to, and I want to take you through the food chain of this because it is kind of unbelievable. But something goes up onReddit, something crazy like Hillary Clinton is running a sex ring at a Comet pizza. Then it makes its way on one of these fake news websites, which are populated by kids from other countries. And then it makes its way to Facebook and then Google advertisements. And then all of the sudden you have some guy walk into a pizzeria with a loaded gun and trying to investigate something that never actually happened. So there are real-world consequences for it. It is something that a lot of people need to sort of understand. And the other side of it that's sort of crazy is conservatives are now using the term "fake news" to describe The New York Times or CNN. So, like, the Russian hacking scandal. They're up there saying, "Well, this is fake news."

MICHELE JAWANDO: Wow, I haven’t even seen that connection yet.

RAMOS: And so it’s a problem, in that it’s out there. And then the other thing that I think people really need to wrap their heads around is Breitbart News is going to have an incredible influence on the White House because Steve Bannon --

MICHELE JAWANDO: That's right. And for our listeners who don't know what Breitbart is?

RAMOS: It's a very -- it used to be a very fringey, right-wing place that has a lot of nasty, horrible things on it. Anti-Semitic --

JAWANDO: White supremacist.

RAMOS: White supremacist.

TIFFANY CROSS: That word is back. We can just use it now freely.

JAWANDO: It never left, for some of us. Right?

MARSHALL: I know, I know.

RAMOS: Well, the guy who used to be the executive chairman of that is now the president's chief strategist.

Previously:

Understanding The Fake News Universe

Right-Wing Media Are Using The Term “Fake News” To Attack Credible News Sources

Google Officials Promised To Stop Making Fake News Profitable, But One Month Later, They've Failed

http://www.alternet.org/media/how-debunk-trump-hoax

https://boingboing.net/2016/11/26/trumps-presidential-hires-an.html

Floyd Brown invented the Reagan-era Willie Horton lie, helped create the Citizens United group, and now owns Liftable Media, including sites like Conservative Tribune (50th most-trafficked site in the USA) and Western Journalism (81st), whence came fake news stories like the lie that Obama had altered the White House logo to include a white flag of surrender (the logo change came from GWB's White House); the lie that Muslims had been "ordered" to vote for Hillary; the lie that Obama had encouraged millennial non-citizen Latin@s to vote without fear of reprisals; the lie that Clinton had a Vegas "drug holiday" before the debate; the lie that Obama's birth certificate was not accepted by experts as genuine -- Brown's sites are all included in Facebook's verified news sources.

Brown is a Trump advisor, also identified by Trump's spokesperson as "a close friend."

Laura Ingraham is another Trump ally who's been tapped to be his presidential secretary: she owns the Ingraham Media Group, including sites like Lifezette, which produced the hoax video "Clinton Body Count," which accused the Clintons of conspiring to crash John F Kennedy, Jr's airplane and of complicity with many other deaths, a video that was shared 14,000,000 times after its successful viral debut on Facebook.

Lifezette also produced a viral hoax video about George Soros buying a voting machine company whose products were widely used in counting US ballots (Soros didn't invest in the company, nor does that company supply US ballots). Other Lifezette hoaxes include a story asserting that a Wikileaks-published document linked Clinton to occult rituals.

Most significant of all, though, is Trump's presidential chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose Breitbart News is a font of hoaxes and slanders:

Breitbart News blends commentary and journalism with inflammatory headlines, in many cases producing fake stories sourced from online hoaxes. The site once attempted to pass off a picture of people in Cleveland celebrating the Cavaliers as a massive Trump rally. The site furiously defended Trump’s false claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the 9/11 attacks, a claim that multiple fact-checking organizations have thoroughly debunked.

Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies[Lee Fang/The Intercept]

THE EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election has been largely portrayed as a lucky break for Donald Trump.

But a closer look reveals that some of the biggest fake news providers were run by experienced political operators well within the orbit of Donald Trump’s political advisers and consultants.

Laura Ingraham,a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.

img

Another LifeZette video, picking up false claims from other sites, claimed that voting machines “might be compromised” because a voting machine company called Smartmatic, allegedly providing voting machines “in sixteen states,” was purchased by the liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros never purchased the company, and Smartmatic did not provide voting machines used in the general election.The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette’s verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views.

One LifeZette article misleadingly claimed that the United Nations backed a “secret” Obama administration takeover of local police departments. The article referenced Justice Department orders that a select few police departments address patterns of misconduct, a practice that, in reality, long predates the Obama presidency, is hardly secret, and had no relation to the United Nations.

But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Brown gained notoriety nearly three decades ago for his role in helping to produce the “Willie Horton” campaign advertisement, a spot criticized for its use of racial messaging to derail Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid. Brown is also the political mentor of David Bossie, an operative who went to work for Trump’s presidential campaign this year after founding the Citizens United group. In an interview this year,Brown called Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a .”

Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he owns called Liftable Media Inc., which operates a number of high-impact, tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown’s sites, Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in the U.S. with 13 million monthly unique page views, according to rankings maintained by the site Alexa. Another, called Conservative Tribune, is the 50th largest site with over 19 million monthly unique visitors.

The Conservative Tribune and Western Journalism provide a steady stream of similarly deceptive, eye-catching headlines.

Thanks to views sourced largely to referrals from Facebook, Brown’s websites now outrank web traffic going to news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and NPR, according to data compiled by Alexa.Both Western Journalism and Conservative Tribune are certified by Facebook as bonafide news providers.

Trump’s relationship with one particularly influential online news site with a history of fabricated stories couldn’t be much closer. Steve Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, took a leave of absence from the organization to become the chief executive officer of Trump’s presidential campaign and has been tapped to serve as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Trump himself regularly promoted Breitbart stories, including a tweet used to justify his campaign to prove Obama was not born in the U.S.

Other conservative content farms, including WorldNetDaily, maintained ties to the Trump election effort. Campaign finance records show that Great America PAC, a Trump-backing Super PAC, paid WND, known as the largest purveyor of Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories, for “online voter contact.”

A Buzzfeed News article that came out shortly before the election famously traced more than 100 pro-Trump websites to young entrepreneurs in a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, who discovered that the best way to generate clicks — at a fraction of a penny per click in ad revenue — is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook. After the election, New Yorker editor David Remnick described President Obama as “talking obsessively” about that article, and quoted him bemoaning its significance. “[T]he capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal, ” Obama said, “that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

The Washington Post interviewed Paul Horner, the “impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire,” who sounded somewhat aghast when he said, “I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything.”

“We live in a time when people don’t care about facts,” said Judy Muller, professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.

During the last three months of the campaign, Buzzfeed News found that the top 20 best-performing hoax stories related to the election had more Facebook engagement than the 20 best-performing stories from major news outlets.

Muller said that ifIngraham is nominated by Trump to be his spokesperson to the press, she will have to distance herself from her growing Facebook content empire.

But the demand for fake news is unlikely to subside.

http://www.alternet.org/media/how-misinformed-tweet-was-manufactured-major-right-wing-news

Buzzfeed News analysis found that the top 20 fake political news stories in circulation during the election got more clicks, views, shares and reactions on Facebook than the top 20 real news stories. The vast majority of those fake stories—all but three—were “overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton,” meaning they pinged around the conservative webosphere, where they were accepted without question by millions and then passed to the next gullible consumer.

Paul Horner, among the most prolific and successful fake news writers, recently told the Washington Post that Trump voters and other “right-wing Republicans” were almost single-handedly responsible for the $10,000 he pulls in every month, because they “post everything, believe anything,” and continue to share fake news even when they find out it isn't true. That might explain why so many fake news stories seem specially tailored for the conservative news reader.

One of Horner’s most popular stories was a fabricated interview with a made-up person who said he’d been paid to protest Trump ahead of the election. During the campaign, multiple members of Trump’s team retweeted the story, even though many sources pointed out it wasn't true. The ludicrous idea that anti-Trump demonstrators are each paid thousands of dollars by billionaire George Soros—who plays a starring role in pretty much every right-wing conspiracy—has now become conservative gospel.

Eric Tucker, a marketer in Austin, Texas, was probably very familiar with this rumor when he recently sent an erroneous tweet that launched a viral right-wing story. The New York Times decided to examine how Tucker's tweet became a major topic of conservative discussion, following its online travels step by step. On the evening of November 9, just as protests against President-elect Trump were erupting all over the country, Tucker tweeted the photo and message below to his tiny group of 40 followers. ...

kos

The original Baltimore Gazette existed for 10 years following the civil war, 1865-1875. Someone has exhumed the name and, no doubt banking on the legitimate sound of it, is using it to publish online not only just recycled articles, rewritten with a decidedly racist slant via not-so-subtly changing details, but also wholly invented rightwing bullshit.

The first article appears to have been published on September 20, 2016. Even though Snopes quickly got wind of it and debunked it and the phony news site, new articles are already being cited by rightwing blogs and publications, including the Tea Party Tribune and various Facebook sites. I was especially bemused by one FB poster who was sending the already debunked articles to Alex Jones.

Here’s the article they’re salivating over today:

Clinton Received Debate Questions Week Before Debate, According to Sources

Here’s the source where I first read about this phony news site. There’s good investigative reporting and details here:

Someone revived the Baltimore Gazette to spread fake bullshit

Here’s the Google search results for “Baltimore Gazette” that includes everything from the history of the real newspaper to Snopes debunking the phony site and its articles and even a Huffington Post article about it.

Google results for "Baltimore Gazette"

TEACHER WITH CONCEALED HANDGUN SAVES LIVES OF ELEMENTARY STUDENTS IN NE TEXAS (UPDATE)

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MALCOLM SCOTT

Photo by Lindsey Turner (CC BY 4.0)

Jefferson City, TX- A cautionary sign in front of the school warns, “ATTENTION: Please be aware that the staff at Jefferson City Elementary may be armed and will use whatever force is necessary to protect our students,” and that’s exactly what happened Tuesday afternoon.

According to police, a man walked into the principal’s office at Jefferson City Elementary School at approximately 1:45 pm looking for his daughter. When school faculty informed him she was absent from school that day, he demanded to be taken to her classroom anyway. The principal agreed and allowed him to check the second grade classroom for his daughter. When the man realized his daughter was in fact absent from class, he became agitated and pulled a gun from his waistband and threatened to shoot everyone in the classroom. That’s when an armed teacher at the school took action and shot the man. The suspect was taken to St Mary’s Hospital where he later died.

Investigators believe the incident may be the result of a custody battle with his ex-wife. Chief Fuller told reporters he credits the fast acting school teacher for saving the lives of students and school faculty. “When the public was notified of our school’s new policy allowing faculty members to carry a concealed weapon, there were a lot of mixed reactions,” Superintendent Christopher Lamont said. “The parents really seemed to agree with it for the most part, but other members of the community did not feel the same way. I think after today everyone can agree that it was the right thing to do.”

A police spokesperson said they agree with faculty members having the right to carry concealed, saying it’s practical. “In situations where someone with a gun goes somewhere and is intent on hurting people, seconds count. It doesn’t matter how quickly we can respond. By the time we get there, it may be too late.”

Chief Fuller would not comment further on the homicide being investigated on Butler Rd. The suspect’s name has yet to be released.

3:10 pm: Marion County deputies said a suspect was taken to a nearby medical facility and later died after a shooting at Jefferson City Elementary School Tuesday afternoon. Deputies said no one else was harmed. Another “possibly related” homicide is being investigated at a residence six miles from the school.

The SWAT team was mobilized and deemed the school safe as of 3 pm. Deputies believe the suspect, an adult male, acted alone. Jefferson City Police Chief Mark Fuller said deputies initially received reports of a possible shooting just before 2 pm. Fuller said parents could come to the First Baptist Church to pick up their children. Students are being transported by bus to that location.

The Marion County coroner said a death is also being investigated at an address on Butler Road. The coroner’s office said the death at the home and the shooting at the school “could be connected.”

A portion of Highway 49 was shut down near the school as emergency crews responded.

The Marion County Sheriff’s Department released the following statement:

“Deputies from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office responded to an active shooter situation that occurred at Jefferson City Elementary School Tuesday afternoon.

The Sheriff’s Office received word of an active shooter at the school around 1:45 pm and immediately dispatched deputies to the scene as well as all area schools to ensure the safety of our students. A request was made until more information became known for area schools to go into a code yellow, which means instructions inside the school continue as usual but no one is allowed into the building. School dismissal will take place on the normal schedule.

Since that time, the Sheriff’s Office has secured and cleared the school. The Sheriff’s Office SWAT unit and additional resources have been activated.”

Correction: This story originally listed the county as Mariel, not Marion.

oct 19 404

https://web.archive.org/web/20161016021711/http://baltimoregazette.com/category/news/

1st archive

CLINTON RECEIVED DEBATE QUESTIONS WEEK BEFORE DEBATE, ACCORDING TO SOURCES

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BG Staff BG STAFF

tdy_alexander_debate_160926-nbcnews-ux-1080-600

The first presidential debate was held and Hillary Clinton was proclaimed the winner by the media. Indeed Clinton was able to turn in a strong debate performance, but did she do so fairly? Multiple reports and leaked information from inside the Clinton camp claim that the Clinton campaign was given the entire set of debate questions an entire week before the actual debate.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161012200818/http://baltimoregazette.com/clinton-kerry-nominated-nobel-peace-prize-iran-deal/

BREAKING: DAYCARE BUS DRIVER CHARGED WITH RAPE; WAS IN U.S. ILLEGALLY

The nuclear deal clinched between Iran and six major world powers caps more than a decade of negotiations. The “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA), known commonly as the Iran Deal, aims to restrict uranium enrichment for 15 years, cut the stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, reduce the number of gas centrifuges by two-thirds over a 13 year period and opens all such facilities to monitors within the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In exchange, Iran received a large cash payment and will receive relief from the US, European Union, and United National Security Council sanctions.

Awarding the prestigious award to Kerry and Clinton fits a pattern of nuclear-themed peace prizes. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton made Iran a top priority talking at great lengths about the importance of pressuring Iran to discontinue nuclear activity, including tough sanctions and an arms embargo. During her time at the State Department she led diplomatic lobbying efforts to get other countries to join in the US plan to increase pressure getting both Russia and China on-board. Clinton then passed the torch to the current Secretary of State, John Kerry, who worked aggressively with all parties involved and was able to get the JCPOA agreed upon July 14th, 2015. At the time of its signing, President Barack Obama, who won the prize in 2009 for promoting nuclear non-proliferation, hailed the Iran deal as a step towards a “more hopeful world”.

The deal received a large amount of criticism from the Republican Party after details outlining a substantial cash payment to Iran appeared to have been a payment made in exchange for release of Iranian held hostages. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has evolved from a position of immediate repeal to a renegotiation of the deal if elected. Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani stated “Donald Trump will make sure that any agreement with Iran meets the original goals of the U.N. and our allies, and that is a non-nuclear Iran.”

The Nobel Peace Prize has been given out annually since December 1901 to those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction in standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”. This year saw 376 candidates for the price, out of which 228 are individuals and 148 organizations.

BREAKING: COLORADO POT SHOP REGISTERING VOTERS BY OFFERING FREE MARIJUANA

Earlier last week an NBC intern was seen hand delivering a package to Clinton’s campaign headquarters, according to sources. The package was not given to secretarial staff, as would normally happen, but the intern was instead ushered into the personal office of Clinton campaign manager Robert Mook. Members of the Clinton press corps from several media organizations were in attendance at the time, and a reporter from Fox News recognized the intern, but said he was initially confused because the NBC intern was dressed like a Fed Ex employee.

The reporter from Fox questioned campaign staff about the intern, but campaign staff at first claimed ignorance and then claimed that it was just a Fed Ex employee who had already left. No reporters present who had seen the intern dressed as a Fed Ex employee go into Mook’s office saw him leave by the same front entrance. The Fox reporter who recognized the intern also immediately looked outside of the campaign headquarters and noted that there were no Fed Ex vehicles parked outside.

Clinton seemed to have scripted responses ready for every question she was asked at the first debate. She had facts and numbers memorized for specific questions that it is very doubtful she would have had without being furnished the questions beforehand. The entire mainstream media has specifically been trying to portray Trump as a racist and a poor candidate. By furnishing Clinton with the debate questions NBC certainly hoped to make Clinton appear much more knowledgeable and competent than Trump. And though it is unlikely that anyone will be able to conclusively prove that Clinton was given the debate questions, it seems both logical and likely.

last archive

Big media news for Hillary Clinton Tuesday night as the Arizona Republic ― which had never in its history endorsed a Democrat for president ― has thrown its endorsement to the former secretary of state, citing her lifetime of never coming across like an impulsive man-baby: “The president commands our nuclear arsenal. Trump can’t command his own rhetoric.”

But not so fast! Donald Trump has a media coup of his own to brag about. Seems that some eagle-eyed investigative reporters at the Baltimore Gazette have brought home a dilly of a scoop: “Multiple reports and leaked information from inside the Clinton camp claim that the Clinton campaign was given the entire set of debate questions an entire week before the actual debate.”

Trumpet sting!

Earlier last week an NBC intern was seen hand delivering a package to Clinton’s campaign headquarters, according to sources. The package was not given to secretarial staff, as would normally happen, but the intern was instead ushered into the personal office of Clinton campaign manager Robert Mook. Members of the Clinton press corps from several media organizations were in attendance at the time, and a reporter from Fox News recognized the intern, but said he was initially confused because the NBC intern was dressed like a Fed Ex employee.

That’s some serious shoe-leather! Unfortunately there was un problema. As the Baltimore City Paper’s Brandon Weigel reported last week:

The Baltimore Gazette, a newspaper that existed very briefly just after the Civil War, has returned online as a site to spread fake news stories and other nonsense.

One article in particular, “ATLANTA OFFICER KILLS BLACK WOMAN, INJURES CHILD, FOLLOWING BREASTFEEDING ARGUMENT,” caught the attention of the online sleuths at Snopes.com after it apparently went viral. Search “Baltimore Gazette” on Facebook and you’ll find a number of people who have been deceived by the breastfeeding story or are trying to prevent others from doing the same.

Yes, turns out the Baltimore Gazette is just one more in an increasingly baffling array of “parody” news sites that swap the humor of The Onion with the crackpottery of your great-uncle’s emails, all while dressing up their wares with as close an approximation to real news as they can muster.(Weigel reports that the “Gazette” does salt its bogus offerings with occasional stories that are on the level ― and stolen from other sources.)

Nevertheless, a story about Clinton getting the debate questions ahead of time? Fake news site or no, you’d have to be a complete idiot to believe ―

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Conspiracy theory? Sure looked and sounded like she had the questions in advance to me: :{http://:(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:baltimoregazette.com/clinton-receiv:{ed-debate-questions-week-debate/ :(style="position:absolute !important;overflow:hidden !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important"):}:…

7:16 AM - 27 Sep 2016

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Imagine polls don't exist. Show me evidence Hillary is winning?

8:56 PM - 7 Aug 2016

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