Fake News

Fake News is a catchall for efforts to subvert good journalism

new tag 1219 cnspir

see FAKE NEWS 2

pete h reboot 3 26 iran war

see press suppression

alt fact post truth

see echo escalator

see social media

Chevron Corporation Takes on First Amendment Powers in Richmond, CA

Evan Aczon

January 2018

Earlier this year, a Move To Amend story about corporate abuse of power addressed the looming physical and financial presence of oil giant Chevron Corporation over the town of Richmond, California.¹(https://movetoamend.org/corporate-rule-examples-19#1) The refinery is the biggest employer in the city, providing work for roughly 1200 employees and taking up nearly 3000 acres, sprawling across the landscape as you look out from the Richmond Hills to the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge just beyond.

Yet there is a dark duality of the Chevron plant, where the daily output of smoke and exhaust is matched by the corporatism seeping into the very fabric of Richmond’s governance and its municipal and regional politics. Physical explosions and fires sent residents scrambling for shelter in 1989, 1999, 2012, and 2016, resulting in thousands of hospitalizations and millions of dollars in settlements. Unpaid taxes and lawsuits kept money out of the local coffers while taking huge tax cuts from the federal government.

The most toxic output from the Chevron refinery, however, may not be coming from the smokestacks, but from the printing presses. In a truly blatant exercise of illegitimate corporate power under the First Amendment (these rights belong to natural persons, not corporate entities), Chevron Corporation has bankrolled an entire public relations operation posing as a local news website,The Richmond Standard, which states the following:

This news website is brought to you by Chevron Richmond. We aim to provide Richmond residents with important information about what's going on in the community, and to provide a voice for Chevron Richmond on civic issues.

Whether or not that disclaimer is present is not what is at issue here. What matters is that Chevron is openly publishing its own opinions in the form of a community news website, posting updates on local events like marathons and holiday parades, while also sprinkling in subtly anti-activist, stories about climate change marchers and Chevron-supporting stories about its “community work.” ^2 3

As noted in a 2014 piece from the Los Angeles Times, the Chevron Corporation even stated that there would be nothing critical of the oil giant in The Richmond Standard,saying, “We came out in the beginning and said, if you're looking for a story that's critical of Chevron, you're not going to find it in The Richmond Standard."⁴(https://movetoamend.org/corporate-rule-examples-19#4)

The outlet has also become a primary outlet for Richmond Mayor Tom Butt, who frequently pens letters to the community through The Richmond Standard. Butt’s policies and positions also appear frequently and with marked support from Chevron.

The corporatization of a “news source” is something that should frighten all residents, especially when that outlet is being bankrolled by one of the biggest corporate welfare recipients in the country. In an age of “fake news” and growing media consolidation, the sourcing of journalism and the integrity of the content we’re reading online should always face strict scrutiny.

When corporations assume First Amendment press freedoms to enter the journalistic marketplace with their own biased coverage, endorsing candidates, ballot measures, and policies, they are implementing a right never intended for the corporate form in a democracy.

“Corporate news” can be unbridled pay-to-play, promotion of company positions at low cost and it should be sought out and stopped at the source. Most importantly, the right of corporations to constitutional First Amendment freedoms of the press must be withdrawn by the people and their legislative bodies.

Join Move to Amend and work to make it clear that corporations should not have constitutional rights and that money is not a form of protected speech! To join the movement, please visit: www.movetoamend.org/amendment.

Chevron Refinery Harms Local Communities in California |Move To Amend

170 activists, some from Richmond, rankle Amtrak passengers and conductors on cross country trip |Richmond Standard

Over 450 community members tour Chevron Richmond Refinery |Richmond Standard

A Chevron PR website pretends to be an objective news source |Michael Hiltzik

Origin

The phrase was attributed by journalist Ron Suskind to an unnamed official in the George W. Bush Administration who used it to denigrate a critic of the administration's policies as someone who based their judgements on facts.^[2] In a 2004 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine, Suskind wrote:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.^[3] [SOME ^ARE ^BUILDING ^MONUMENTS, ^SOME ^ARE ^JOTTING ^DOWN ^NOTES]

^Suskind, ^Ron ⁽¹⁷ ^October ^2004). ^"Faith, ^Certainty ^and ^the ^Presidency ^of ^George ^W. ^Bush". ^The ^New ^York ^Times ^Magazine. ^ISSN ^0028-7822.

The source of the quotation was later identified as Bush's senior advisor Karl Rove,^[4] although Rove has denied saying it.^[5]

Evaluation

Though some on the left side of the United States political spectrum considered it as a badge of honor,^[2][6] the term and the piece of writing where it was revealed to the public were not perceived as significant by conservatives.^[7][8] It was given a second life by growth of the so-called post-truth political culture.^[9][10][11]

...

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-october-13-2017/

refs lienhart on transnational aspects of media corps? Rob Williams critical reasoning course; stegner: "amputated present"

characteristics of real and fake news

10 filter (build on chomsky?) sock puppets, algorithm (ggl); microtargetting (Cam anal); deep state disinfo, bubble

cure is interdisc: history, critival thinking? WRITING, __&_&__

http://projectcensored.org/video-critical-media-literacy-education-antidote-fake-news-propaganda-censorship-post-truth-world/

http://projectcensored.org/

explosive new lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that the Trump White House reviewed and signed off on a bogus Fox News story that claimed murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had been in direct contact with WikiLeaks.

NPR reports that the lawsuit was filed against Fox News by Rod Wheeler, a longtime Fox contributor who was quoted in a Fox story about his so-called “investigation” into the Rich murder.

In the original report, Wheeler was quoted as saying he “absolutely” found evidence that Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks in the weeks before the website published stolen DNC emails that U.S. intelligence agencies believe were stolen by Russian hackers.

However, Wheeler’s lawsuit alleges that the Fox reporter behind the story, Malia Zimmerman, fabricated these quotes in her story. Additionally, Wheeler’s lawsuit claims that the story was originally concocted to help take heat off the White House, which has been struggling to contain assorted scandals related to the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 election.

The most explosive allegation in the story, however, is that the Trump White House reviewed the contents of the Fox News article on the Seth Rich conspiracy before it was published.

“On April 20, a month before the story ran, [wealthy Trump supporter Ed] Butowsky and Wheeler… met at the White House with then Press Secretary Sean Spicer to brief him on what they were uncovering,” NPR reports. “The first page of the lawsuit quotes a voicemail and text from Butowsky boasting that President Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story just before it went to air and was published.”

The Butowsky text in question tells Wheeler that “the president just read the article” and “he wants it out immediately.”

Neither Fox News nor Wheeler have responded to Raw Story’s request for comment.

Read the entire story about the lawsuit at this link.

The full text of the lawsuit follows below.

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/01/25/22-times-jim-hoft-and-gateway-pundit-were-absurdly-wrong/215106

The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft said the Trump administration has promised that the site will “have a White House correspondent this year.” Hoft's website is one of the worst purveyors of false information on the internet, having repeatedly fallen for fake stories, published numerous articles with factual inaccuracies (later pulling some, but leaving others uncorrected), and pushed fact-free conspiracy theories about a wide range of topics including President Obama’s birthplace.

BACKGROUND:

The Gateway Pundit’s Hoft Says Site Will Have White House Correspondent

:{Trump Heavily Promotes Gateway Pundit:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Trump Is Favoring Propagandists For WH Press Access:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Media Have Frequently Criticized Gateway Pundit For Errors:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

22 TIMES JIM HOFT AND THE GATEWAY PUNDIT WERE ABSURDLY WRONG:

:{Gateway Pundit Attacked Wrong Asian Woman For “Sneaking Photos” At Hearing:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Claimed Picture Of Cleveland's NBA Title Parade Was Trump Rally:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Pushed Fake Story About Bus Of Paid Protesters:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Fell For Hoax About Paid Protest Group:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Falsely Claimed John Podesta Said “It’s OK For Illegals To Vote With Driver’s License”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Posted -- Then Removed -- Article Claiming Clinton Campaign Manager Deleted Tweets Because Of FBI Announcement:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Falsely Claimed Obama Made Confederate Flag Pin In 2012:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Falsely Claimed CNN Lightened Photo Of Fort Lauderdale Shooter:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Fell For Fake Photo Of Oregon Shooter :(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Claimed “Tests Show" Obama’s Birth Certificate Is “A Forgery”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Fell For Parody Article About Obama Birth Certificate:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Falsely Claimed Michelle Obama Deleted Hillary Tweets:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Fell For Twitter Joke About Postal Voter Fraud:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Suggested Hillary Clinton Had “A Seizure On Camera”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Fell For Racist Hoax Video About Anti-Trump Vandalism:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Lie: Trump Would Have Won Popular Vote If Not For “Illegal Vote Tally”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Thought Closed Captioning On Jumbotron Was Applause Instructions:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Falsely Claimed Obama Was Going To "Ban Sport Fishing":(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Falsely Claimed Obamacare Allows “‘Forced’ Home Inspections”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Suggested Obama Was “Photoshopped Into Famous Situation Room Photo” Taken During Bin Laden Raid:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Fell For Fake Photo Claiming Obama Patted Melania Trump On The Butt:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{Gateway Pundit Fell For Fake Facebook Page To Claim Mass Shooter Was Obama Fan:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

Gateway Pundit’s Hoft Says Site Will Have White House Correspondent

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 on Reddit, 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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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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Follow

[Bill Mitchell :{

✔

}:@mitchellvii](https://twitter.com/mitchellvii)

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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Ah, yeah, good old Bill Mitchell,the self-styled pro-Trump radio host whose deeper thoughts included this gem:

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[Bill Mitchell :{

✔

}:@mitchellvii](https://twitter.com/mitchellvii)

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

8:56 PM - 7 Aug 2016

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Imagine the non-existent polls in imaginary newspapers if you like! In the meantime, remember: The Baltimore Gazette is bogus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/this-is-a-real-news-story-about-fake-news-stories/

This is a real news story about fake news stories

By Callum Borchers November 7

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been targets of fake news stories in the final weeks of the presidential campaign. (Left, Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images; right, David Goldman/Associated Press)

Fake news reports have been a problem throughout the presidential campaign. We’re not talking about reports that are merely flawed or thinly sourced; we’re talking about stuff that is completely made up. The Fix’s Philip Bump wrote in April about a fake news site called Prntly that has routinely duped Donald Trump supporters — and even Trump himself.

Things have only gotten worse in the final weeks of the race. Here are seven totally bogus stories that have popped up online since October.

Donald Trump is dead

As fake news stories go, this is about as brazen as it gets, considering how easily it could be debunked. Undeterred, an NBC News imitation site claimed in October that the Republican presidential nominee had died of an apparent heart attack. Another site made the same false claim in August, launching the hashtag #RIPTrump.

As everyone knows, Trump’s doctor has stated “unequivocally” that his patient “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” So no one should have believed Trump was dead.

Hillary Clinton will be indicted

Many conservative news sites have been hoping to print those words for more than a year. The fake news site WorldPoliticus decided not to wait for reality to catch up to the dream and last week claimed to have the scoop — courtesy of unnamed FBI sources — that Clinton was going to be indicted in connection with using a private email server while she was secretary of state. Tens of thousands of people shared the “news of the millennium” on Facebook.

BuzzFeed reported that WorldPoliticus is just one of more than 100 pro-Trump websites originating from a single town in Macedonia, where online scam artists are pumping out fictional clickbait for the real estate mogul’s followers.

Clinton’s campaign chairman is into the occult

Among the hacked John Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks was one in which Podesta’s brother, an art collector, forwarded an invitation to a “spirit cooking” dinner party hosted by performance artist Marina Abramovic. Podesta appears not to have responded to the message from his brother, and he did not attend the dinner.

CONTENT FROM ALLSTATE

What do millennials really care about?

A revealing survey of the generation that could swing the vote in this election.

Never mind that. Infowars, the site run by 9/11 truther Alex Jones, used the original email to concoct a story last week about how Podesta “is apparently into spooky occult rituals involving menstrual blood and semen.” From there, the Drudge Report ran a banner that declared “Podesta practices occult magic.”

A postal worker in Ohio is destroying absentee ballots cast for Trump

This was a joke. Not a very funny one, perhaps, but no one should have taken it seriously. It came from a Twitter user who frequently makes ridiculous, obviously made-up claims on social media. Claims such as:

raandy @randygdub

i love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio and ripping up absentee ballots that vote for trump

1:09 PM - 16 Oct 2016

2,713 2,713 Retweets 6,477 6,477 likes

Conservative blogger Jim Hoft thought the ballot destruction was real and wrote about it. Drudge picked up the story. So did Rush Limbaugh. The U.S. Postal Service and Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted ultimately debunked the tweet.

President Obama is thinking about fleeing the country if Trump wins

This was also a joke. It originated on a Canadian satire site called the Burrard Street Journal, which in August published a story that pretended to quote Obama saying a move to Canada is “something Michelle, the kids and I have discussed as a potential solution to the Donald.”

Two months later, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said during a news conference that Trump's campaign rhetoric “raises questions in the minds of many Americans about whether or not he's committed to the kind of inclusive society that are consistent with long-held American values.”

“So he wouldn't move to Canada or New Zealand if Donald Trump is elected?” a reporter replied.

“He's working very hard to make sure that nobody has to move — has to leave the country as a result of an electoral outcome that the president doesn't support,” Earnest answered.

The Daily Mail then used that exchange to report that the White House was refusing to give a straight answer to the “rumor” that Obama might leave the United States. Sean Hannity did the same thing on his radio show. But there was never an actual rumor — just a joke by a Canadian version of the Onion.

Obama unfollowed Clinton on Twitter

After the FBI renewed its investigation of emails that passed through Clinton’s private server, Your News Wire fabricated a report that Michelle Obama had unfollowed the Democratic nominee on Twitter and also deleted supportive messages. That led to additional false claims on the Internet that Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had done the same.

A quick visit to Twitter could have disabused any reader of the notion that three of Clinton’s top surrogates were abandoning her on social media. But the hoax still fooled Hannity, who told radio listeners that the president’s digital cold shoulder “means they know it's huge. You know why? Because Obama's implicated! He's implicated here, and he's pissed. You know what his legacy might be? Jail.”

Hannity later apologized. On Twitter, of course.

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Sean Hannity ? @seanhannity

Correction. Live on radio I read a gateway pundit report that @MichelleObama had deleted mentions of HRC. And a listener said BHO and...

3:07 PM - 1 Nov 2016

614 614 Retweets 1,559 1,559 likes

Sean Hannity ? @seanhannity

Elizabeth Warren did same. Fact is they didn't. I humbly apologize. Live radio

3:08 PM - 1 Nov 2016

321 321 Retweets 1,193 1,193 likes

An FBI agent investigating Clinton died under suspicious circumstances

A fake news site called the Denver Guardian on Saturday published a fabricated story about an FBI agent who had been found dead, along with his wife, in a Maryland town that does not exist. The story said officials were calling the episode a murder-suicide but floated the idea that “this was another hit job by the Clintons in retaliation for the FBI email leaks so close to the presidential election.”

The campaign is not over yet. Click at your own risk.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/11/did-fake-news-on-facebook-send-trump-to-the-white-house/

Fake.

It’s the word of the day as pundits and politicos ponder this: Was this campaign season’s plethora of phony news stories and bogus tweets, most of which ended up passed around on Facebook and many of which made the Clinton camp seem downright menacing, one of the reasons Donald Trump was able to shock much of the planet and ascend to the Oval Office?

Not if you ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in his defense to critics who claim the social-media site is awash in bogus news posts:

“Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook—of which it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.”

Maybe he’s right, but much of the content was memorable — and many folks seemed to believe it. We decided to poke around and find ten of the more outrageous fake stories of the 2016 election.

Let’s start with candidate Trump’s very own Twitter account where, just days before the election he tweeted out this inflammatory bit: “Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton.” No proof that was happening, and all three sites, in fact, had plenty of stories about the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s emails. But that didn’t stop the tweeted ”news alert” from taking on a life of its own, quickly being retweeted by 25,000 other twitterers and being “liked” 50,000 times.

When is ABC News not really ABC News? When a hoax version of the site appears with a story headlined “Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally.'” The early October prank fooled Trump’s son Eric Trump, prompting him to tweet forth with “Finally, the truth comes out.” The story also generated hundreds of very real and very angry (on both sides) comments from readers.

Twitter? Trust, if you want, but verify: Election Day was just cranking up when Twitter hoaxsters went to work, starting with phony exit poll numbers from the Sunshine State, ostensibly coming from an official CNN account which turned out not to be. It shared this little lopsided and fabricated report: BREAKING: The first Florida exit poll numbers have been released. Trump 55% Clinton 39% Johnson 6%— CNN (@CNN_PoIitics) Nov. 8, 2016. Trump did win Florida, somewhat unexpectedly but not quite that handily.

Even Sean Hannity makes mistakes: The radio host got caught with his proverbial pants down when he found, swallowed and ingested a large chunk of fresh fake news about President Obama supposedly erasing endorsements of Hillary from his Twitter account. That “news” prompted Hannity to suggest that Obama’s legacy might be “jail.” Trouble was, the claim could have been easily disproven with a quick search of Twitter. Hannity soon tweeted a very real correction and a supposedly sincere apology.

Now that’s American ingenuity: YourNewsWire, which was the carrier of the fake news Hannity feasted upon, publishes a mix of true, slanted and simply bogus news. Good clean fun, right? YourNewsWire is just one of many “news” sites that have come under the scrutiny of fact-checking groups like Real or Satire? Their staff has poked and prodded a whole range of suspicious actors, from the jokers over at News10Live.com to the all-in-good-fun guys behind Now8News.com, which Real or Satire? applauds because they at least have “the decency to provide a disclaimer: We thank Now8News for being upfront and honest about their site’s content.”

What kind of creeps is Hillary hanging around with anyway? Did you read the one from the The Denver Guardian? The headline says it all: FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE. While many Trump supporters fell for it, the story, and the website behind it were quickly outed. The Denver Guardian’s cover was blown by the very real Denver Post, a daily newspaper that’s been published since 1892 and is now part of MediaNews Group, which owns the news organization whose content you happen to be reading right now.

Mayor Riley is such a card: Jefferson Riley, the Republican mayor of Mansfield, Ga., and apparently quite the jester around City Hall, posted a bit of “fake news” of his very own: “Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9,” he wrote on his Facebook page before eventually deleting but not perhaps before confusing many of the town’s elderly Democrats. “He’s a good man,” said City Clerk Jeana Hyde, who obviously works for Riley. “He’s a good mayor. And good people do crazy stuff sometimes.” Amen.

Was Trump a bit ham-fisted with this one? CNN corrected a tweet from the Republican nominee on Election Day that said “Just out according to @CNN: “Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country.” CNN’s Jake Tapper quickly took to the air to correct Trump: “CNN is not reporting that. The problem is, the problem’s across the county. A county. Not a country, as Mr. Trump tweeted.” Well, at least Trump only missed it by one letter.

If that’s Christian, we’d hate to see what un-Christian looks like: Back in October, the Christian Times Newspaper broke a very big story: “Tens of thousands” of fraudulent ballots, apparently marked for Hillary Clinton, had been found in a warehouse in Ohio. They were allegedly discovered inside sealed ballot boxes. One website’s version of the story was shared with more than 6 million people, according to Crowdtangle, which is a site that keeps track of how social-media posts are performing. The sleuths at Snopes, though, quickly disproved the piece, just as they’re probably working to disprove this headline currently on the Christian Times website: “BREAKING: Hillary Clinton files for divorce in New York court.” The Christian Times’ disclaimer may offer a clue as to how to take its stories, describing the organization as “your premier online source for news, commentary, opinion, and theories. Christian Times Newspaper does not take responsibility for any of our readers’ actions that may result from reading our stories.”

So who was behind this one? Back in March, a bogus New York Times site posted an article claiming that Democratic firebrand Elizabeth Warren was endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. Not true. But it sure looked like the real thing, complete with the fonts and design of the real New York Times and the story even appeared under the (fake) bylines of two of its (real) political reporters. Before things got sorted out, the original bogus article had been shared by at least 700,000 people. And the top source of the shared link? It was a page called “Bernie Sanders – The Revolution Continues” on, yep. Facebook.

Finally, on Friday, four days after Trump’s election was a done deal, this little meme was making its rounds among the Internet’s gullible: Donald Trump back in 1998 allegedly calling Republicans “the dumbest group of voters in the country.” An image of Trump speaking, accompanied by the quote he allegedly made to People magazine, arrived last year in an email to Snopes, that fact-checking, urban-legend-busting organization that strives to get to the bottom of things.

Trump supposedly said “if I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.”

Snopes quickly debunked the whole thing, saying “despite People’s comprehensive online content archive, we found no interview or profile on Donald Trump in 1998 (or any other time) that quoted his saying anything that even vaguely resembled the words in this meme.”

snopes and buzzfeed fact checks

http://www.snopes.com/tag/denver-guardian/

ORIGIN:On 10 November 2016, the Denver Guardian web site published an article positing that President Obama would be issuing a “blanket pardon” for Hillary Clinton to cover any undiscovered past crimes:

Washington, D.C. — Now that Donald J. Trump has defeated Hillary Clinton (although losing the popular vote) to become the next president elect, many Americans are wondering if President Obama will pardon Clinton for her use of a private email server in which highly sensitive, classified material was compromised while she served as Secretary of State.

Although FBI Director James Comey said, right before the election, that he didn’t find anything in Clinton’s emails to warrant charges, a new FBI director might feel differently, especially one muscled by a vengeful Justice Department under President Trump.

Insiders on Capitol Hill are saying President Obama will issue a “blanket pardon” for Clinton, pardoning her for any crimes committed in the past but have not yet been discovered.

There was no truth to this story. The Denver Guardian is simply a fake news web site masquerading as the online arm of a (non-existent) big city newspaper. Like the Baltimore Gazette, the Denver Guardian is nothing more than a hastily thrown together web site with a bunch of non-working links and a fake street address, all created for the sole purpose of disseminating fabricated clickbait news stories.

---

FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide

Reports that an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server killed himself after murdering his wife are just fake news. Read More

last grab fke migration

https://web.archive.org/web/20161120174219/http://denverguardian.com/cateFgory/news/

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If we’re actively seeking new personnel, we will post the available positions here. But even if we don’t have any listings posted, we know Baltimore has a wealth of talented people – you can always email jobs@denverguardian.com to ask about submitting a resumé.

BUSINESS:

ADVERTISING SALES ASSOCIATE

Denver Guardian is expanding its sales force. If you wish to be considered for our team, email your resume and cover letter to jobs@denverguardian.com.

Purpose

Generate ad sales revenue for Denver Guardian and all associated digital products.

Opportunity

You will work with the “best of the best” businesses that need to position their products and services with our upscale audience in order to grow and sustain their premium business models.

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• Schedule appointments; determine prospect’s needs and challenges; make initial presentation; determine best solutions; prepare contracts; close sales

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Skills/Qualifications

The ideal candidate will possess strong skills in these areas: presentation, communication, prospecting, closing, motivation, planning, persistence, territory management and meeting sales goals.

Education/Experience Requirements

Three+ years ad sales experience; college degree preferred

EDITORIAL:

EDITOR

Denver Guardian is seeking an editor to work in our fast-paced newsroom. This editor will have a great social media presence, know how to make political stories “sing,” and help shape content for various coverage verticals. The job will require excellent organizational skills along with the ability to juggle a large number of projects simultaneously. The ideal candidate will have a keen interest in policy and politics, as well as experience with digital strategy. This person needs to be a strong, innovative journalist with a creative mind and eagerness to embrace changes in news.

Skills/Qualifications

A minimum of 3-5 years of experience as an editor in a fast-paced news environment; excellent news judgment and a proven ability to work well with others under intense deadline pressure.

If you wish to be considered for our team, email your resume and cover letter to jobs@denverguardian.com.

REPORTER

Denver Guardian is seeking a reporter to join our team. Candidates should be comfortable working in a fast-paced newsroom and be capable of producing a steady flow of accurate, crisp and cleanly written stories on a variety of political topics. Candidates should have a highly attuned “nose for news,” have a developed social media presence, and be conversant on subjects ranging from the White House and Congress to national politics, as well as the gamut of public policy issues being debated in Washington.

Experience covering spot news; established ability to write quickly and accurately on tight deadlines; capable of handling a demanding reporting position with grace under pressure; solid news judgment and a feel for stories that have “buzz”; a background in Washington news coverage is preferred.

Skills/Qualifications

A minimum of 3-5 years of experience as an editor in a fast-paced news environment; excellent news judgment and a proven ability to work well with others under intense deadline pressure.

If you wish to be considered for our team, email your resume and cover letter to jobs@denverguardian.com.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

It is Denver Guardian’s policy to provide equal employment opportunity to all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender or other basis prohibited by applicable federal, state or local law.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/debunk-fake-news-election-day.html

Fake stories and memes that crop up during live news events have been a problem on social media for years, but a wild election season has highlighted the news media’s slow response to them.

On Election Day, we asked our readers to send in some examples of what they were seeing. Here’s what we heard.

Hoaxes

Hoaxes often gurgle up from the bowels of Facebook, as shares from sites that claim to mix satire with the truth, like The Rightists, or sites that don’t seem to exist for any particular reason but to fool people, like one called The Denver Guardian.

Here’s some of what we saw as Election Day unfolded:

• People behind hoax Twitter accounts were busy. This post about exit poll numbers in Florida did not come from an official CNN account. One fast way to root out impostors is to check the account’s history. A cursory glance shows that this account’s history contains a message that says, “Let’s get banned.”

BREAKING: The first Florida exit poll numbers have been released.

Trump 55%

Clinton 39%

Johnson 6%

— CNN (@CNN_PoIitics) Nov. 8, 2016

Another account purporting to belong to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and a supporter of Donald J. Trump, is a fake.

We cannot let Blacks and Hispanics alone decide this election for Hillary! Everyone deserves a say. All others, head to polls NOW! #Trump16

— Rudolph Giuliani (@rudygiulianiGOP) Nov. 8, 2016

• Fake sites were going into overdrive. Here’s a recent example from The Denver Guardian. On Saturday, that site claimed that an F.B.I. agent connected to Hillary Clinton’s email disclosures had murdered his wife and shot himself. The story was fabricated, and The Denver Post published a detailed report explaining that The Denver Guardian was a hoax.

On Tuesday, several readers notified us that a site called the Conservative Daily Post had published a number of false stories, including a report that President Obama and Hillary Clinton had both promised amnesty to undocumented immigrants who vote on the Democratic ticket. Neither person has made this promise to immigrants. The site has also posted a story that declares Word War III is days away. According to the website Politifact.com, the Conservative Daily Post is rated “Pants on Fire,” at the opposite end of the spectrum from sites rated “True.”

• Fliers were distributed to trick college students. The Bangor Daily News reports that were fliers left on the campus of Bates College, in Maine, telling students that if they wanted to vote in Lewiston, they would have to pay to change their driver’s licenses and re-register any vehicle in the city. These sorts of hoaxes are common on college campuses.

Somebody spread this fake "legal advisory" around at #batescollege to try to keep students from heading to the polls Tuesday. #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/erk77n2lH5

— Steve Collins (@SteveCollinsSJ) Nov. 6, 2016

• A mayor posted a message with an incorrect date for Election Day. Jefferson Riley, the Republican mayor of Mansfield, Ga., posted a message on his Facebook page: “Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9.”

He soon deleted the post.

Jeana Hyde, the city clerk in Mansfield, confirmed that Mayor Riley had made the post on his personal account. She said that while she couldn’t speak for the mayor, she believed that the post had been a joke, “but I really don’t know.”

“He’s a good man; he’s a good mayor,” she said. “And good people do crazy stuff sometimes.”

Needless to say, Tuesday is Electing Day for all Americans, regardless of their political affiliations.

Misinformation

Other falsehoods are spread by seemingly well-meaning entities — corporate accounts and misinformed individuals — who trumpet claims that turn out not to be true.

Here were some Election Day examples:

• An inaccurate guide was distributed to voters. Urban Outfitters on Monday tweeted an Election Day guide that contained wrong information, telling voters that they needed a “voter’s registration card” along with their identification to vote. There is not a single state that requires such a card.

The retailer has since corrected its guide.

• Incorrect information was circulating at the polls. Anni O’Connor, 53, of Paradise Valley, Ariz., reported on The New York Times’s Facebook page that she overheard a woman in line at her polling place say that all her friends had voted online already. Ms. O’Connor, who had been an independent voter for many years but registered as a Democrat to support Hillary Clinton in this year’s primary, said she told the woman to alert her friends that they had not voted.

There is no state in which votes can be submitted online, though a few states make exceptions for military and overseas voters.

• A much-shared tweet about election workers being fired in Florida got some things right, but got key details wrong. Even when people seem eager to help spread the truth, there’s often misinformation given out. For instance, look at this tweet from Adam D. Brown, a Republican politician:

Breaking: Two Florida election clerks have been fired and removed from Miami-Dade county.

Looks like Fraud.... #ElectionDay

— Adam D. Brown (@aduanebrown) Nov. 8, 2016

While Mr. Brown is correct that two Florida election clerks were removed from their duties on Tuesday, it was in Broward County, not Miami-Dade.

Tonya Edwards, a spokeswoman for the Broward County elections supervisor, confirmed that two clerks had been removed from their duties before noon, and had been replaced by other poll workers.

The clerks were removed, Ms. Edwards said, because “they were not adhering to our election policies and procedures as they were trained.”

Asked to elaborate, she said that they had “obstructed and interfered” with the voting process but could not give any more information. She said that the episode had not ended up affecting anyone’s ability to vote.

• CNN corrected a tweet from Mr. Trump. The Republican nominee tweeted on Tuesday that Utah officials had reported problems with voting machines across the country.

Just out according to @CNN: "Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Nov. 8, 2016

Later, Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor, addressed Mr. Trump’s tweet during a live broadcast.

“CNN is not reporting that,” Mr. Tapper said. “The problem is, the problem’s across the county. A county. Not a country, as Mr. Trump tweeted.”

• A tweet about a “rigged” voting machine in Philadelphia was shared more than 11,000 times. But it was user error, according to ProPublica’s Electionland project.

A Few Tips for Spotting a Fake

On Election Day and in the days afteward, Snopes and BuzzFeed, two operations that vigilantly debunk fake news sites, will be useful.

First, a note: A growing tendency to dive into our own echo chambers and construct our personal versions of the truth on social media has been destructive to the ability to call out misinformation online. A post that contains an opinion you disagree with isn’t necessarily “fake” or “inaccurate.” We’re looking for stories that seem designed to misinform the reader.

Here’s a quick primer for spotting fake news:

• Check the account history of the source. One red flag is usually the number of posts and the span of time the account has been active. Is the story one of 50 coming from a Facebook account that was created just last week? It warrants a deeper look.

• Images are often reused from one live event to another to deceive people. Do a reverse-image search with a service like TinEye. The site should tell you if the photo has been used elsewhere.

• Check for context. Distortion is a powerful tactic used by sites designed to mislead the public. Images, videos and text snippets will be chopped, twisted and stuffed into a new headline to fit an inflammatory new narrative.

In one example cited in a recent BuzzFeed study, a site called Freedom Daily wrote fake details around a months-old video to make it seem like two white men had been beaten and set on fire by supporters of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The story was, in fact, a dispute between two co-workers, and BuzzFeed found that it had nothing to do with racially motivated violence.

But it got a lot of shares.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/17/how-pro-trump-twitter-bots-spread-fake-news.html

How Pro-Trump Twitter Bots Spread Fake News

Using hashtags like #CrookedHillary and #TrumpTrain, automated networks of social-media bots disseminated erroneous information throughout the 2016 campaign, with Trump benefiting.

Gideon Resnick

11.16.16 10:05 PM ET

President-elect Donald Trump has credited the strength of his political movement, in part, to his immense reach on social-media platforms.

And it’s true, he does have a ton of followers on Facebook and Twitter. But not all of those followers are human. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, automated networks of social-media bots spread erroneous information to potential voters—often to the benefit of Trump.

According to a new memo compiling data from the election by a team of researchers including Oxford University Professor Philip Howard, automated pro-Trump activity outnumbered automated pro-Hillary Clinton activity by a 5:1 ratio by Election Day. And many of those auto-Trumpkins were busy spewing lies and fake news: that Democrats could vote on a different day than Republicans; that Clinton had a stroke during the final week of the election; and that an FBI agent associated with her email investigation was involved in a murder-suicide.

“The use of automated accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election, most clearly with pro-Trump campaigners and programmers who carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled automated activities after Election Day,” wrote Howard; Bence Kollanyi, a Ph.D. candidate at Corvinus University of Budapest; and Samuel Woolley, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington.

The team of researchers used specific hashtags, including #CrookedHillary, #TrumpTrain, and #ImWithHer, to track the frequency with which messages and links to stories were being spread throughout the cycle. For the most recent memo, they focused particularly on the final week leading up to the election (Nov. 1-9).

Of the approximately 18.9 million tweets generated during the last week of the campaign that used some combination of the hashtags in the study, 55.1 percent were pro-Trump and 19.1 percent were pro-Clinton.

Many were automated, which the researchers defined as follows:

“These accounts are often bots that see occasional human curation, or they are actively maintained by people who employ scheduling algorithms and other applications for automating social-media communication. We define a high level of automation as accounts that post at least 50 times a day using one of these election-related hashtags, meaning 450 or more tweets on at least one of these hashtags during the data collection period.”

And as soon as the election ended, the researchers discovered a steep decline in content. Some nodes in networks began to disappear; others simply retweeted what Trump said.

“The pace of automated political campaigning dropped off after Election Day—a reminder that ultimately the campaigners and programmers behind such accounts are humans who could disable their automation on victory,” the memo read.

During the period after the third and final presidential debate, when most public polling indicated that Clinton had a steady lead, the hashtags generated by the bot accounts pointed to a bit of a different story.

“In an important way, Twitter activity reflects the shift in popular sentiment that was largely undetected by traditional polling,” the memo read. “In the last debate, 30.8 percent of the traffic about the debates was using relatively neutral hashtags, but was cut in half by Election Day. In the leadup to voting, only 15.2 percent of the traffic was using neutral hashtags, pro-Trump traffic grew from 46.7 to 55.1 percent, and pro-Clinton traffic grew from 10.4 to 19.1 percent.”

In a conversation with The Daily Beast, Howard described how the pro-Trump bot networks began to use pro-Clinton hashtags, injecting memes, links, and political messages into pro-Clinton circles. Like a virus, they essentially co-opted the opponent’s messaging and infiltrated her supporters. Using pro-Clinton hashtags like #ImWithHer and #uniteblue, memes describing Clinton as corrupt ricocheted across both blue and red feeds.

“Programmers made some strategic points about how to use the automation to maximum effect,” Howard said.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the final week of the campaign. For example, Howard explained that the bots aggressively pushed the news of FBI Director James Comey looking into additional emails pertaining to Clinton’s investigation on the computer of her aide’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Days later, when Clinton once again was not charged, the networks were only sharing the news of the investigation and not the absolvement.

Besides selective story-sharing, the networks pushed some outright false reports.

“There was a story from the ‘Denver Guardian’ about the FBI agent who was suspected in the Hillary email leaks who was found dead in a murder-suicide,” Howard said of one example.

He’s referring to a story from a nonexistent publication that spread so widely that The Denver Post, a real publication, had to write a thorough debunking of the report. As The New York Times reported, the fake story “claimed that an FBI agent connected to Hillary Clinton’s email disclosures had murdered his wife and shot himself.”

Howard said Trump’s simple turns of phrase, like the infamous “Crooked Hillary” line, made for naturally great hashtags that could be exploited by these accounts. In the final days leading up to the election, they even went so far as to employ pithy attempts at voter suppression.

“We tracked a fair amount of bot activity on Sunday [Nov. 6] on voter-suppression messaging,” Howard said. “There was a note that came over the Clinton hashtags that said voting would be postponed until Thursday.” Another claimed that “Democrat voters could SMS their vote in and there was another one that Clinton had a stroke over the weekend.”

All of these were means to trick unsuspecting users into not turning out on Election Day to vote for Clinton.

Howard provided numerous examples of pro-Trump accounts incorporating pro-Clinton hashtags as a means of spreading the message to a wider audience.

Twitter Bot

TWITTER

There were some accounts that were even personalized with human-seeming names, spewing out the same tweet verbatim. As Howard’s fellow researcher Samuel Woolley described one instance: “Pro-Trump bots that looked like Latino voters were launched after Trump’s primary win there and disappeared the next week.” This seemingly also happened with less frequency with pro-Clinton bots.

Twitter Bot

TWITTER

Howard described a similar social-media campaign that took place in the leadup to Brexit, a referendum with which Trump tried to associate his surprise win. As Howard and his team analyzed the data, he determined that the pro-Trump accounts were more successful than the pro-Clinton ones due to the negative nature of their messaging and the “offensive pictures with strange captions” that can so easily get passed around.

He, however, did not think that was the work of the campaign itself.

“I’m not sure the Trump campaign had enough of a strategy,” Howard said. “I’m not sure they had the brain or interest to do this. The PACs around him and the individual passionate Trump supporters would have done this.” (The Daily Beast previously reported on one such organization funded by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.)

When asked whether the proliferation of pro-Trump content affected the electorate, Howard didn’t draw any direct conclusion but said he believed “they had an impact.”

Trump’s social-media activity was always a topic of discussion during the election and in particular instances, including his sharing of an unseemly image of Ted Cruz’s wife, drew sharp criticism from other candidates and the media. At the time, individuals affiliated with the Trump campaign, including Brad Parscale, who went on to assume a bigger role in Trump’s data operation, denied that anyone in the campaign had any involvement in the generation of these memes.

“I don’t have any other Twitter accounts,” Parscale told The Daily Beast at the time. “If there’s something else the campaign is doing, I don’t know about it.”

The persistence of the accounts during the election, according to Samuel Woolley, were meant to give the appearance that Trump may have had a bigger initial following than expected.

“Some of the botnets that supported Trump were more than likely purpose-built to create an illusion of massive online political traction for Trump,” Woolley said in an email. “These sorts of bots work to create a bandwagon effect among voters who are considering a candidate, or are focused on a specific issue. They also generate a spiral of silence among voters who might not agree with a candidate or issue but who experience a barrage of hugely enhanced content from the Trump bot network. These purpose-build bots and botnets often disappear right after a political campaign, some are even created for a specific issue within a campaign and go offline after working to manipulate public opinion around that one issue.”

And now, having done their duty, the remaining active networks are amplifying the president-elect’s message even louder with tens of thousands of retweets at a time.

https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2016/11/17/tech-companies-debate-how-to-handle-fake-news/

accenture subcontractors, 1 post 10 secs

http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/16/13637310/facebook-fake-news-explained

Facebook's fake news problem, explained

Updated by Timothy B. Leetim@vox.com Nov 16, 2016, 9:10am EST

News stories are supposed to help ordinary voters understand the world around them. But in the 2016 election, news stories online too often had the opposite effect. Stories rocketed around the internet that were misleading, sloppily reported, or in some cases totally made up.

Over the course of 2016, Facebook users learned that the pope endorsed Donald Trump (he didn’t), that a Democratic operative was murdered after agreeing to testify against Hillary Clinton (it never happened), that Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old girl (a total fabrication), and many other totally bogus “news” stories. Stories like this thrive on Facebook because Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes “engagement” — and a reliable way to get readers to engage is by making up outrageous nonsense about politicians they don’t like.

New Money logo

A big problem here is that the internet has broken down the traditional distinction between professional news-gathering and amateur rumor-mongering. On the internet, the “Denver Guardian” — a fake news site designed to look like a real Colorado newspaper — can reach a wide audience as easily as real news organizations like the Denver Post, the New York Times, and Fox News.

Since last week’s election, there has been a fierce debate about whether the flood of fake news — much of it prejudicial to Hillary Clinton — could have swung the election to Donald Trump. Internet giants are coming under increasing pressure to do something about the problem.

On Monday, Google announced that it was going to cut fake news sites off from access to its vast advertising network, depriving them of a key revenue source. Facebook quickly followed suit with its own ad network.

At the same time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signaled reluctance to have Facebook become more active in weeding out fake news stories. He described it as “a pretty crazy idea” to think fake news on Facebook could have swayed the election. He says Facebook will look for new ways to stop the spread of fake news, but he also argues that “we must proceed very carefully” and that Facebook must be “extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

The importance of this issue is only going to grow over time. More and more people are getting their news from the internet, putting more and more power in the hands of companies like Google, Twitter, and especially Facebook. The leaders of those companies are going to be under increasing pressure to use that power wisely.

The internet is growing up

In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to think of the internet as a decentralized, even anarchic, place where no one was really in charge. Online-only news organizations were still in their infancy, so that most people either got their news from traditional sources like newspapers or cable news shows, or else they went to the home pages of conventional news organizations like the New York Times, the Atlantic, or Fox News.

The rise of social media sites has changed things in two major ways.

First, social media has drastically lowered barriers to entry in the news business. It has always been easy for anyone to publish a website, of course. But as news consumption is increasingly driven by social media sharing, it’s becoming easier than ever for no-name sites to reach a big audience.

At the same time, a handful of big tech companies — Twitter, Google, and especially Facebook — have gained a huge and growing influence over what news people see. 44 percent of US adults tell pollsters they got news from Facebook in 2016. That’s vastly larger than other news-focused social media sites like Twitter (9 percent) and Reddit (2 percent). And while many people get their news from television programs or newspapers, those media are divided among many competing news organizations. This means that Facebook has a larger influence over ordinary Americans’ media diets than almost any other news organization.

Normally we think that organizations with a lot of power have an obligation to use that power responsibly. But the leaders of the largest technology companies have resisted thinking of themselves in those terms. They like to think of their sites as neutral platforms that help users share information with each other — without the company making value judgments of its own.

But this isn’t how power works. When an authority figure turns a blind eye to a problem that’s happening under his watch, the problem doesn’t go away. It festers, often becoming an even bigger problem over time.

Fake news is a problem, but we don’t know how big it is

The problem of fake news is so new that we don’t have definitive data on how big of a problem it is. But there are some reasons to think it could be very significant...

Publicly, Facebook’s CEO has downplayed the site’s role in distributing fake news online. But privately, there’s a raging debate inside Facebook about how it could do more.

BuzzFeed reports that some Facebook employees are frustrated by Zuckerberg’s blasé response to concerns about fake news on the social media platform.

“What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that,” one anonymous engineer wrote, according to BuzzFeed. “He knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.”

One reason Facebook’s management has been so cautious on this issue is that it’s still smarting from the controversy earlier this year over Facebook’s trending news feature. Until this summer, Facebook employed a team of professional journalists to curate the trending news box that appeared in the right-hand rail next to the Facebook newsfeed.

Then in May, one of Facebook’s trending news editors told Gizmodo that the team was routinely suppressing trending stories that slanted in a conservative direction. That caused a massive backlash, including questions from Republicans in Congress about Facebook’s editorial policies. This led to Facebook terminating the entire trending news team. Today, Facebook uses software to choose which headlines appear in this box.

THUNE

But with the human editors gone, Facebook had a new problem: It started to see fake stories showing up in the trending box. Facebook’s trending news algorithm simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to distinguish an accurate news story from an inaccurate one.

The current debate over fake news on Facebook can be seen as a much broader version of the same controversy. Nobody is going to defend fake news per se. But once you start injecting human editorial judgment into content decisions, questions of bias are inevitably going to come up.

This is a particularly tricky issue because it’s not easy to draw a line between articles that are totally fake and articles that are just highly misleading or based on shoddy reporting.

For example, after BuzzFeed reported that 43 percent of articles from a hyperpartisan site called Right Wing News were either “mostly false” or a “mix of true and false,” the site’s editor insisted that many of the articles classified as false were actually accurate. One story claimed that the Clinton Foundation devoted only 10 percent of its revenue to charity, a figure it got from a Federalist article that only counted grants to third-party organizations, not charitable activities carried out by the Clinton Foundation itself, in calculating total charitable spending.

It seems pretty clear that the Federalist and Right Wing News are in the wrong here. It’s not reasonable to count a foundation’s own charitable programs as overhead. But if Facebook were to classify this story as fake news and ban it from the site, some conservatives are going to see that as evidence of left-wing bias.

Also, any effort to weed out fake news at Facebook’s scale is going to lead to some straight-up mistakes. If these mistakes disproportionately target conservative viewpoints, that’s going to create a backlash that will hurt Facebook’s brand with tens of millions of conservative Facebook users.

“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Sunday Facebook post. He argued that many stories “express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

Banning fake news might be the wrong approach

Most of the discussion about how Facebook could address fake news has assumed that the goal is to banish fake news from the platforms. But there are a couple of other approaches that might ultimately work better....

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/inside_the_right_wing_lie_factory_secrets_of_a_koch_funded_propaganda_machine_more_insidious_than_fox_news/

:{ Apr 30, 2016 05:00 AM PST

Inside the right-wing lie factory: Secrets of a Koch-funded propaganda machine more insidious than Fox News

As daily papers cut back on local news and politics, the Koch brothers are rushing into the void with slanted news

Topics: Books, Koch Brothers, Media Criticism, Rush Limbaugh, Innovation News, Business News, News, Politics News

Inside the right-wing lie factory: Secrets of a Koch-funded propaganda machine more insidious than Fox News

Scott Walker (Credit: AP/Paul}: Sancya)

Excerpted from "Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP"

Medora is a small, seasonal tourist town in the Badlands of western North Dakota, about 25 miles from the Montana border. It has a population of less than one hundred. It went for John McCain for president by a three-to-one margin in 2008. A handful of small stores are in the center of the town—some gift shops, a bookstore, an ice cream shop, two restaurants, a museum, and a hotel that’s full during tourist season.

Around the corner from downtown is the Rushmore Mountain Taffy and Gift Shop (not to be confused with the Rushmore Mountain Taffy Shop at the base of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota). You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but the Medora taffy shop was the first legal home of a media organization that now provides a significant amount of political news coverage in 39 state capitals through 55 interconnected news sites, according to a local reporter who was curious about the entity and asked around.

At the start of 2008, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity had a budget of zero dollars. Its legal home was the taffy shop in Medora. By 2009 the Franklin Center’s budget had jumped to $2.4 million, according to IRS tax records. That’s a spectacular leap for a nonprofit, especially in Medora.

It was almost as if someone wished to utilize the charter concept of the Franklin Center—developing individual but interlinked news centers across the United States that would all promote the same messages—for other purposes and therefore infused it with a mountain of funding and network support. Intriguingly, this was a year before the Tea Party movement seemingly sprang from nowhere and spread like a prairie fire to the thirty-nine state capitals where the Franklin Center now operates its news sites.

The Franklin Center has a second address—a post office box in Bismarck, North Dakota, where mail is forwarded east to Old Town Alexandria, near Washington, DC. North Dakota law requires that nonprofits have a “physical address,” not just a forwarding address or a post office box. So, for years, the Franklin Center’s registered agent was at the taffy shop, while the mail was forwarded from the UPS store in Bismarck.

The Franklin Center’s president is Jason Stverak. He used to be the executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party. He also ran Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign efforts in the state. But just prior to starting the Franklin Center, he was the regional field director for the Sam Adams Alliance, where, according to his Franklin Center bio, he “worked with state groups and associations committed to promoting the free-market policies” that are now embedded in every political story that the network’s reporters write about in state capitals across the country.

“An expert in non-profit journalism, Jason works to promote social welfare and civil betterment by leading initiatives that advance investigative journalism,” his Franklin Center bio reads. “His support of non-profit journalism has played a vital role in exposing corruption in our elected officials and encouraging transparency in government.”

The Franklin Center grew from nothing in 2007–08 to the largest network of local political reporting in the country almost overnight. Its 55 news sites generally cover political events or issues from an antitax, antiregulation, or antispending frame. While each of the sites has its own team of local reporters, they generally tend to share common themes across the entire network of coverage, recent studies have shown. Government is either working badly and needs to be exposed; or local initiatives are spending far too much money; or politicians are unjustly pushing for excise taxes on oil or gas or cigarettes; or the local governments are burying citizens in regulations and bureaucracy.

The Franklin Center describes most of its reporters in the state capitals as “watchdogs,” constantly looking for excise taxes that need to be rolled back or government initiatives and regulations that need to be curtailed. The organization was built to “address falling standards in the media as well as a steep falloff in reporting on state government,” its mission statement says. It “provides professional training; research, editorial, multimedia and technical support; and assistance with marketing and promoting the work of a nationwide network of non-profit reporters.” It supplements that watchdog reporting in state capitals with its “newly launched Citizen Watchdog program that trains ordinary citizens to report from local communities.”

In many of the state capitals across the United States, especially in the less populated red states, the Franklin Center news sites are a significant source of local and statewide political news. “Specializing in state and local government, [the] Franklin Center has focused its efforts on reaching maximum penetration within small and mid-sized media markets—on driving a conversation about transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility at the grassroots level and putting a human face on public policy,” it says. “We specialize in reaching a layman’s audience through local media, coordinating our nationwide network to ensure that we are hitting this audience in every state.

“[The] Franklin Center was founded in 2009 to help fill the void created as the nation’s newspapers cut back on their statehouse news coverage and investigative reporting in the wake of falling circulation and revenues. Our goal is to provide fresh, original, hard-hitting news content that is published on our own Web sites and in traditional media sources.”

While each of the local sites and reporters cover their own beats and stories, they all share a common goal and platform. “All publications have a mission and a voice. We are unabashed in ours: to spotlight waste, fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars by state and local governments. We always ask these questions when reporting on events: What does this mean for taxpayers? Will it advance or restrict individual freedom? We look at the bigger picture, provide analysis that’s often missing from modern news stories, and do more than provide ‘he-said, she-said’ reports from the state Capitol. Our journalists look for the back story and offer much-needed perspective on the day’s news.”

That context—multiple news outlets with the same underlying themes— is what makes the Franklin Center unique. State legislators have come to accept a certain style of coverage from its local news sites, which have names such as KansasReporter.com, PlainsDaily.com, or CapitolBeatOK.com, and they are rarely disappointed. The state legislators and local readers also aren’t generally aware that a national center is directing traffic.

Beyond its news sites and paid reporters, the Franklin Center also trains an army of citizen journalists who will blog and comment on taxes and government in state capitals. “We’re leaders in the new wave of non-profit journalism. We have reporters, news sites, investigative journalists and affiliates across the country—and we’re growing. In addition to our nationwide team of professional journalists, we are expanding our reach into citizen journalism,” it says. “We provide training to these citizen watchdogs so that they can better employ journalistic standards as they keep their local governments accountable through their blogs and Web sites. While distinct from our journalism efforts, this new wave of information activism will help fulfill Franklin’s vision of creating a more vibrant democratic society based on accountability and open government.”

Like the Sam Adams Alliance training sessions that were conducted under the umbrella of Americans for Prosperity in the year or so prior to the Chicago Tea Party event, most of the Franklin Center’s training sessions for citizen journalists are likewise conducted in partnership with Americans for Prosperity.

A training session in Omaha, Nebraska, in the fall of 2013 is a good example of this partnership. The session was free, sponsored by the Nebraska AFP chapter. The Franklin Center ran it for two nights (and included conservative activist James O’Keefe, who filmed ACORN events under cover, creating a firestorm of controversy).

“Nebraska and our nation are in a fiscal crisis,” the AFP’s Facebook event page said, describing the training session. “You’ve heard the egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse on a daily basis. We can no longer afford to sit by and wait for the government or mainstream media to fully inform the public about what’s going on behind closed doors. The time has come to stand up and take action. Together, we can begin the hard, but important job of taking back America.”

In an era where old media is being replaced rapidly by digital media and citizen journalism, nonprofit media organizations are paying close attention to the ways in which philanthropy is intersecting with journalism. They are amazed at the rapid growth of the Franklin Center because it has been extraordinarily successful at a time when local investigative journalism efforts—even those supported by philanthropy—have struggled to take hold. Even the largest news organizations in the world are struggling to survive.

The New York Times has gone through several rounds of buyouts and forced layoffs in the last three years, for instance. Every major newspaper in the country is struggling with the transformation to the digital age of media. An American Journalism Review in 2009 found that the number of reporters covering state capitals had fallen 30 percent since 2003.

Yet the Franklin Center flourishes. Why? Because it has deep financial pockets and no worries about its funding. National Journal reported that the Sam Adams Alliance provided the seed money to launch the Franklin Center in the months prior to the Chicago Tea Party event, taking the funding from zero to $2.4 million in 2009, then to $3.7 million the following year.

Besides operating a group of paid national reporters who focus on state capitals as well as a group of citizen journalists blogging in these state capitals, the Franklin Center also supplies grants to each of the fifty-five sites in the thirty-nine state capitals.

Its success—basically, the reason that it has no need to fight for its survival when every other local digital journalism effort does—is almost certainly due to its connection to the Koch donor network. Like other related groups with operations in the DC area, the Franklin Center benefits greatly from the Koch donor network’s Freedom Partners.

The Franklin Center’s director of donor development, Matt Hauck, worked for the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Its senior vice president in charge of strategic initiatives, Erik Telford, worked for the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity before joining the Franklin Center. The founding board member who set it up was Rudie Martinson, who helped run Americans for Prosperity in North Dakota. Martinson is still on the Franklin Center’s board. One of the founders of the Franklin Center, John Tsarpalas, is a past president of the Sam Adams Alliance and director of the Illinois Republican Party.

The Franklin Center operation works quickly and efficiently. Here’s a good example, from a report by the Center for Media and Democracy. In 2012, the Idaho legislature took up a bill that was designed to keep minors from going to commercial tanning salons. It was uncontroversial—other states have instituted similar restrictions for minors due to concerns about the dangers of skin cancer—until the Idaho Reporter (one of the Franklin Center’s news sites) took up the issue in force. It posted six stories on the tanning-bed bill between February 16 and March 22 of that year, claiming that passing such a bill represents a “huge overreach by the state . . . an infringement upon a family’s right to make these kinds of choices.” A state Senate committee then voted the bill down.

Former Reuters chief White House correspondent Gene Gibbons conducted a review of statehouse coverage by traditional media outlets shortly after the spontaneous combustion of the Tea Party movement in 2009— and ran smack into the Franklin Center network. He was surprised at what he found, he wrote in his study for the NiemanReports publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard in 2010.

“For the most part, the people in charge of these would-be watchdog operations are political hacks out to subvert journalism in their quest to grab and keep power using whatever means they have to do so,” Gibbons wrote. “At the forefront of an effort to blur the distinction between statehouse reporting and political advocacy is the Franklin Center.” He added that such efforts were “political propaganda dressed up as journalism.”

Gibbons interviewed Jason Stverak in the spring of 2010 for the Nieman Foundation report. Stverak told him that the Franklin Center journalists were held to the same journalism ethics as those from traditional newspapers. They should be judged “based upon the content that they produce,” Stverak said.

But when Gibbons looked into how the Franklin Center went about its business, he indeed found “political propaganda dressed up as journalism.” Four months after he interviewed Stverak, Gibbons wrote, “The Franklin Center co-sponsored and played an active role in a two-day conference organized by Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The Right Online Agenda conference included such breakout sessions as ‘Intro to Online Activism’ and ‘Killing the Death Tax’ and featured speakers such as conservative U.S. Representative Michele Bachman of Minnesota and Tea Party activist Sharron Angle, a Republican who was then running against Harry Reid in the election for U.S. Senate in Nevada. No Democratic legislators were included in the program. The finale of the Las Vegas conference was a ‘November is Coming Rally.’ ”

But Gibbons also said that this was likely the future of some form of journalism and cited conservative columnist K. Daniel Glover in a subsequent report in June of 2010 on the trends for the Kennedy School of Government’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

“Once conservatives realize they can conduct great investigations that expose the flaws of intrusive government and the special interests that corrupt it, you will see more of them embracing that kind of journalism,” Glover told him. “Mainstream publications like the [Washington] Examiner and organizations like the Franklin Center . . . which helps support and fund budding watchdogs, are showing them the way.”

The Franklin Center sites also clearly drive follow-on news coverage, often uncritically. Its Wisconsin Reporter, for instance, once sponsored a poll that found more than 70 percent of people in the state supported an effort by Governor Scott Walker to cut the collective bargaining rights of the state’s public sector workers—a fight that angered the unions of teachers and other public sector workers. National news organizations, including MSNBC, picked up the coverage and reported on the poll.

In his study, Gibbons found a highly leveraged network of sites: “The State Policy Network–Sam Adams Alliance–Franklin Center troika is at least loosely associated with more than a dozen other conservative groups funding news sites in various states.”

By 2011, according to CMD and others, the Franklin Center had more than tripled in size from its 2009 start. Donors Trust, a 501(c)(3) charity whose Web site says they encourage giving to “fund organizations that undergird America’s founding principles,” alone provided $6.3 million to the Franklin Center in 2011, according to those reports. Mother Jones called Donors Trust “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement” in a 2013 article. The Franklin Center was the second-largest recipient of Donors Trust funding in 2011. A central contributor to Donors Trust is the Knowledge and Progress Fund founded and run by Charles Koch.

Today, Franklin Center reports make the national news circuit through the Fox News Channel, the Washington Examiner, and The Daily Caller and hit the front page of the Drudge Report consistently. For instance, at the end of October 2014—just a few days before the midterm elections, its Wisconsin Reporter story about Governor Scott Walker’s opponent in his reelection fight (Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke) was highlighted by Rush Limbaugh.

“Now this story hit,” Limbaugh said on his popular, syndicated radio program. “It’s a story about Mary Burke, the Democrat candidate there, and how she was fired from the family business for incompetence. Whatever the family business is, she was fired from it. She’s seeking the governorship in Wisconsin, and the point is, if her own family had to discharge her from the family business because of how much she gunked it up, then what business does she have being elected governor?”

Needless to say, Burke contested the news story. But the damage was done, with little time to deal with it publicly before the election.

One thing is also obvious from this episode. What began as a novel concept—shaping media coverage from a libertarian perspective by becoming the media and presenting only one side of an issue—in the years and months prior to the spontaneous rise of the Tea Party in Chicago in 2009 may now, according to Gibbons and others studying the intersection of philanthropy and journalism, become the norm for the way in which news is conveyed in American democracy.

Excerpted from “Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP” by Jeff Nesbit. Published by St. Martin’s Books. Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Nesbit. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

JEFF NESBIT was the director of public affairs for two federal science agencies. He was once profiled in The Wall Street as one of the seven people who ended the Tobacco Wars. Nesbit was a journalist, communications director for Vice President Quayle, and manager of a strategic-communications business for nearly fifteen years. Now the executive director of Climate Nexus, he writes a weekly science blog for U.S. News & World Report. He lives in New York.

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/09/16/the-nh-union-leader-just-hired-a-disciple-of-th/205587

The NH Union Leader Just Hired A Disciple Of The Koch Brothers To Run Its Editorial Page

ResearchSeptember 16, 2015 12:37 PM EDT ››› DANIEL ANGSTER

The New Hampshire Union Leader has hired Grant Bosse, a former researcher at a think tank funded by the Koch brothers, to be the new editor of the paper's editorial page. In his previous role as a columnist for New Hampshire's Concord Monitor, Bosse defended the Koch brothers and once wrote that progressives who believe the billionaire industrialists are trying to control the Republican Party subscribe to a "conspiracy theory."

**Grant Bosse Has Been Named Editor Of The Union Leader Editorial Page**

The Union Leader Announced Grant Bosse As Editor Of The Editorial Page.In a September 12 article in the Union Leader, Grant Bosse was introduced as the newspaper's new editorial page editor. *Union Leader,* [9/12/15]

New Opinion Editor Grant Bosse Worked For A Koch-Sponsored Think Tank For Years

Grant Bosse Worked For The Koch-Funded Josiah Bartlett Center For Over Four Years.In a 2013 column for the Concord Monitor, in which he defended the Koch brothers as philanthropists and libertarians, Bosse wrote that he had worked for the Josiah Bartlett Center (JBC) for four years and falsely claimed that the JBC was not funded by the Kochs (emphasis added):

The anti-corporate paranoia that fuels Koch conspiracy theories came into bloom in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Fortunately for Democrats, OWS fizzled well before Election Day because it highlighted radical liberalism at its worst. The insidious notion that corporations are out to get us has crept into our culture, and it's got to stop.

Of course, I could be so wrapped up the Kochs' web that I don't even know it. I asked Charlie Arlinghaus, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center - where I worked for the past four years and where I'm currently helping research New Hampshire budget issues - if he was part of the vast, secret Koch Empire.

"They don't give us money, but I wish they would," Arlinghaus responded. *Concord Monitor*, [3/17/13]

Josiah Bartlett Center For Public Policy (JBC) Has Significant Ties To Koch Brothers And American Legislative Exchange Council

The Josiah Bartlett Center For Public Policy Is Listed As A Member Of The State Policy Network.According to the State Policy Network (SPN) website, the Josiah Bartlett Center is an official member of the SPN. SPN.org, Accessed [9/16/15; Media Matters,1/6/14]

Center For Media And Democracy: State Policy Network (SPN) Members "Are Major Drivers Of The Right-Wing, ALEC-Backed Agenda In State Houses Nationwide." According to a report by the Center for Media and Democracy, SPN " 'think tanks' work together in coordinated efforts to push their agenda, often using the same cookie-cutter research and reports, all while claiming to be independent and creating state-focused solutions that purportedly advance the interests or traditions of the state." The report also states (emphasis added):

Although many of SPN's member organizations claim to be nonpartisan and independent, our in-depth investigation reveals that SPN and its member think tanks are major drivers of the right-wing, ALEC-backed agenda in state houses nationwide, with deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders, all while reporting little or no lobbying activities.Acknowledging the groups' political power and that their activities make them into something different than think tanks, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin called one SPN member a "do" tank. Center for Media and Democracy, [November 2013;*Media Matters,*1/6/14]

JBC Received More Than $400K From The Koch Brothers-Funded Donors Capital Fund.According to Granite State Progress, a progressive NGO that tracks politics in New Hampshire, the JBC received large donations from the Donors Capital Fund, a monetary go-between for several big money conservative donors, including the Koch brothers:

Between 2008 and 2010, JBC received $425,364 from the Koch-funded Donors Capital Fund, which represented anywhere from 39-70% of the center's income for those years. JBC also received thousands from the Kochs' Claude R. Lambe Foundation. Meanwhile, JBC has supported policy proposals that would directly benefit the Koch brothers' political and corporate interests, including opposing pollution regulations and calling for lower corporate taxes. Granite State Progress, [October 2013; Media*Matters,*1/6/14]

Donors Capital Fund Funded Special Projects At The JBC, Including Journalism Programs.Tax documents obtained by Granite State Progress expose the large sums granted to the JBC by Donors Capital Fund (click to enlarge):

Below shows Donors Capital Fund's itemized contributions to the Josiah Bartlett Center between 2009 and 2011. Donors has paid for Josiah Bartlett Center's direct mail programs, transparency project, and journalism project (likely the NH Watchdog).

Granite State Progress [October 2013; *Media Matters,*1/6/14]

The JBC Acts As An "Academic Validator" And The New Hampshire Watchdog Acts As A "Media Amplifier."In describing the cooperation between ALEC and JBC, Granite State Progress showed how JBC supports ALEC-sponsored legislation to give it academic credibility. The same idea is then echoed by the New Hampshire Watchdog and SPN affiliates with hopes of getting the issue picked up by mainstream media. Granite State Progress gives an example of the cycle in New Hampshire (click to enlarge):

Granite State Progress [October 2013;Media Matters,1/6/14]

The Guardian: SPN And ALEC Are Funded By The Searle Freedom Trust. The Guardianreported in December, 2013 that SPN members receive funding from tobacco giant Philip Morris and the billionaire Koch brothers, who are notorious for supporting the conservative agenda. FromThe Guardian's report:

The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.

The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire - now part of Pfizer - which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself. *The Guardian*, [12/5/13; Media Matters,1/6/14]

Bosse Defended The Koch Brothers As A Columnist For TheConcord Monitor

Bosse Wrote A Glowing Defense Of The Koch Brothers And Their Political Involvement.In an March 2013 column in the Concord Monitor, Bosse claimed that progressives believe a "conspiracy theory that the Koch brothers are secretly controlling the entire Republican Party." Bosse also defended ALEC's corporate-driven model legislation, saying the group provides "valuable" information to legislators.

Somehow the modern left has drawn itself deeper and deeper into a conspiracy theory that the Koch brothers are secretly controlling the entire Republican Party in an effort to bring about some sort of anarchist utopia. This despite thousands of articles about the Koch brothers' political activities and copious evidence that the Republican Party isn't that serious about sticking to the principles of limited government. It's the least effective, most well-publicized secret plan you've ever seen.

[...]

In New Hampshire, a group called Granite State Progress is currently obsessed with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

ALEC invites members of state legislatures to go to conferences, eat hotel food, sit through PowerPoints, and share legislative ideas. They also publish model legislation based on successful bills. If the 50 states are laboratories of democracy, ALEC is where scientists compare their results. ALEC is the right-leaning counterpart to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which caters to state bureaucrats as well as elected officials. I attended three NCSL conferences during my two years working at the State House, one of which was quite informative.

Representatives should probably pay their own way to go to ALEC or NCSL events, but the information they provide is valuable. We should learn from what other states have tried. I've often argued against being early adopters. But the theory that the Koch brothers and evil corporations are using ALEC to take over the New Hampshire General Court is laughable. *Concord Monitor*, [3/17/13]

B2 admin trained former general to be pundits?

The Madison County Record, "an Illinois weekly newspaper launched in September [2004] that bills itself as the county's legal journal, reports on one subject: the state courts in southern Illinois," Jeffrey H. Birnbaum reported in the Washington Post.^[33]

Birnbuam pointed to a "recent front page[that] carried an assortment of stories about lawsuits against businesses. In one, a woman sought $15,000 in damages for breaking her nose at a haunted house. In another, a woman sued a restaurant for $50,000 after she hurt her teeth on a chicken breast. ... Nowhere was it reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce created the Record as a weapon in its multimillion-dollar campaign against lawyers who file those kinds of suits," Birnbaum wrote.^[33

Uploaded on Jul 4, 2011

Agenda 21 is a product of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and it is the means by which Americans may soon be saddled with lower living standards. Agenda 21 is implementing "soft law" through ICLEI, which amounts to bribes and regulations imposed by state and local governments.

By Tom Eddlem - Liberty News Network Correspondent.

Brought to you by Liberty News Network - a project of The John Birch Society

fang machine:

PR Qorvis staff henretty posed as news reporter and interviewed college rep on student debt (fun to track down to check on hoist]

:{:{ }::{All the president's PR men: Raw Story investigation reveals revolving door on Iraq PR}::{

}:Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel KanePublished: Wednesday October 17, 2007:{

}:New questions are being raised about political operatives who have promoted President Bush?s Iraq war agenda and their role in spreading ?good news? about Iraq, illustrating a public relations revolving door among the Republican Party, the White House and the private sector.:{

}:A month long investigation by RAW STORY, originally prompted by the pro-Iraq war advertising of a ?grassroots? group called Freedom?s Watch, has unearthed a series of connections between the Bush administration and two subsidiaries of the PR giant Burson-Marsteller, particularly BM?s own ?grassroots? firm, Direct Impact.:{

}:Founded in 1988, Direct Impact boasts of over ?1,200 field representatives covering every Designated Market Area in the nation, ready to engage their community in a moment's notice. Self-designated as a ?grass roots? company, Direct Impact's community operations include media and online advocacy.:{

}:Direct Impact began working with Burson-Marsteller by 1997 and became a full-fledged subsidiary in late 2001. Following the acquisition, the formerly low-profile firm began hosting a steady stream of powerful Republican Party political and communications figures.:{

}:For example, Burson-Marsteller, which had hired former National Republican Congressional Committee communications director Craig Veith to oversee their Media Relations Practice, appointed him CEO of Direct Impact in late 2002.:{

}:As head of Media Relations, Veith and Prince Bandar, then Saudi ambassador to the US, had signed an agreement for Burson-Marsteller to work on repairing Saudi Arabia's image in the wake of 9/11 ? just three days after the attacks.:{

}:Veith was joined at Direct Impact in 2003 by a prominent GOP campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, who had held Veith?s former job of communications director for the NRCC since 2001. Schmidt left Direct Impact a year later to become a top strategist in the Bush-Cheney ?04 campaign, where he ran the rapid response operation. He then joined the White House staff as a Senior Adviser to the President and a Counselor to the Vice President.:{

}:In April 2005, former Bush-Cheney '04 Midwest regional political director Dave DenHerder joined Direct Impact. DenHerder would become Direct Impact's COO in September after Veith, who had been both CEO and COO, departed to found his own firm.:{

}:Freedom's Watch and Democracy Data:{

}:In August 2007, a ?grassroots? organization called Freedom?s Watch began running a series of ads attacking those who disagree with the Bush administration?s strategy in Iraq as ?anti-victory.? According to their mission statement, the group seeks to give voice to Iraq war issues which it claims have been underrepresented because ?those who want to quit while victory is possible have dominated the public debate about terror and Iraq since the 2004 election.?:{

}:Although Freedom?s Watch is a non-profit corporation ?dedicated to educating individuals about and advancing public policies that protect America?s interests at home and abroad,? the group was exposed by the online publication, Politico, as largely consisting of wealthy Republican donors, Neoconservatives, and, most prominently, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.:{

}:In his role as press secretary, Fleischer had helped sell the Iraq war to the American people. At a September 2002 press briefing, he said, ?There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest.? (WH Press Briefing 9/6/2002).:{

}:But Freedom?s Watch's relationship to Fleischer, as well as other political operatives in the RNC, is not the only issue surrounding the startup ?grassroots? effort.:{

}:Freedom's Watch is hosted on servers belonging to Democracy Data and Communications (DDC) ? DEMOCRACYDATA.COM ? which for many years had common ownership, leadership, and even shared office space and telephone numbers with Direct Impact.:{

}:According to public records, in 2001 both Direct Impact and Democracy Data were located at 1029 North Royal Street, Alexandria, VA. They also shared the following telephone number: 703-684-9690 and the following fax number: 703-683-9626. In 2005, well after Burson-Marstellar had acquired Direct Impact and also well after Veith had become CEO, they continued to share the same address as well as the same phone and fax numbers.:{

}:Although there is no apparent current direct link between Freedom?s Watch and Direct Impact, the overlapping of relationships raises questions about the true origin of the ?Freedom?s Watch? grassroots effort and a larger, more political use of domestic organizations to convey a message that mirrors that of the Administration.:{

}:Blackwater USA:{

}:The most recent news buzz about Burson-Marsteller has been about their contract with the embattled security contractor Blackwater USA.:{

}:According to the Nation?s blog, Blackwater?s subsidiary BKSH was "tasked with salvaging Blackwater's tattered image and allegedly murderous conduct. ... The account is being handled by Robert Tappan, a former State Department official who directed communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004.":{

}:Reached for comment last Tuesday, Paul Cordasco ? a spokesman for Burson-Marsteller ? said that the engagement with Blackwater was short term.:{

}:"Through a personal relationship, BKSH, a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, helped Blackwater prepare for their recent hearing before Congress,? Cordasco said. ?With the hearing over, BKSH's temporary engagement has ended.":{

}:Cordasco did not respond when asked to elaborate on what ?a personal relationship? means, nor to questions asking about what exactly the firm did for Blackwater.:{

}:Robert Tappan is not part of BKSH, however. In July 2006, Tappan became head of Burson-Marsteller?s Washington office with responsibility for overseeing the marketing operations of Direct Impact, a position he still maintains.:{

}:Prior to joining Burson-Marsteller, Tappan had served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, holding that position from November 2002 to June 2006. Tappan?s case, one of many, illustrates the vanishing boundaries between the private sector of public relations and government communications.:{

}:While at the State Department, Tappan was said to have been involved in the distribution of domestic pro-Afghanistan war propaganda, in the form of a ?feel good? Administration pre-packagedpiece about Afghanistan that appeared on local tv outlets in 2003, without a disclaimer, as a news story.:{

}:Tracking precisely how a ?good news? report on Afghanistan could have migrated to Memphis from the State Department is far from easy,? wrote two reporters for the New York Times. ?The State Department typically distributes its segments via satellite to international news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press Television News, which in turn distribute them to the major United States networks, which then transmit them to local affiliates.?:{

}:"Once these products leave our hands, we have no control,? Robert A. Tappan, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an interview. The department, he said, never intended its segments to be shown unedited and without attribution by local news programs. ?We do our utmost to identify them as State Department-produced products.??:{

}:Tappan was sent to Iraq in early 2004 to serve as Director of Strategic Communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority. At this point in the war, optimism about the US endeavor in Iraq was beginning to fade and the Pentagon was turning to public relations to bolster popular support.:{

}:?U.S. occupation in Iraq has led to progress, in spite of what the media say, according to Robert Tappan,? a news story after his return remarked. ?Tappan and the CPA were also responsible for an advertising campaign in Iraq, he said. The messages in the three-commercial series were ?We all yearn to live in a free Iraq,? ?I want my children to live in peace? and ?I want a prosperous Iraq.??:{

}:For his services, Tappan earned the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service ? the highest Defense Department civilian honor.:{

}:Immediately before joining the State Department, Tappan had been a senior vice president with public relations firm Powell Tate, whose co-founder and vice-chairman wasSheila Tate, a onetime press secretary to Nancy Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Tate was a participant in the Rumsfeld Group,named for the then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a kitchen cabinet of lobbyists and Republican insiders who met informally to help the White House and the Defense Department produce sellable talking points about Iraq. In particular, they worked on ?linking the anti-terrorism cause with efforts to convince the public 'of the need to engage ?rogue states? ? including Iraq ? that are likely to harbor terrorists.??:{

}:The group was brought together after 9/11 by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria "Torie" Clarke, who had advised Rumsfeld ?that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda.?:{

}:Like Tappan and his superiors at State, Clarke appeared to view news and the nature of reporting as a product to be delivered to the American people, ordered by a third party and often filtered through the foreign press.:{

}:In 2006, Direct Impact and Democracy Data appear to have parted ways. This was confirmed to Raw Story by Tappan in September.:{

}:?Burson-Marsteller does not have any role with Freedom?s Watch in any way, shape or form,? Tappan declared in an email to RAW STORY. ?Neither our firm, nor any of its subsidiary or affiliate companies, are involved with Freedom?s Watch. To the best of my knowledge, none of our principals, including me, have been involved with this organization, either on a personal or professional level, at any time.?:{

}:Taken in concert, this group of people suggests a pattern whereby GOP campaign and public relations expertise has been applied to selling the administration?s policies, particularly in the Middle East and Iraq, in a series of advertising campaigns where private PR and government advocacy become almost indistinguishable.:{

}:The privatization of propaganda:{

}:The National Security Act of 1947, Section 503(f), defines domestic propaganda as illegal. The Act states that ?no covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.?:{

}:However, when asked specifically by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) in February 2006 about his views of the President?s power to conduct domestic covert propaganda, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he was unable to answer the question::{

}:FEINSTEIN: Can the president suspend, in secret or otherwise, the application of Section 503 of the National Security Act, which states that no covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media? In other words, can he engage in otherwise illegal propaganda? :{

}:GONZALES: Senator, this will probably be my response to all of your questions of these kind of hypotheticals. Questions as to whether or not ? can Congress pass a statute that is in tension with the President?s constitutional authority? Those are very, very difficult questions, and for me to answer those questions sort of off the cuff, I think would not be responsible.Bush Administration propaganda efforts have been well-documented.:{

}:In 2004, for example, local stations were found to have received videos produced by more than 20 different federal agencies to promote the administration?s policies, many of which aired as if they were the network?s own reporting. The Army and Air Force?s Hometown News Service has delivered ?good military news? to an estimated 41 million homes. Nor were commentators immune: In January 2005, news emerged that conservative commentator Armstrong Williamshad received $240,000 from the Education Department to promote the No Child Left Behind Act.:{

}:Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories. Contact: larisa@rawstory.com:{

}:Muriel Kane is director of research for Raw Story.}:http://rawstory.com/news/2007/All_presidents_PR_men_Raw_Story_1017.html===

DWJ is a major U.S. broadcast PR company that states on its website that "produces newsworthy video news releases, satellite media tours, radio news programming and public service campaigns and gets their stories aired on TV and radio". [1]

[hide]

VNRs and "pay to play"

In an article in The Broadcast News, a DWJ newsletter, the company dismissed the practice of companies paying broadcast companies to air video news releases (VNRs) or other PR broadcast material. While such companies cited high audience reach numbers, DWJ argued that the greatest impact was by taking time to get VNRs aired on news programs: "Yes, it is much more difficult to keep pitching a story to TV stations, re-angling it if they aren't interested and reminding them of it every time there is a new peg on the day's news agenda. But the rewards are airings on legitimate news shows, which have the most credibility and audiences who tune in to watch the news," DWJ stated. [2]

Amidst the controversy in early 2005 over the use of VNRs, DWJ defended their use. "VNRs have been used as educational or informational tools by government agencies for many years. Problems arise when they cross over into promoting controversial policy," DWJ stated in its newsletter. [3]

Satellite media tours

In October 2007, the Miami Herald reported on one of DWJ's satellite media tours: ^[1]

In a round of satellite interviews with broadcast journalists on how to combat colds, nurse Lynne Griffin touted Soft Soap liquid soap for keeping germs away, Cepacol lozenges to soothe a sore throat and Sudacare plug-in vaporizer to sleep better when congested. "I recommend people be proactive and have these products on hand," Griffin said.A public relations firm, DWJ Television in Ridgewood, N.J., hired Griffin to promote the products for Colgate, Cepacol and Pfizer, according to the DWJ website.

BIO 2008

A promotional website for the industry group Biotechnology Industry Organization's June 2008 convention states: [4]

BIO has retained DWJ Television to provide videography, TV, and radio broadcast services, as well as webcasting and podcasting, during the 2008 BIO International Convention.DWJ will operate the BIO TV® booth, a radio booth, and a television interview position for registered participants to use (subject to availability), either with DWJ’s cameras and crew or your own. Digital editing into any format also will be available on-site. ...DWJ Television can shoot footage and edit a video for your exhibit booth or B-roll/soundbites for news broadcasters. ...DWJ will produce and distribute radio newsfeeds daily throughout the convention. DWJ will also maintain live fiber and satellite capability 24/7 for the delivery of important corporate news and interviews during the convention – to any and all TV stations in the U.S. or abroad. ...DWJ Television can edit Convention highlight videos for e-mailing to customers, colleagues, and staff members. Results for broadcast and internet projects will be tracked using Nielsen SIGMA and PrimeNewswire.

Clients

According to company press releases and other sources as indicated below, DWJ's clients include: [5]

Personnel

Brian Unger - Director
Dan Johnson

Contact details

1 Robinson Lane

Ridgewood, NJ 07450

Direct: (201) 445-1711

Fax: (201) 445-8352

E-mail: dwjinfo AT dwjtv.com

Web: http://www.dwjtv.com/

SourceWatch resources

External links

References

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Douglas Hanks, "TV experts get big bucks for plugs: Where's the Hot New Place To Vacation? Depends on Who's Paying the Travel Experts on Television," Miami Herald, October 7, 2007.

Articles

George S. Mc Quade III, "Old Dogs & New Tricks: Getting people to Stop, Look & Listen in a New Way", Eye on PR, Mayop Communication, 2001.
"Bloggers Stir New Scandals About Journalists, Both Real and Fake", The Broadcast Report, DWJ, March 2005.
"Transcript to VNR Teleconference", O'Dwyers PR Daily, March 17, 2005. (Sub req'd).

Categories:

11/14

Big Oil’s influence on corporate media has American news outlets shamefully shirking climate coverage. But oil companies won’t be satisfied by merely controlling the national news. In the poor Californian city of Richmond, where Chevron wants to upgrade a polluting refinery that is wont to explode, the oil giant has started an online newspaper.

The *Richmond Standard* is a hyperlocal journalism site launched in January with the hallmarks of a typical Patch site (before said service was dumped by AOL): minimally reported stories about local crime, public meetings, and sports, told with the inverted-pyramid style of traditional news writing.

But the Standard is not your typical, well-intentioned but underfunded local reporting initiative; it’s a Chevron propaganda rag that’s run and written by the company’s flacks. *The San Francisco Chronicle* delves into the ethics of such an initiative:

The idea of the nation’s second-largest oil company funding a local news site harkens back to an era of journalism when business magnates often owned newspapers to promote their personal financial or political agendas. Now that mainstream newspapers are struggling to survive, online news sites are testing ways to fund their operations, said Edward Wasserman, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

But the idea of a company sponsoring news in a community where it operates still poses problems, he said.

“The tradition of press independence — even though in many times it’s more aspirational than real — is nevertheless a cornerstone principle,” Wasserman said. The Standard “is a different model. It’s clearly meant as a community outreach effort, so it’s born in an ethically challenged area.”

The Standard claims to be Richmond’s first “community-driven daily news source” since prior to 1990, yet Wasserman’s school runs Richmond Confidential — a rival site that frequently covers Chevron. The Standard has a “Chevron speaks” section, which has so far been used to introduce the website (which it says could “blaze the trail for a new model of corporate-sponsored, community-generated news”), and tocriticize negative press coverage of its plans to upgrade the refinery. But the positive coverage of Chevron and its refinery also spills into the “News” section.

Chevron’s San Francisco-based PR consultants poached colorful crime reporter Mike Aldax away from the San Francisco Examiner late last year, hiring him to work as an account manager and to write Richmond Standard’s articles. A Chevron spokesperson described the writer as “independent,” but a recent tweet reminds us that Aldax’s loyalties lie with his client:

“Richmond residents are not going to be fooled — they know where we’re coming from,” Aldax said. “The onus is on me to provide information that’s factual and accurate.”

Note that Aldax doesn’t say anything about “balance.” As theChronicle points out, Aldax didn’t quote activists who oppose the refinery upgrade in a recent story about the project’s “robust” environmental impact report.

Perhaps we can look forward to more such ventures in other communities where Chevron operates. The *Ecuador Standard*, anyone?

Source:New Chevron website covers Richmond news, San Francisco Chronicle.

ATI

A month before the vote, Montana residents woke up to a fake newspaper on their doorstep called “The Montana Statesman.”

The publication calls itself “the largest and most trusted news source” but is actually a series of ATP-funded attacks on Bullock. It leads with a giant headline that reads “Bullock Admits Failure.”

The “news” story below claims that the attorney general has let “1 in 4 sex offenders go unregistered.” It includes four photos: three registered sex offenders and Bullock.

The group can continue to raise money on the promise that “no politician, no bureaucrat, and no radical environmentalist will ever know you helped make this program possible,” as its 2010 briefing to donors reads. “You can just sit back on election night and see what a difference you’ve made.”

Unsworth says his 2010 investigation did not stop ATP, and outside spending that has already flooded the state is sure to intensify, particularly in light of the Citizens Uniteddecision. He calls the advertising a “mess of trash that lays at the feet of the public,” paid for by “funny money with no legal constraints.”

“We don’t know who’s saying these crazy things,” he added, “so the public has to suffer and our political system suffers as a result.”

===

uscoc:

No wonder secrecy is a hallmark of the U.S. Chamber/ILR's strategy when getting involved in these electoral races. Indeed, the organization sometimes goes to great lengths to keep its involvement and funding a secret. The Huffington Post is definitely on the right track with its new "tip line" seeking to find out who is backing them. We're guessing Deborah Sennthinks so too.

In 2004, Senn, who was Washington State's insurance commissioner, ran for state Attorney General. She had been known as a pro-consumer commissioner, committed to protecting the rights of her state's policyholders. She was comfortably ahead in the polls but in September 2004, right before Washington's Democratic primary, a group called the Voters Education Committee (VEC) ran a series of nasty and expensive attack ads against her. The state's Public Disclosure Commission sought financial information about the VEC but was denied. It was only after the state filed a lawsuit that :{the truth came to light:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: -- that the Chamber was VEC's sole contributor, spending $1.5 million on the anti-Senn ads. Senn won the primary despite the smears, but the damage had been done. After continuing PR attacks, she lost the general election.

The Chamber said that its activities constituted voter education and issue advocacy, not campaigning or political advocacy that can be regulated by election laws. However, the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission disagreed, finding that its ads impugned the character and record of Deborah Senn and thus was "express advocacy" -- not "issue advocacy." The Washington State Supreme Court agreed, telling the Chamber to reveal its donors.

Since then, the ILR has come under heavy criticism in a few other ways. Theodore Eisenberg, Professor of Law and Statistical Sciences at Cornell University, has just published a scathing attack on the integrity, validity and impact of the ILR's annual "ranking" of states, which is simply a survey of corporate lawyers many of whose clients have been taken to court for causing harm.

They have also created several "newspapers" around the country that present readers with biased, anti-victim accounts of cases and pro-"tort reform" commentary. Initially, the Chamber tried to hide that it created the papers to use, as the Washington Post wrote, "as a weapon in its multimillion-dollar campaign against lawyers who file those kinds of suits."

But all of this secrecy has to be expected. After all, think of their goal: to convince average Americans to give up their rights to go to court against reckless corporations and to make sure the insurance industry can keep a little more money in its pocket. That's what "tort reform" is. And that is some PR feat.

chamberwatch 2011

If the Chamber is a black box in terms of its disclosure, the Institute for Legal Reform is

the black box inside that black box. Similar to how the Chamber allows corporations to

anonymously pursue their lobbying agendas by funneling money through the Chamber

(which in turn does the dirty work for these corporations), increasingly, the Institute for

Legal Reform allows the Chamber to anonymously pursue efforts that it wishes to keep

out of the press, in a different pool of money.

...

n March ofthe following year,the ILR stepped up their campaign in a serious way,

hiring Michael Mukasey,the formerU.S. AttorneyGeneral under PresidentGeorge W.

Bush, to lobby on “issues related to possible amendments to the Foreign Corrupt

Practices Act and issues related to criminal law and policies affecting U.S. corporations.”

In the first three quarters of 2011, the ILR has thus far reported paying Mukasey’s law

firm $140,000xii.

...

The ILR and theNewspaper Business:A“Shameful Propaganda Machine”

In addition to its lobbying and political operations, since 2004, the ILR has been in the

“news” business, publishing actual newspapers in various states and cities with content

that reflects its pro‐tort reform agenda—but in large measure, without a disclaimer

about the bias and affiliation of the publisher. In 2004, Stanton D. Anderson, an ILR

advisor at the time, and Chamber President Tom Donohue published the first of these

papers, theMadison‐St. Clair Record in Illinois. As reported by the Washington Post in

2004:

“Anderson said he didn't agonize over ethics when he was thrashing around…for

a new way to bring attention to the increasing burden class action lawsuits place

on companies. He was focused instead on his frustration that Madison County's

court system plays host to more class action lawsuit filings than any other

country in the nation…His brainstorm: buy a newspaper to spotlight the county's

courts. Purchasing an existing publication proved too pricey even for the

chamber's Institute for Legal Reform, which spent $40 million this year to battle

trial lawyers. So he and Thomas J. Donohue, the chamber's president, decided to

start a newspaper from scratch.”xxv

Other publications followed: LegalNewsline.com, the West Virginia Record, the

Southeast Texas Record, the Louisiana Record, and the Pennsylvania Record all bear the

ILR stamp.

Plenty of media outlets‐‐ including the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review,

NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University‐‐ have

covered the ILR’s lack of transparency in informing readers about its ownership of the

papers and claims of the publications’ bias to the ILR’s agenda.

Yet the ILR itself has not seen a similar need to disclose. Referring to the Madison‐St.

Clair Record, Andersen simply admitted the paper had a “point of view.” The Record’s

publisher, Brian Timpone (who is also on the masthead of the other Records), would

only say, “I'm a biased guy. I'm a Republican.”xxvi The ILR has reported its ownership of

the Madison County Record in its 990 tax forms since 2005, but doesn’t report any of

the other newspapers as separate entities.

The ILR announced its launch of LegalNewlsine.com on February 1, 2007xxvii yet

LegalNewsline’s “About Us” pagexxviii has no mention of the U.S. Chamber or the ILR’s

ownership of the site, as of October 18, 2011. That is also true of the online “About Us”

pages on the websites of the Madison‐St. Clair Record, the West Virginia Record,

Southeast Texas Record, and the Louisiana Record.

Following the 2004 launch ofthe Madison County Record,the Washington Post’sJeffrey

Birnbaum wrote,

“Nowhere was it reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce created the

Record as a weapon in its multimillion‐dollar campaign against lawyers who file

those kinds of suits…. The chamber is one of a growing number of advocacy

groups that blur the distinction between legitimate media and propaganda to

promote their causes.”

xxix

Six years and four publications later, Laura McGann of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab

wrote an October 2010 piece on the ILR’s publications entitled, “Using the power of

publishing to influence: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s entry into the news biz.”

McGann explained,

“Nowhere on the main pages of the Chamber sites is the Institute or Chamber

mentioned. In 2008, the most recent year available, the Institute spent $41

million (pdf) on various activities pushing for the cause of tort reform. At the

same time, the Institute’s reporters are covering civil cases with large

settlements and other tort reform‐related news — and working for news outlets

set up in some of the nation’s most tort‐friendly jurisdictions.”xxx

The Chamber’s questionable publications have not escaped legal scrutiny. According to

the Houston Chronicle, in 2007, Texas lawyer Brent Coon subpoenaed the editor and

reporter of the Southeast Texas Record, “questioning about whether they were trying to

taint jurors by handing out their paper. ‘This shameful propaganda machine is deceptive

and demonstrates a willingness to misrepresent fact,’ Coon complained in court

papers.”

xxxi Ultimately, Coon’s request to depose the editor and reporter of the

Chamber’s Texas paper was denied,

xxxii but throughout the debacle, editor Timpone

“said the paper's ownership doesn't matter in all this.”

Just five months ago, the ILR rolled out its newest publication, the Pennsylvania Record.

For the first time, the paper acknowledged the ILR connection on its website, noting on

its “About Us” page, “the Record newspapers and Legal Newsline are owned by the

Institute for Legal Reform, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.”

There are scant traces of the U.S. Chamber’s ownership of its legal publications in five

different states and of LegalNewsline.com, but they are overwhelmingly absent.

Furthermore, both the Chamber and editor overtly support this journalistic opacity, and

keeping ownership details under wraps. In a larger context, the Chamber’s legal

publications are yet another example of its extreme tactics to further a corporate

agenda while deliberately choosing anonymity

The group is now locked in an ongoing dispute with Montana authorities, who ruled in October 2010 that the nonprofit should have registered as a political committee and should have to disclose its donors. WTP sued. A hearing is set for March.

In the meantime, the group has changed its name to American Tradition Partnership, reflecting its larger ambitions. This month, it sent Montana voters a mailer in the form of a newspaper calledthe Montana Statesman that claimed to be the state’s “largest & most trusted news source.”

The front page accused the Democratic gubernatorial candidate of being soft on sex offenders.

...

This year, American Tradition Partnership is as active as ever. It’s suing to try to overturn contribution limits in Montana, so far unsuccessfully. The group sent out mailers attacking candidates before the June primary in Montana, reporting none of them to the state as political expenditures. It later put out a press release saying that 12 of the 14 candidates it backed had won.

For the general election, the group appears to be targeting Montana’s attorney general, Steve Bullock, the Democratic candidate for governor. As attorney general, Bullock fought the partnership’s lawsuits against the state, including the one that ended up in the Supreme Court.

The first issue of the partnership’s Montana Statesman newspaper, dated Oct. 7, which a group press release said was sent to 180,000 voters, featured four photographs on the front page: Three of registered sex offenders, and one of Bullock, accusing him of allowing one in four sex offenders to go unregistered. “Bullock admits failure,” the headline announced. A full-page ad accused Bullock of taking illegal corporate contributions and of “criminal hypocrisy.”

The Statesman’s editor and publisher is none other than Ferguson, the partnership’s executive director, described as an “award-winning newspaper veteran” who has been “commended by other newspapers for his ‘honest, intelligent and issue-oriented’ approach.”

Ferguson didn’t respond to a question about his journalism credentials.

“Conservative group American Tradition Partnership now one of nation’s biggest media outlets,” said a press release on the group’s website, adding that the newspaper would publish “several” editions through Election Day and into 2013.

http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/big-sky-big-money/story/documents-found-meth-house-bare-inner-workings-dar/

SPN's Legislative Agenda Is Frequently Buttressed by Its Forays as "Press" and the Echoes of Its Allies in the Growing Right-Wing State "Press" Corps. As CMD was one of the first to document, SPN groups like the Goldwater Institute are hiring people to act as reporters, and the legislative agenda of SPN is increasingly echoed by the growing right-wing infrastructure of groups that pose as press. Some even get their stories or "reports" picked up as news and delivered to state newspapers as a "wire" service like the Associated Press, as with the Franklin Center's Watchdog.org groups and the Ryun brothers-allied "American Majority" and "Media Trackers" operations.

===

Manufactured journalism

From SourceWatch

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manufactured_journalism

Jum

Manufactured journalism, as so aptly illustrated in the February 13, 2005, Houston Chronicle news story below, is "the practice of buying ostensibly independent reporters and writers to shill for politicians."

Avery Walker, The Raw Story columnist, points out in "The worst of the old names itself the voice of the new" that

"Last week, cable news programs were overpopulated with forgettable, self-important talking heads ranting about the lack of “credentials” behind the Gannon discovery. Apparently, this implies that the facts and evidence offered by bloggers are somehow made false by the fact that their presenters never pleasured Scott McClellan for a press pass. Though certainly not for the White House, I’ve gone through the credential process as a representative of newspapers, and I’ve also chosen the internet as my preferred outlet. As someone who carries two with me at all times, let me just tell you that anybody who believes their press pass somehow makes their work more true is either a deranged egomaniac or completely incompetent. Of course, I mean that in the nicest way possible."If the press were still expected to do their job, Jeff Gannon would never have made headlines in any sense. But they’re not. The New York Times buried a story that seemed to indicate Bush had indeed cheated in the debates. A major news outlet carried a story about an Aryan supremacist’s (William Regnery II) founding of a whites-only dating site, just days before quoting the same man as a Swift Boat Vet, never making the connection. A cable comedy show that doesn’t even gather firsthand information shames the news coverage of four twenty four-hour news channels. And the only sources of trustworthy news about international policy are BBC and PBS. Let’s all think about that for a moment."And now we have Jeff Gannon, so shameless a mouthpiece for the right that his stupidity has thrust him into the limelight. Finally, a journalist so unqualified, he made news! Unfortunately, the response of print journalists has often been to crucify not Gannon, who was especially inept at doing their job without those “credentials” that they’re so crazy about, but Americablog, which managed to outdo them without ever having to claim that they were only a pimp."The general claim being regurgitated is that internet sites are digging up dirt from Gannon’s past that is personal and unrelated to his career, making claims that are unsupported as they go along. And I’ll agree that Gannon’s sex life isn’t the issue; it merely serves to illustrate how completely ludicrous the GOP propaganda machine is. Well, that and to make us all yearn for the good ol’ days, when the whores worked in the White House, not out of it."

The *Houston Chronicle* provided a summation to date on the case of Jeff Gannon a.k.a. James D. Guckert, whose status as a fake White House "correspondent" for the fake news agency Talon News was outted by bloggers:

"The unmasking of an alleged journalist who used a pseudonym to gain access to White House briefings and news conferences, raises more questions about the Bush administration's tactics for securing favorable news. James Guckert, who used the Talon News byline Jeff Gannon, managed to get access to the White House on a daily basis for two years.""Guckert questioned President Bush at a January news conference last month, tossing a softball query that ridiculed Democrats for 'being divorced from reality.' The organization Guckert worked for turned out to be an arm of a partisan group, GOPUSA, a conservative Web site based in Houston and dedicated to 'spreading the conservative message throughout America.' It turns out Talon News was created only a few days before Guckert first applied for a White House daily pass."Guckert was denied similar credentials to cover Capitol Hill because of questions about his legitimacy as a reporter. His identity was exposed by bloggers, and he turned out to be associated with a number of sexually oriented Web sites. Guckert resigned, claiming harassment by liberals."Guckert's only credential as a journalist appears to be attendance at a two-day seminar by the conservative Leadership Oriented Broadcast Journalism School [1]. He apparently gained access to the White House using little more than a fake name, a Social Security number, and date of birth. In an age of heightened security, it's hard to believe this lapse could occur without someone inside the White House vouching for Guckert. The alternative would be little meaningful security at the executive mansion."White House press secretary Scott McClellan said President Bush did not know who Guckert was. A journalist familiar with the process says it's likely Bush was tipped by his press staff that 'the bald guy would lob him an easy one.' If so, setting up ringers to toss fawning questions to the president is another indication, if any were needed, that the administration prefers the media to be propagandists rather than independent inquisitors."At least there's no indication the White House was involved in directly paying Guckert for his services, as the administration did in three other recent incidents. Last month, conservative commentator Armstrong Williams apologized for not disclosing that his company had received $240,000 from a public relations agency hired by the Department of Education to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind Act." (See Bush administration education reform.)"Syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher also apologized to her readers for not disclosing a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help create materials used to promote Bush's $300 million initiative encouraging marriage to strengthen families."HHS later disclosed that a third conservative columnist, Michael McManus, had received $10,000 to promote Bush's marriage initiative, according to an Associated Press report. His weekly column appears in about 50 newspapers."The practice of buying ostensibly independent reporters and writers to shill for politicians deceives the public and corrupts the free media. Allowing fake reporters to compete with credentialed journalists for sparse press conference time with the leader of the free world demeans the whole process."

On February 16, 2005, MensNewsDaily.com countered with "Left-Wing Activist Poses as Reporter At White House Press Briefings":

"... media watch-group Accuracy in Media charged today that a liberal activist and associate of Ralph Nader has been obtaining access to White House press briefings while claiming to be a legitimate news reporter."Russell Mokhiber, who sells a $795 a year newsletter that bashes corporations, attends the briefings to make obscure anti-Bush political points. Recently, for example, he asked spokesman Scott McClellan whether President Bush violated one of the Ten Commandments by invading Iraq. Mokhiber, who told AIM that he has never taken a journalism class in his life and was denied a permanent White House press pass, posts his ludicrous questions and answers on a far-left web site under the title 'Scottie & Me'."

The Accuracy in Media article to which MensNewsDaily.com refers was actually posted February 11, 2005, and not on the link provided.
The "far-left web site" referred to is Common Dreams.

White House 'Daily Show'

Frank Rich, writing in the February 20, 2005, New York Times article "The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'," says that:

"By my count, 'Jeff Gannon' is now at least the sixth 'journalist' (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's 'marriage' initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ('In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting,' went the script) pretending to 'sort through the details' of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such 'reports', some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal 'covert propaganda' by the Government Accountability Office."Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration's overall propaganda effort. President Bush wasn't entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion 'scripted' while it was still going on. (And 'Jeff Gannon' apparently wasn't even at that one). Everything is scripted."The pre-fab 'Ask President Bush' town hall-style meetings held during last year's campaign (typical question: 'Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?') were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, 'unsuspecting viewers' tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were 'watching a completely open forum.' A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the DISH Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?""It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned 'minders' - attractive women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message."

SourceWatch Resources

External links

See manufactured journalism/External Links.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manufactured_journalism"

Category: Scandals

===

"Jeff Gannon" is the pseudonym used by James Dale Guckert, unmasked in February 2005 by John Aravosis's AMERICAblog.org Blogspot and Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group based in Washington, DC, to be a fake White House "correspondent" working for the pseudo news organization Talon News, which is closely tied to GOPUSA, a right-wing site owned by a Texas-based Republican activist.

Gannon had access to the White House and was admitted to the White House press briefing room on day press passes for almost two years. He was recognized for editorializing before asking "softball" questions of the White House press staff and, even on occasion, of President George W. Bush, to break up lines of aggressive questioning by legitimate reporters, thereby assisting the staff in controlling press conferences.

Contents[hide]

Summary

Investigation has followed at a feverish pace by blogspots Media Matters for America, Daily Kos, The Raw Story, Crooks and Liars, Media Citizen, Editor & Publisher, and other bloggers, as well as interviews with Gannon on CNN and MSNBC and through other media outlets, which discovered that, among other things, "Jeff Gannon"

has no media experience other than a two-day training course at The Leadership Institute's Broadcast School of Journalism
was denied media credentials April 7, 2004, by the "Standing Committee of Correspondents, the press body that oversees the distribution of credentials on Capitol Hill"
was not working for a recognized media outlet
had access to the White House press briefing room before Talon News was operational
operates an online male escort service [1]
had a career as a $200-an-hour escort [2]. A particularly indiscreet aspect was that he used the same pseudonym for both his "escort" work and his "journalist" work!
posed nude in photos discovered on numerous gay web sites, including MaleCorps.com, WorkingBoys.net and MeetLocalMen.com [3][4]
owns several male gay porn websites, including military-themed escort domain names [5]
had access to the Valerie Plame CIA memo
raises questions about posing a security risk as he somehow bypassed both Secret Service and FBI screening to access the White House press room
raises questions as to how he gained access to the White House press room when legitimate journalists cannot
is suspected of being a "plant" for Republican operative Karl Rove
is suspected of assisting the GOP to "attack" Democratic Senator Tom Daschle
knew about shock and awe attack on Iraq four hours before it happened [6]
bragged to Free Republic that he fed information to Sean Hannity on September 10, 2004, "about Mary Mapes which would discredit Dan Rather's sources on the National Guard story" [7]

"Jeff Gannon"'s GOPUSA bio via the WaybackMachine, which is gone from both the Talon News and GOPUSA web sites.
"Jeff Gannon" in the Wikipedia.
"Jeff Gannon" in the dKosopedia.

For those to need to catch up, perhaps, see World O'Crap's version of "'Jeff Gannon / James Guckert' for Dummies," with links to other versions (February 23, 2005).

Current status

In June 2008, Editor & Publisher reported that Gannon / Guckert is an active member of the National Press Club. "Since 2006, Gannon ... has been a member in good standing and currently serves on two press club committees, according to the esteemed journalistic organization. He also blogs on the Press Club Web site, as well as on his own online page." ^[1]

"Press Club rules require that a new member be sponsored by at least two current members in good standing. Gannon said Rick Dunham, then with BusinessWeek and now a Houston Chronicle reporter, was one of his sponsors. He said he could not remember the other." Dunham said that he sponsored Gannon / Guckert because he wanted the Press Club "to expand our membership into blogging and multimedia." ^[1]

According to a May 2007 Washington Post column, Gannon / Guckert is now the spokesman for the International Bible Reading Association. "Let us pray for the power to understand how Gannon made his way from HotMilitaryStud.com to the International Bible Reading Association," Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote drily. [8]

Gannon blog

*Gannonblog* is back .. again! Accessed March 3, 2005.

Hoffmania! announced February 25, 2005, that "Guckert Halts Weblog Operation," "Citing 'nasty criticism of my new blog' and 'the resultent [sic] harm done to my freinds [sic] and family,' Jim 'Jeff Gannon' Guckert has ceased operating his new weblog after just a day of operation and has vowed to return to the web at a later date.

"The shutdown follows a pattern of behavior where the former White House reporter and still male prostitute withdraws from a web presence after just one day of bearing the brunt of opposition critics."This time, the decision came after repeated harsh words were bandied around the liberal blogosphere regarding the quality of Guckert's new venture."

"Gannon launches a blog!," AMERICAblog Blogspot, February 24, 2005:

"Yes, we know this is him because it's the same Web address he was using while working at Talon News, and he answers emails addressed to him at this address. We have other proof as well, this is him. He pulled his site after he resigned. He's now relaunched it, with a vengeance apparently. I can't imagine Karl Rove is very happy right now."

"Bruised but not broken," jeffgannon.com, February 24, 2005:

"I'm baaaaaaack! If you thought I was going to slink away - then you don't know much about me. Someone still has to battle the Left and now that I've emerged from the crucible, I'm stronger than before."Despite all the pleas from the Left to go over to the 'dark side' and expose the 'corrupt Bush administration' simply isn't going to happen. My faith and my ideology are rock solid."Still, the last few weeks have been difficult for my family and my associates. To them I offer my apology and gratitude for their support."In regard to the allegations about my personal life, I have been advised by my attorneys not to comment on any of the details pending the outcome of any possible legal action I might pursue. Therefore, I won't be discussing any of that stuff here."

Criticism

John Aravosis wrote in the February 23, 2005, AMERICAblog Blogspot that "WorldNetDaily savages GannonGuckert."

"One of the best, BEST, stories ever about GannonGuckertGate and what it means, and why it matters, comes from one of the most - MOST - conservative pro-Bush news sources on the Internet. This guy spells out exactly why this is a story. Exactly why this is so outrageous. And note, his column doesn't even criticize us, the liberal bloggers. It is pure and simple an article about how outrageous Gannon's and Talon's AND THE WHITE HOUSE'S actions were in this entire affair."

Joseph Farah, "No substitute for real journalism," WorldNetDaily:

"Who knows why this symbiotic relationship succeeded for as long as it did? Perhaps Gannon-Guckert knew something about people in the Bush administration. Or, perhaps some inside the Bush administration knew the truth about Gannon-Guckert. We may never know the full truth."But the whole sordid affair illustrates just why a truly free and independent press is so vital to watchdogging government."

Connections

Rove-Gannon

Dotty, Lynch,"Rove-Gannon Connection?," CBS News, February 18, 2005:

"So when Jeff Gannon, White House 'reporter' for Talon 'News,' was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable. Gannon says that he met Rove only once, at a White House Christmas party, and Gannon is kind of small potatoes for Rove at this point in his career."But Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon's aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the 'boy genius.' Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon.""This week Democrats, who have serious case of Rove envy, went a little nuts and started sending around information and graphic pictures of Gannon and his porn Web sites. But it is the more routine part of Gannon's life that deserves serious scrutiny. Planting or even just sanctioning a political operative in the WH press room is a dangerous precedent and Karl Rove's hope to become a respected policymaker will be hampered if the dirty tricks from his political past are more apparent than his desire to spread liberty around the globe."

Also see Treasongate: Beyond Karl Rove.

Liddy-Gannon

At the September 16-18, 2004, "GOPUSA Issues & Answers Conference" held in Washington, DC, the Friday, September 17th 3:30-4:15 Policy Session IV - Politics and the Media was moderated by G. Gordon Liddy, "Radio Talk Show Host and Former Presidential Advisor," and the panel consisted of (as stated):

Jeff Gannon, White House Correspondent, Talon News
Paul Rodriguez, Managing Editor, Insight Magazine
Peter Roff, National Political Analyst, UPI

Credentials

In his February 11, 2005, Media Citizen Blogspot article "Gannon's White House Maneuver," Tim Karr provided a link to Talon News' application on behalf of Guckert/Gannon to the "Standing Committee of Correspondents, the press body that oversees the distribution of credentials on Capitol Hill." According to the Committee's April 7, 2004, minutes, the application was unanimously denied. However:

The application clearly states that the "application [was] from James Guckert, who writes under the name Jeff Gannon, of Talon News."2. The application provides a clue that, at the time of the application, Guckert/Gannon was not a full-time paid employee of Talon News:As "... a stipend was arranged that would provide more than half of Mr. Guckerts income in an effort to comply with the gallery's requirement that correspondents be paid, full time employees of the organization for which they are applying."3. The application states that "information [had] been requested about Mr. Guckert's role as executive director of the Free Speech Foundation in order to determine whether it would conflict with gallery rules regarding paid promotion, publicity, and advertising."

On the evening of February 17, 2005, the Daily Kos blogspot issued a request for distribution of the following press release, asking that "As Propagannon is being picked up by the national media, it is critical that we keep them focused on the important aspect of this: How did Guckert get access, and did he have anything to do with the Plame leak?"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEBrian Kelly at nybri2@yahoo.comMember, DailyKos.comWHITE HOUSE SCRAMBLES TO EXPLAINFAKE REPORTER IN ITS PRESS CORPSFeb.17, 2005 - Internet researchers have uncovered new evidence that contradicts the Bush Administration's claims about James Guckert, a Republican activist allegedly involved in criminal activities and linked to an incident involving a major breach of national security. Guckert, operating as "Jeff Gannon," was granted daily access to White House press briefings for more than two years as a "reporter" for Talon News.White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan stated that Guckert was granted access in part because he was affiliated with a news organization that "publishes regularly." But yesterday, bloggers discovered video footage suggesting this standard was not applied to Guckert. Video footage of a Feb. 28, 2003 White House press briefing shows Guckert, apparently unaffiliated with any news organization, asking former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer a question. It is unclear why Guckert was granted any pass at this time, since the Internet-based Talon News did not register its domain name until March 29, 2003.Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, reported today she was denied press credentials at the start of the Bush administration in 2001. Yet Guckert, whose only journalistic training was derived from a $50 weekend seminar, was repeatedly granted access.Despite calls from Congress for the White House to disclose its standards for entrance to the briefing room, the Bush administration has yet to reveal its credentialing standards or details surrounding the scandal, including: specific dates when Guckert was admitted to the briefing room, how many passes he was issued, as well as how he cleared a Secret Service background check while owing the state of Delaware over $20,000 in back taxes (penalties and interest) and possibly engaging in prostitution, as revealed by Americablog.org.Guckert has also been implicated in a leak of federal classified information that revealed the identity of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame. Revealing the identity of an undercover agent is a federal crime.White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has insisted that President Bush will do anything he can to assist the Plame investigation. But the White House has not answered questions about the role of Guckert in the Plame investigation or his inexplicable access to White House Press Corps briefings.

Background

According to *Free Republic*, "Since June 23, 2003, ... Jeff Gannon is the Washington Bureau Chief and White House Correspondent for Talon News. www.talonnews.com ... He also hosts 'Jeff Gannon's Washington' on Rightalk."

Suzanne Goldenberg reported February 11, 2005, about Jeff Gannon, the"Fake reporter unmasked at White House," who at press briefings had a propensity to ask softball questions or questions that the White House desired to address.

The White House faced fresh accusations of a clandestine propaganda campaign yesterday after it emerged it granted regular access to a rightwing blogger with a habit of asking President Bush easy questions.

Gannon, who represented a rightwing site owned by a Texas-based Republican activist, had been a regular at White House briefings since 2003 but aroused reporters' suspicions after posing ideologically loaded questions.

Gannon, the fake White House correspondent, quit his job at the Talon News site on Wednesday after liberal bloggers found he had been operating under a pseudonym, and that he was linked to several gay pornographic web domain addresses under his real idenity, James Guckert.

And his use to the White House becomes clear:

"You could see there was a pattern in which the White House press secretary, Scott McLellan, would be getting a more aggressive and less friendly question, and then would seem to call on Jeff Gannon to change the subject. And when he did he got a softball question in return," Mr Brock said."The fake reporter's downfall came last week when he attracted suspicion with a particularly loaded question to the president on how he would enlist Democratic support for his U.S. Social Security reforms."After falsely attributing quotes to Democratic leaders, Gannon asked: 'How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?'"

On January 30, 2005, Susan G. posted "Plame Leaked by Fake News Source? Overview: Part IV" on the Daily Kos: "White House-credentialed fake news reporter 'Jeff Gannon' from fake news agency 'Talon News' was cited by the Washington Post as having the only access to an internal CIA memo that named Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent. Gannon, in a question posed to Wilson in an October 2003 interview, referred to the memo (to which no other news outlet had access, according to the Post). Gannon subsequently has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury looking into the Plame outing."

Additionally, she writes: "Gannon has as many as seven websites (www.jeffgannon.com, www.theconservativeguy.com), all of which have the following registration information:

Bedrock Corp

4001 Kennett Pike

Wilmington, DE 19807 US

Daniels, J. bedrockcorp@aol.com

4001 Kennett Pike

Wilmington, DE 19807 US

202-547-8825

"The phone number returns to a Bill Turnley, 616 E. Capitol St. NE, Washington DC 20003 (one commenter found it also returned to a Sean Turner, who also writes for GOPUSA, which is another tie-in between GOPUSA and Talon News/Gannon). Turnley appears to be a professor in the business program at Kansas State University, and the property is registered with its owner as the Janice N. Hedges Trust. Hedges appears to be an author of several pieces regarding labor and management. ... [At the time, Susan G. wondered] if there could possibly be a tie-in with the Leadership Institute here since so many members of its board are involved in anti-labor/pro-management activities.

"The Bedrock Corp address seems to return to a Mailboxes Etc. dropbox in a mall."

*Media Matters for America* reports the only journalistic training Guckert has received, as posted on his bio since removed from Talon News, was a two-day training course at The Leadership Institute's Broadcast School of Journalism. The institute was founded by former Reagan White House staffer Morton C. Blackwell and funded by wealthy right-wing doners

Contact

URL: www.jeffgannon.com/

SourceWatch resources

External links

References

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 Joe Strupp, "Former WH Reporter Jeff Gannon Now a National Press Club Activist," Editor & Publisher, June 18, 2008.

Photos

AOL Home Page.
"A man called Jeff," AMERICAblog Blogspot, February 14, 2005. Includes graphic photos and links to Guckert/Gannon's web sites.

Radio & audio

"'Jeff Gannon’s' Greatest Hits," The American Street, February 17, 2005.
David Folkenflik, "Conservative Reporter Resigns Amid Controversy," National Public Radio, February 9, 2005: "Gannon spoke with NPR's David Folkenflik the day before he resigned. He says he is open about his conservative point of view, but that he is just as valid a journalist as other reporters in the White House press corps." Audio link to interview with Gannon on page.

Parody & humor

"The Creation of Gannon," Whiskey Bar, February 19, 2005.
"They Hate Us Because of Our Hookers" and "Name That Thune/Gannongate," The Internet Weekly, February 2005.

On-going files

John Aravosis, AMERICAblog.org Blogspot.
BuzzFlash.com.
Crooks and Liars.com.
Daily Kos.com and dKosopedia.com.
Demopia: "Jeff Gannon".
Joe Strupp, Editor and Publisher.com.
Media Matters for America.org.
"GannonGate," Hard Attack News.
John Byrne, The Raw Story.com.
William Pitt, "The Jeff Gannon Experience," truthout.org.
"Jeff Gannon/James Guckert News," U.S. Politics Today.
Frank Rich, "In need of Thompson's savage take", International Herald Tribune, March 5, 2005. (Reprinted from the New York Times).

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jeff_Gannon"

Categories: Scandals | George W. Bush | United States

Fake News

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Origin

Evaluation

BACKGROUND:

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Propaganda machine

“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.”

Fake News

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Banning fake news might be the wrong approach

The NH Union Leader Just Hired A Disciple Of The Koch Brothers To Run Its Editorial Page

ResearchSeptember 16, 2015 12:37 PM EDT ››› DANIEL ANGSTER

Grant Bosse Has Been Named Editor Of The Union Leader Editorial Page

New Opinion Editor Grant Bosse Worked For A Koch-Sponsored Think Tank For Years

Josiah Bartlett Center For Public Policy (JBC) Has Significant Ties To Koch Brothers And American Legislative Exchange Council

Bosse Defended The Koch Brothers As A Columnist For TheConcord Monitor

Contents

VNRs and "pay to play"

Satellite media tours

BIO 2008

Clients

Personnel

Contact details

SourceWatch resources

External links

References

Articles

Manufactured journalism

From SourceWatch

White House 'Daily Show'

SourceWatch Resources

External links

Summary

Current status

Gannon blog

Criticism

Connections

Rove-Gannon

Liddy-Gannon

Credentials

Background

Contact

SourceWatch resources

External links

References

Photos

Radio & audio

Parody & humor

On-going files

Attachments

**Grant Bosse Has Been Named Editor Of The Union Leader Editorial Page**