FAKE NEWS 2

717, see main for older

includes conspiracy

comeback 7 24? AA reporter april --- starts w/ tough but fair questions, you’re ABC? fake news...

AHA: back in the enemy of the ppl phase, rubber reverse term, you’re the puppet becomes a cudgel to deflect crit [origin in Newt debate had done something horrible to wife, he attacked press out of the gate; become std for GOP to trash press before answering any question as a sort of pre-emptive prophylactic tactic?

IF YOU NEUTRALIZE FACT CHECK, SHARED REALITY YOU GET POLAR ECHO ESCA FROM THE FEVER SWAMP --? ALT FACT EARTH2

ironically there is lots of fake news, it's just all made by the right

eg

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pete h reboot irAN WAR 3 26

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NOT REAL NEWS: A Look at What Didn't Happen This Week

https://apnews.com/hub/not-real-news

Social media users shared a range of false claims this week, including erroneous information about vaccines and the infrastructure bill.

By Associated Press

Oct. 8, 2021

The Associated Press

FILE - In this Sept. 14, 2021, file photo, a health worker administers a dose of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine during a vaccination clinic at the Reading Area Community College in Reading, Pa. On Friday, Oct. 8, The Associated Press reported on stories circulating online incorrectly claiming newly leaked emails among Pfizer employees show that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine contains fetal cells. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

By The Associated Press

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

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Major US newspapers and broadcast TV news outlets often failed to report on Jim Jordan’s role in undermining the 2020 election – and ignored the risk to certification in 2024 if he becomes speaker | Media Matters for America

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1 24 judd ymail

david D. Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group (Sinclair), purchased the Baltimore Sun — the largest newspaper in Maryland — for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition means another powerful media outlet will be under the control of a wealthy conservative businessman with a history of using local media outlets to push an ideological agenda.

Smith is the son of Sinclair founder Julian Sinclair Smith and, along with his brothers, controls the company. Sinclair, a publicly traded company, owns or operates 185 local television stations across 86 markets. A 2018 study published in the American Political Science Review found that stations purchased by Sinclair "coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics" and undergo "a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage."

Sinclair regularly requires its local affiliates to run segments pushing right-wing talking points. In 2018, Sinclair affiliates were required to have local anchors read a script warning views about "fake stories" being published by other media outlets "to push their own personal bias and agenda." The trend was described as "extremely dangerous to a democracy." The argument, which included no actual examples, matched then-president Donald Trump's rhetoric about the media.

When Sinclair faced criticism for puppeteering its local anchors, Trump defended the company. "So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased," Trump said. "Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke."

Sinclair stations were also required to run political commentary from Boris Epshteyn, who previously served as a Trump advisor and surrogate. Sinclair hired Epshteyn as its chief political analyst. Epshteyn's segments for Sinclair were mostly indistinguishable from his work for the Trump campaign. "The American people demand change, and they demand action, and that’s exactly what they’ll get from this administration going forward," Epshteyn declared in one piece.

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and advisor, said that in 2016, the Trump campaign provided Sinclair stations with extensive access to Trump in exchange for friendly coverage that did not include fact-checking. "We are here to deliver your message," Smith told Trump in a 2016 meeting. Sinclair executives denied there was anything unusual or unethical about its dealings with the Trump campaign. Sinclair affiliates have also promoted right-wing conspiracy theories, including claims that DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered by a hitman as payback for sharing sensitive emails to Wikileaks.

The history of using Sinclair-owned stations to push a right-wing agenda predates Trump. In 2004, "Sinclair ordered its stations to broadcast an hour-long documentary — preempting prime-time programming — titled Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal that blamed Democratic nominee John Kerry for the torture of American prisoners of war in Vietnam."

In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Smith defended Sinclair's news coverage "as balanced and apolitical." According to Smith, Sinclair is "not perfect" but overall is "much better than a lot of folk."

Smith, not Sinclair, is purchasing the Baltimore Sun — although that may be a distinction without a difference. Smith said, "he envisions opportunities for partnerships between The Sun and Sinclair, such as promoting each other’s stories, and other synergies in the future."

The checkered history of Smith's right-hand man

Smith did not purchase the Baltimore Sun alone. He brought along one partner: Armstrong Williams, a right-wing pundit and operative.

:{:{Williams has his own syndicated show on Sinclair stations. His social media accounts are full of incendiary statements about Democrats and liberals. "Each day Joe Biden has sat in office, we have gotten closer and closer to a fascist communist nation," Armstrong wrote on January 10. On January 5, he accused Biden of "destroy[ing] American democracy."}:

On December 19, Armstrong decried "the real time consequences of being infiltrated by radical left-wingers and the acceptance of their insane political agendas." (The issue was the Pope slightly softening his stance on same-sex marriages.) On December 6, Armstrong called Biden "a senile senior citizen" who "barely knows right from left." Armstrong also called the prosecutors pursuing cases against Trump as "terrorists" and promoted false narratives and conspiracy theories about the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.}:

Armstrong served as an advisor to former presidential candidate and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. He claims to have paid for Justice Clarence Thomas' wedding reception. In 2005, Armstrong lost his syndicated column after it was revealed that he had been paid $240,000 by the George W. Bush administration to promote their signature education initiative, No Child Left Behind.

Follow the money

Smith has used his vast wealth to support a variety of far-right causes. The Baltimore Banner reports that since 2015, Smith, through his family foundation, has donated large sums to Young Americans for Liberty ($581,000), Project Veritas ($536,000), Turning Point USA ($150,000), and Moms for Liberty ($121,000).

Smith does not support Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), and has sought to recruit opponents to unseat him. Sinclair stations have provided highly favorable coverage to former Mayor Shelia Dixon (D), who is running against Scott this year. Armstrong conducted an interview with Dixon on a Sinclair affiliate last summer that consisted mostly of "praise for Dixon and criticism of current elected officials."

In 2022, Smith backed a successful ballot initiative to impose term limits on Baltimore's elected officials. Currently, Smith is "underwriting Renew Baltimore, a ballot drive to cap and lower the property tax rate."

Now, Smith has a new tool in his arsenal to shape Baltimore's politics: the city's paper of record.

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[Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine does not contain fetal cells, contrary to online claims

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CLAIM: Newly leaked emails among Pfizer employees show that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine contains fetal cells.

Political Cartoons

View All 393 Images

THE FACTS: A widely shared video by the group Project Veritas has led to a false claim online that purported emails among Pfizer officials show that the pharmaceutical company’s COVID-19 vaccine contains aborted fetal cells. But the video — an interview between Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and a self-identified Pfizer employee who claims to show internal emails from the company — does not support that erroneous conclusion. Instead, it shows that the company used a fetal cell line when testing the efficacy of its vaccine. Cell lines, which are key to medical research, are cloned copies of cells from the same source that have been adapted to grow continuously in labs. 

Nevertheless, users spread the falsehood about the contents of the vaccine widely on social media. “You are mandated to inject dead babies into your body,” one Twitter account sharing the video falsely claimed. “Fetal cells in the vaccines yet they are denying people religious exemptions.” At the heart of the widely shared video spurring the false claims are purported emails among Pfizer officials from early 2021. The messages displayed show an alleged conversation about the company’s reluctance to publicize that testing of its vaccine — not production — used a cell line that was originally derived from fetal tissue.

One of the main emails cited specifically says, “Human fetal derived cell lines are not used to produce our investigational vaccine, which consists of synthetic and enzymatically produced components.” It adds: “One or more cell lines with an origin that can be traced back to human fetal tissue has been used in laboratory tests associated with the vaccine program.” The video also shows an email referencing the HEK293T cell line — or Human Embryonic Kidney 293 — which was first established in the early 1970s using cells from a kidney of a fetus. What’s not made clear in the video is that it is already public record that Pfizer’s vaccine was tested using such cells.

In a paper published in September 2020 detailing the vaccine’s development and success in mice and monkeys, Pfizer and BioNTech scientists said that the vaccine had been tested using the HEK293T cell line. And the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in a January document about the COVID-19 vaccines noted: “Neither Pfizer nor Moderna used an abortion-derived cell line in the development or production of the vaccine. However, such a cell line was used to test the efficacy of both vaccines.” The conference recommended that, in the absence of a vaccine with no connection at all to such a cell line, vaccines that use them “only for testing would be preferable to those that use such cell lines for ongoing production.”

Dr. Saahir Khan, an assistant clinical professor of infectious diseases at the University of Southern California, said about the Pfizer shot, “There are no components of fetal cells in the vaccine, and none used in manufacturing." Khan said it is very common to use such cell lines somewhere along the way in the research or development of vaccines and other medicine for humans. He said such cell lines, started decades ago, are grown in labs — so the cells being used for research are not the original cells.

One COVID-19 vaccine used in the U.S., from Johnson & Johnson, is produced by using an adenovirus that is grown using retinal cells that trace back to a fetus from 1985, according to the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.Vaccines for chickenpox and other diseases also use this type of process. But none of these vaccines contain fetal cells.Pfizer did not respond to questions about the Project Veritas video, but a spokesperson pointed out that information about the testing has been publicly disclosed through a number of sources and news reports.

— Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in Philadelphia contributed this report.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/duncan-hunter-fake-border-crossing-825094/

no lnx mojo

Duncan Hunter (R-CA) posted a video on Facebook and Twitter Thursday that he claimed showed him crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. But there’s one catch: the border was actually almost 100 feet away from where Hunter was, Customs and Border Patrol said.

“So here is the grand border wall in Yuma, Arizona,” Hunter said in the video, pointing to a waist-high barrier he could easily step over. “This is what we expect to stop people, transnational terrorists, families, all illegal aliens from coming across the border. This is it.”

He then did step over the fence and said to the camera, “There you go. That’s how easy it is to cross the border in Yuma, Arizona.”

Except no, that wasn’t the border, nor did he climb an actual border wall or set foot in Mexico. A Customs and Border Patrol spokesman told the Times of San Diego that the barrier Hunter climbed was a vehicle barrier located in the United States, 75-100 feet from the actual U.S.-Mexico border, which is located along the Colorado River.

Had Hunter actually crossed the border, he would have created even more trouble for himself. The congressman is currently out on bail because he has been indicted for allegedly misusing campaign funds for personal family expenses to pay for luxury family vacations, dentistry and other bills, and even his children’s school lunches. According to the terms of his bail, Hunter is not allowed to leave the country, so if he had actually crossed over to Mexico, it would have been a violation of his bail.

[vid]

According to the indictment, Hunter and his wife not only spent $250,000 of campaign funds on themselves, they did so while claiming to make donations to charities. For example, they claimed a $200 shoe purchase at Dick’s Sporting Goods was actually hunting equipment to benefit “wounded warriors.” And Hunter’s wife Margaret purchased $152 of make-up at Nordstrom then falsely claimed it was for “gift basket items for the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Diego.”

...

alt rt everything you love will burn wants to interview soros as he is nexus of all conspir theories

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-november-16-2018/

civil constutution citizen partic stanford fishkin? white list news sites civil.co

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/18/blockchain-media-startup-civil-doing-what.html

hmmn

tart-up called Civil Media has an ambitious plan to save journalism using blockchain technology and cryptoeconomics.

After assembling 13 start-up newsrooms to kick things off, Civil announcedlast week it will launch its cryptocurrency on Aug. 13, followed by its blockchain-based publishing protocol about a week later.

The company used a lot of buzzwords in its announcement, like calling itself a “protocol” for journalism and saying it valued “decentralization.”

But between the buzzwords, what is the company actually trying to do?

We talked to the company and think we figured it out.

The problem with journalism, according to Civil, is that reporters are compromised by working for companies that value returns to shareholders over the relentless pursuit of truth. Ad-based business models drive reporters to generate shallow content to generate page views, while threats from advertisers or wealthy people threatening lawsuits can cause publishers to alter or remove controversial stories.

Civil believes that one way to restore alignment between reporters and readers is to let readers buy the right to “vote” on whether a newsroom represents fair, quality journalism or not. The only way newsrooms can be challenged is if a majority of involved readers agree.

The currency used in this process: Civil’s cryptocurrency, CVL, which will be based on the Ethereum blockchain.

“The single most significant aspect of why we are applying blockchain and the cryptoeconomic model to what we are trying to do is because we think it has the potential trying to flip the system on its head and create an environment in which journalists can truly be beholden to their readers above all else, not to a company with shareholders and ... a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits,” co-founder Matt Coolidge said.

Challenging the news

Civil is a platform, not a publisher, Coolidge emphasized. In that respect, it’s more like Facebook or Twitter than The Washington Post.

Right now, 13 fledgling newsrooms have signed up to be on the platform, including the Colorado Sun, a local investigative newsroom staffed by former Denver Post reporters, and Documented, which covers immigrants and immigration policy in New York City....

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ginni caravan invasion

The problem: the meme is fake. According to Snopes, the image is actually from a clash between Mexican police and student protestors in Mexico City in 2012, and has nothing to do with migrants.  But sharing extremist right-wing content is not a new thing for Thomas, a conservative activist who has made frequent use of social media. Earlier this year, she shared posts attacking the Parkland kids and praising the "#WalkAway" movement, a fake campaign of Russian trolls pretending to be people of color leaving the Democratic Party.

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12/16 see ggl 2

Media Matters Found Google-Hosted Ads On At Least 24 Websites That Are Known To Push Fake News Stories. Media Matters found advertisements placed by Google on at least 24 websites that have a track record for pushing fake news stories -- stories with fabricated information packaged to appear as a legitimate news story. The sites listed below all featured ads marked by the “AdChoices” icon that hyperlinked the user to Google’s information page about its advertising services. All screenshots were taken on December 12.

America's Freedom Fighters

The Angry Patriot

Before It's News

Conservative Daily Review

DC Gazette

Eagle Rising

Freedom Daily

Gateway Pundit

GOP The Daily Dose

Mad World News

Mr. Conservative

Observatorial

The Political Insider

Political Reviewer

Prntly

RightAlerts.com

Right Wing News

Supreme Patriot

Tell Me Now

TruthFeed

USA Politics Today

US Chronicle

Web Daily

Western Journalism

America’s Freedom Fighters

On December 31, 2015, America’s Freedom Fighters posted a story claiming that “Obama Allows Nation’s First SATANIC Ceremony at State Capitol In History… .” Debunking site Snopes.com evaluated this claim and concluded that the ceremony “was neither literally Satanic nor in any way sanctioned by President Obama.

http://time.com/5352516/india-whatsapp-fake-news/

On the evening of June 8, a 29 year-old sound engineer and a 30-year-old business man were on their way to a picnic spot in India’s northeastern Assam state when they stopped at a village to ask for directions. The villagers had been told, in a video circulating on the messaging app WhatsApp, that child kidnappers were roaming the country. Believing these strangers were the ones they’d been warned about, the villagers formed a large mob, and, before the men could convince them otherwise, beat them to death.

The video they had seen was actually an instructional safety video made in Pakistan, but was shared with some text warning about kidnappers in the local area, causing fear and anger among the community. After the killings, police arrested 16 people and demonstrations took place in the victims’ hometown of Guwahati, the largest city in Assam. Similar incidents involving false news stories circulated on WhatsApp have reportedly led to the deaths of two dozen people in India since April. Now, both the app and the government are scrambling to prevent more mob lynchings.

“This is really happening at the frontier of technology,” says Nandagopal Rajan, new media editor at The Indian Express newspaper. “India has had a 4G revolution in the past 18 months and we’ve seen around 200 million new people start using the internet, mostly on phones. That means WhatsApp has suddenly ended up in the hands of a lot of first time internet users.”

India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 200 million users at last count, in February 2017. The number today is likely much higher. While the app was designed as a messaging platform for one-on-one exchanges or small groups, in India it has taken on a life of its own. “Many Indians use Whatsapp not as a messaging platform,” Rajan says, “but as a consumption platform—people join lots of groups so they receive an endless flurry of video messages, memes and random jokes and stories, directly to their inbox.”

When those messages and stories contain false information, WhatsApp’s content-sharing function can have a more sinister effect. End-to-end encryption, which effectively locks messages and gives only senders and receiver the key to open them, makes it impossible for the company to see inside chats and regulate content on their platform in the same way Twitter or Facebook can. Groups are closed and limited to 256 people, making it impossible for journalists or police to get in and track where a rumor originated.

A 2018 reportfrom the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford shows WhatsApp is becoming an increasingly dominant news-sharing platform across Latin America and Asia. That means the problem is only growing.India’s technology ministry said in a statement onJuly 19 that the company would face legal action if it remained a “mute spectator” to the violent consequences of false stories circulating. “When rumors and fake news get propagated,” it said, “the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility.'  Since late June WhatsApp has been responding with a series of unprecedented interventions to curb sharing on the app. It added a setting that would allow only admins to send messages in a group. It reduced the number of people a message can be forwarded to from 100 to 5 in India (and to 20 in the rest of the world) and removed the “quick forward” button that appears next to messages containing photos, video or audio. It also introduced a “suspicious link” label, which will appear alongside links where WhatsApp detects an obvious problem, such as a strange combination of characters. Earlier in July the company took outnewspaper ads in nine states warning people to “question information that upsets you.”

“WhatsApp is making an effort to understand [how people use its platform in India] but we’re in uncharted territory,” Rajan says. “Nobody has ever fathomed what happens when this kind of a platform, which is in encrypted code, starts working at scale—the kind of scale you have in India.”

While the forwarding limit has been reduced, Rajan points out that content can still spread very fast between groups. “Often, all the members of a group are admins, and they’ll all be admins of ten more groups too. All the groups are interconnected, so it’s really easy for content to go viral.” WhatsApp did not respond to TIME’s request for further comment on the situation in India.

“WhatsApp’s new measures are a band-aid, not a solution,” says Bal Krishn Birla, a tech entrepreneur from Bangalore. Two years ago, Birla and software engineer Mohammed Shammas launched volunteer service Check4Spam, in the hopes of curing their country’s burgeoning fake news epidemic. Now with a team of 15 volunteers, the pair painstakingly fact check false stories of all kinds, using lunch breaks, evenings and weekends to balance the task with their day jobs.

They receive between 100 and 250 messages a day from people asking whether or not a story is true. “We can’t respond to all of them, but we try to get most,” Birla says. The team will take a typical news story, such as a report of a young child being kidnapped, research the facts online and use tools like reverse image search to check if photos or videos included in the story come from the region or time that they claim to. “It’s pretty simple,” he says, “We’re not reinventing the wheel.” They then upload the fact-check to their website and encourage the sender to share it too, reversing the flow of fake news.

Check4Spam isn’t the only grassroots organization taking notice of the risks posed by news on WhatsApp. In Mexico, where 35% of people use WhatsApp as a primary news source according to the Reuters Institute, a group of journalists made the app the focus of their fact-checking site,Verificado 2018. In the run up to the country’s largest ever elections in July, they responded to thousands of requests from people wanting to check political stories.

Alongside volunteer groups like these, Birla believes the lasting solution lies in media literacy education, something Check4Spam is keen to get involved in. On May 30, Facebook announced the company would team up with India’s National Commission for Women and the Cyber Peace Foundation, an NGO, to run digital literacy courses at universities in several major Indian cities. They will teach 60,000 women who are new to the internet to recognize false information online, helping to avoid both fake news and scams. But similar programs could take years to roll out across a country of 1.3 billion. “These killings are very likely to continue, unfortunately,” Birla says. “To me it seems like it’s just the beginning.”

Birla questions whether social media companies are truly committed to stopping the spread of fake news. “It amounts to getting people to share less, and that directly conflicts with their business model,” he says. He believes Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, already has the technology to deal with much of the false information circulating on its platforms. “They understand how to flag content that seems inappropriate or like it violates copyright—they just haven’t done it yet for things that may seem suspicious.” While the difference between truth and lie may be more difficult for technology to spot than an unlicensed music clip, tools like reverse image search, which can reveal if an image comes from where it claims to, are currently under-used by social media companies, he says.

“When people start leaving their platform, then I think they’ll figure out the solution,” says Birla, pointing to a trend in young people abandoning Facebookfor Instagram and Snapchat where the lack of sharing function means there’s less undesired spam content. Government pressure can only go so far, Birla says. “The will to fight fake news has to come from consumers. It has to be a people’s movement.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mark-zuckerberg-defends-holocaust-deniers-during-discussion-about-allowing-fake

no lnx

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended Holocaust deniers during a Recode podcast published on Wednesday.

The comments came during a discussion of Facebook's policy around banning content, or rather, not banning content.

“Let’s take this a little closer to home. So I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive," Zuckerberg said to Recode. "But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong — I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong."

He continued by comparing his own missteps when speaking to those of Holocaust deniers.

"It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think as important as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly," Zuckerberg said. "I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public leaders who we respect do, too. I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say we are going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.”

Facebook continues to be embroiled in controversy as the platform remains the subject of congressional hearings for its propagation of fake news.

Zuckerberg claims he feels a "deep sense of responsibility to try to fix the problem.”

But his continued defense of outright fake news draws skepticism about his commitment to reforming his platform.

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 dumb lie of "Spygate," and how right-wing media create bullshit:{

Donald Trump lied. This time, the lie is that the FBI inserted a spy into his campaign. No such thing happened, but Trump called it Spygate and made a big deal of it, even asking the Justice Department to investigate whether any actions were done for political purposes. As per this helpful food chain analysis, the lie originated in the Wall Street Journal opinion page, jumped to social media and to Hannity and from there to the rest of right-wing media.

What really happened is that an FBI informant asked people in Trump's campaign after the FBI learned of dubious contacts with Russia. The facts are straight forward. A counter intelligence investigation into former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page began in 2014. A counter intelligence and criminal investigation into former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort began in 2014. As Marcy Wheeler notes, of course law enforcement should look into why George Papadopoulos knew about stolen emails before the DNC did. No one forced Trump to hire these people.

In all, this is just another episode of right-wing media spinning lies about the Russia investigation. As Simon Maloy notes, this is just another part in an endless series of debunked conspiracy theories that ends up consuming the media. Previous instances include wiretapping, unmasking, a "secret society," Obama texts, and the Nunes memo.

}:

==

ref

https://www.gq.com/story/spygate-conspiracy-theory-explained

see escalotor

==

https://www.alternet.org/how-right-wing-media-help-trump-spin-lies-about-russia-investigation

2 mtgs gang 8

... crucial to view this attempt by the White House to assert the existence of an anti-Trump cabal within the government in context: It's the latest in a series of fraudulent and debunked attemps to push such a claim. Trump’s demand that his investigators be investigated rests on a foundation of lies that was built with the critical assistance of a credulous and complicit right-wing media.

Let’s run through all the major conspiracy theories that brought us to this point.

Wiretapping 

The effort by Trump and his defenders to deflect attention from the Russia investigation onto the previous administration started with this early-morning tweet from March 2017:

Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump  

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

4:35 AM - Mar 4, 2017

• 144K
• 103K people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy  

It was a deathly serious allegation for the president to make, and it was completely false. Top Justice Department officials denied the allegation, a DOJ court filing affirmed that there are “no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets,” and the president has not produced any evidence to back up his accusation.

Unmasking

Nonetheless, Trump’s defenders in the conservative media contorted themselves to try to prove Trump was right, especially following House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes’ March 22, 2017, press conference (which Nunes secretly coordinated with the White House) announcing that “surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.”

Speaking of Nunes, he became the driving force behind the allegation that Obama administration officials had improperly unmasked the identities of Trump associates whose conversations were incidentally captured by intelligence agencies. Once again acting on information provided by the Trump White House, Nunes accused former national security adviser Susan Rice and other Obama officials of abusing the unmasking process. Rice acknowledged that she had requested certain identities, but congressional investigators from both parties saidshe’d done nothing wrong.

The “unmasking” nonsense permeated conservative media and was presented as evidence of an Obama-led conspiracy to undermine Trump as president-elect. Trump himself told The New York Times that he believed Rice had committed a crime.

“Secret society”

This was an especially stupid fiasco kicked up by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX). The pair went on Fox News to reveal the existence of a text message exchange between two FBI agents sent the day after the 2016 election that referenced a “secret society” supposedly populated by anti-Trump law enforcement officials. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, seized on the message to allege “corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.” Conservative media went absolutely crazy with the “secret society” allegation, holding it up as proof of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump.

The “secret society” turned out to be nothing more than an inside joke between the two agents.

:{

Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing”}:

The White House’s deflection strategy rests on the idea that Barack Obama corrupted law enforcement agencies by directing them to investigate Donald Trump’s campaign as a way of undermining his candidacy. To that end, Republicans and conservatives are invested in demonstrating that Obama actively meddled in politically sensitive law enforcement business, such as the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In February, Johnson’s committee released a report alleging that a text message from an FBI agent stating that Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing” raised “questions about the type and extent of President Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email scandal and the FBI investigation of it.”

Once again, conservative media was driven to a frenzy, fueled partially by Trump’s tweet that the “NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!” And, once again, it all turned out to be false -- the text in question referred to presidential briefing materials regarding the investigation into Russian election interference, not Clinton.

FBI hid info from the FISA court 

In February, Nunes’ committee released a memo that, according to the frantic hype that preceded its release, would reveal rampant surveillance abuses committed by intelligence agencies against the Trump campaign. Chief among the alleged abuses was the accusation that the FBI had illicitly obtained a warrant to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page by concealing from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the political origin of some of the evidence it cited in its application.

Right-wing media figures like Sean Hannity this “Watergate times a thousand” and said the FBI “lie[d] to a foreign intelligence surveillance court.” Trump tweeted that the memo “totally vindicates” him and showed the Russia investigation to be “an American disgrace.”

It was a lie -- the political origin of the evidence was indeed disclosed in the FBI application -- and Nunes and his Republican colleagues admitted as much in the days following the memo’s release.

What emerges from all this is a damning picture of a Republican political operation -- involving the White House and key members of Congress -- to concoct blatant falsehoods and conspiracy theories, and a conservative media apparatus that readily absorbs and rebroadcasts that propaganda. At a certain level, behavior like this is to be expected -- these same characters spent all eight years of the Obama administration cobbling together ridiculous conspiracy theories about Benghazi, the former president’s birthplace, and a secret military invasion of Texas.

There is a key difference, however, in all the lying about the Russia investigation. These conspiracy theories are defensive. Most conservative pundits will describe the Russia investigation as a threat to the very fabric of American government; they recognize the extreme danger it poses to Trump’s presidency. Trump himself has no discernible legal strategy. Instead, he’s fighting a public relations campaign and casting himself as the victim of a “witch hunt.”

These attacks on the legitimacy of the investigation are the only weapon they have against it. And as the investigation exposes Trump to more and more legal and political peril, the conspiratorial attacks on the Justice Department and the Obama administration become more strident. Trump used to be content to vent on Twitter about the Russia investigation, but now he’s using the weight of his office to give life to an evidence-free accusation of political persecution.

Trump relies on the conservative media’s unthinking support as he wages this increasingly unhinged campaign. He needs to hear the hosts of Fox & Friends chirp every morning about how each new phony “bombshell” about the Russia investigation vindicates him. He needs to chat with Sean Hannity every night before bedtime about how Robert Mueller is out to get him. But Trump is only going to get more frustrated as each increasingly elaborate falsehood fails to produce the desired outcome, and that means the coordinated lying and conspiracy-mongering are only going to get worse as the investigation moves forward.

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https://www.alternet.org/dark-conspiracy-theories-consume-mind-donald-trump

no lnx

The Dark Conspiracy Theories That Consume the Mind of Donald Trump

Trump never met a crazy idea he didn’t like.

By Larry Schwartz / AlterNet April 22, 2018, 4:45 PM GMT

If there was ever any doubt that conspiracy theories course through the dark, troubled mind of Donald Trump, his tweets in the weeks since he won the election should dispel that notion. Hot and bothered by the inconvenient fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than 2 million votes (and counting) and that he is president due only to the questionable decision by James Madison to deny direct voter election of our presidents and instead delegate that task to an Electoral College, the birther-in-chief-elect took to his preferred social media platform. On November 27, Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Huh? That was quite a claim, given that no one had heard that alarming fact. At least no one in their right mind.

Turns out Trump’s fantastic claim came from his favorite bedside reading website, InfoWars, home of conspiracy monger Alex Jones, and the place where outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories come to thrive. Jones, a Trump pal (who privately boasts that Trump repeats his ideas “word for word,” according to the San Jose Mercury News), was one of the first people Trump called to thank after his upset victory on November 8. Jones is the guy who, among other disturbing lunacies, helpfully informed us that the Sandy Hook massacre of school children and teachers was all an elaborate hoax by the government to deprive people of their guns. (There is a special place in hell for people who buy into this hateful lie.) Jones has also peddled the notions that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are demons (“I been told this by high-up folks, and they tell me Obama and Hillary both smell like sulfur”); that the federal government orchestrated 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings; that juice boxes make children gay; and that old bugaboo, that fluoridation of our water is for the purpose of government mind control.

So, in a nutshell, Alex Jones is deranged and psychotic, and not in a good way at all.

In the case of Trump’s “fraudulent vote” tweet, it seems InfoWars picked up a tweet on November 13 by someone named Greg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services employee and a member of a sketchy “voter fraud” monitoring organization called True the Vote. “We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens. We are joining ?@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action.” Despite repeated requests to come up with proof of these allegations, Phillips demurred, although he specified some unnamed time in the future when he would release the information, though not to the media. Facts be damned, Phillips' tweet was picked up eagerly by InfoWars, and then the Drudge Report (though even the factually challenged Drudge referred to the tweet as a “claim”). Next stop, Donald Trump, who apparently has never met a conspiracy he doesn’t embrace if it suits his purposes. Meanwhile Phillips, who is no one’s liberal icon, followed up his tweet on November 15 saying, “By the way, we have never said they all voted for Hillary. Why lie?” Wait, what? Meanwhile, a 2012 analysis of voter fraud came up with exactly 56 fraudulent votes in the U.S. over an 11-year period. Shocking.

Conspiracy theories have been plaguing the United States for as long as the nation has existed. Pilgrims were convinced Satan was conspiring with witches. In the 19th century, Freemasons were controlling the government. In the 20th century, communists were infiltrating the halls of the Capitol. A cabal of the CIA, the Mafia, Cubans, and LBJ brought down John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

Americans can be a gullible lot. Some polls (if we can believe them anymore) suggest that all of us subscribe to at least one conspiracy theory. Twenty-five percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind 9/11; 61% of us think JFK was offed by more than one lone gunman; and 70% of us agree that wars, recessions and elections are controlled by a small secret subset of the population. Who peddles these theories? Mostly those outside the established system who use conspiracies to question the status quo or further their aims, be they political, monetary or otherwise. Think Joe McCarthy, Sarah Palin, and now Donald Trump, who has brought conspiracy theories out of the fringes and into the Oval Office.

“There’s something going on” may be Trump’s favorite four words. During the campaign he used the phrase constantly to imply that some mysterious “something” was manipulating America against the public welfare. The government was shadowy, evil and engaged in a coverup that dwarfed Watergate. And that, Trump implied, or outright stated, was responsible for your lost job or your diminished status or whatever ailed you. No need to be specific; Trump supporters could connect the dots themselves. Drain the swamp and America will be great again!

Trump seemingly can’t, or chooses not to, distinguish fact from fiction. He has a long history of adopting conspiracy theories. Here are 10 he has fully embraced.

1. Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. (aka the birther lie)

Birtherism is the the vehicle on which Donald Trump rode to political relevance. Beginning in 2011, Trump began publicly questioning the birthplace of Barack Obama, claiming he was born a Kenyan Muslim, not a Hawaiian Christian, and thus questioning the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president. The birther conspiracy did not actually originate with Trump. A fringe political candidate, Andy Martin, who tried to paint Obama as a secret Muslim in 2004, started it in Illinois. After Obama’s election in 2008, the birther lie more or less died down, until Trump took up its mantle in 2011: “Three weeks ago, when I started, I thought he was born in this country. Now I have a much bigger doubt than I did before. His grandmother, who was born in Kenya, said she was there and witnessed the birth.” When asked by Chuck Todd during the campaign if Americans could ever accept a Muslim president, Trump replied, “Some people have said it already happened, frankly.” This past February, when President Obama did not attend Antonin Scalia’s funeral, Trump tweeted that Obama would have attended if the funeral were “held in a mosque.”

Trump loved being Head Birther so much that even as he was supposedly disavowing and trying to move past it, he couldn't help bragging (falsely), “I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate and I think I did a good job.”

2. Muslims in New Jersey celebrated 9/11

In November 2015, Trump categorically stated that thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated when the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11. "I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering," he said at an Alabama rally. When called on this fact-challenged claim, Trump doubled down, telling George Stephanopolous on ABC that he had seen them, and that only political correctness kept this from being common knowledge. “People over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down.” While there was celebration of 9/11 in the Middle East, reports of New Jersey celebrations have been thoroughly debunked. Although Trump pal Howard Stern reported on his radio show that celebrations occurred, the facts say otherwise, as the Newark Star-Ledger reported on Sept. 23, 2001:

Hours after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a story spread across the state: Palestinians in Paterson were celebrating in the streets. Braced for a riot, the Paterson police rushed to South Main Street, the center of the city's Middle Eastern community.

"When we got there," Paterson Police Chief Lawrence Spagnola said, "They were all in prayer."

In the ensuing days, the rumor went national, lighting up talk radio phone lines. In the end, it was nothing more than rapid-fire urban myth.

3. Vaccines cause autism.

Now here’s a conspiracy theory Trump shares with Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, a doctor (!). The roots of the autism vaccine conspiracy are almost 20 years old. A medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a paper in 1998 linking the administration of the MMR vaccine (mumps, measles, rubella) with the onset of autism in children. Running with this, conspiracy theorists blamed Big Pharma for covering up the link in order to protect profits. In 2010, however, a panel of the British General Medical Council found that Wakefield, "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant" and acted against the interests of his patients and "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his published research. Conspiracy mongers, including Donald Trump, couldn’t take “wrong” for an answer, and continued to spread the falsehood. In 2014, Trump tweeted, “Vaccines: Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!”

4. Daddy Cruz was in on the JFK assassination.

There have been a ton of JFK conspiracy theories over the years, but only one that Trump decided to make political hay of. After reading an article in the April 2016 issue of the National Enquirer (which he believes is an actual newspaper because sometimes they are right), he thought it was perfectly OK to bring up the fact that his primary opponent Ted Cruz’s father was maybe in on the Kennedy killing. His evidence was irrefutable: After all, a photo in the Enquirer that had been drifting around in conspiracy circles showed Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans before the assassination. Or someone that looked like Cruz’s father. Or someone…let’s just call him Cruz’s father just for conspiracy’s sake. In an interview with Fox News, Trump said, "His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being, you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it."

Yes, we wonder why no one brings this up. Just for the record, Rafael Cruz is shorter than the man in the photo, was a Cuban refugee who hated Castro (the photo was of Oswald handing out pro-Castro flyers), and was probably living seven hours away in Austin at the time the photo was taken. Also, even in the unlikely event that it was Cruz in the image, it has already been established that the two men with Oswald were strangers Oswald paid a couple bucks to hand out flyers with him for a half hour.

5. African American criminals prey on white folks.

On Nov. 22, 2015 (ironically, the anniversary of the JFK assassination), Trump took to Twitter in response to criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement, to retweet some misinformation about rampant crime in America. The tweet, originally sent by a white supremacist group (oops) purported to summarize statistics from the Crime Statistics Bureau in San Francisco, and claimed that 81% of whites who are murdered in America were killed by black people, and that 97% of blacks were killed by blacks. In other words, black folks do all the killing. Couple of minor points, however. The Crime Statistics Bureau does not exist. Also, the statistics are radically wrong. Eighty-two percent of white people are killed by white people, only a little lower than the percentage of blacks killed by blacks. (Since, according to the FBI, most people are killed by people they know, these statistics are not surprising.)

When confronted with the correct stats, as well as the true source of his tweet (again, white supremacists), Trump responded, "I re-tweeted somebody who was supposedly an expert and was also a radio show. Am I going to check every statistic?" Correct answer: I shouldn’t have done that, and yes.

6. Global warming is a hoax.

Ninety-nine percent of climate scientists believe that manmade climate change is occurring, mainly due to carbon emissions from power plants, cars and other non-renewable energy sources. Donald Trump, however, has a different opinion. “I think there will be little change here. It’ll go up, get a little colder, get a little warmer, like it always has for millions of years. It’ll get cooler, it’ll get warmer. It’s called weather.” Far be it for climate experts to point out that climate and weather are two different animals. Also, Trump’s uncle, an MIT professor not remotely a climate scientist, who died 35 years ago when climate science was in its infancy, didn’t buy it either. Good enough for Trump. Feh. It’s China’s fault.

7. The Clintons killed Vince Foster.

In 1993, Vince Foster, White House deputy counsel and close friend of the Clintons, killed himself. Despite five, count ‘em, five investigations into his tragic death, it remains what it always was: a suicide. Foster had been in treatment for depression, and an FBI-assisted investigation concluded he committed suicide. He even left behind a note: “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.” Clinton-haters never stopped spreading the conspiracy theory that the Clintons were behind the death of their friend, killing Foster to cover up their Whitewater real estate deal in Arkansas.

In May 2016, Trump picked it up again, calling the theories of foul play “very serious” and “very fishy.” He went on to say, with pointed innuendo, “I really know nothing about the Vince Foster situation. I haven’t known anything about it. Somebody asked me the question the other day. I said a lot of people are very skeptical about what happened and how he died. I know nothing about it.”

8. Obama was linked to the Orlando, Florida nightclub shooting.

In June 2016, a deranged Muslim man barged into an Orlando gay nightclub and killed 49 people. President Obama condemned the act, and said and did all the right things, including personally consoling the victims’ families. Not enough for Donald Trump. Why? Because Obama did not utter the three words he longed to hear. Radical. Islamic. Terrorism. "Look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind. And the something else in mind — you know, people can't believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can't even mention the words 'radical Islamic terrorism.' There's something going on. It's inconceivable. There's something going on," he told Fox News.

9. ISIS pays for Syrian refugee cell phones.

One of Trump’s signature promises during the campaign was to stop the influx of Syrian refugees into the U.S. He claimed that to accept them would be to welcome terrorists into our country. For proof he pointed to all the cell phones they had! “It’s sort of strange. I mean, who’s paying for these cell phones? Where are they coming from? Who are they calling? These are people, can you imagine, millions, maybe many many many cell phones. Why? Where did they get cell phones? Who pays their monthly bill? What do they do? Don’t they get billed by the phone company? Or something?”

Apparently the idea that Syrian refugees are terrorists makes more sense to Trump then the reality that maybe they bought the cell phones like anyone else in the world buys them. Syria, prior to its civil war, was a relatively prosperous country (certainly more than Egypt, where cell phones proliferate). And before you flee your country, the first thing you want is a phone to communicate with family and friends. Apparently Trump is unaware of prepaid cell phones that don’t need a phone company sending a monthly bill to keep them operative. No. They must be terrorists.

10. A global cabal of Jewish bankers, power brokers and special interests is actually in control.

seehttps://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/has-donald-trump-made-world-less-safe-jews

There’s no one in the world more familiar with conspiracy theories than Jews. Jewish people have been victims of conspiracy accusations from the moment Abraham and his tribe were chosen back in the day. So when Trump, after being outed as a serial p***y grabber, uttered these words at a rally, Jews around the world paid notice: “It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities. This is well documented, and theestablishmentthat protects them has engaged in a massive coverup of widespread criminal activity at the State Department and the Clinton Foundation in order to keep the Clintons in power.”

Hitler himself could not have said it better.

***

There are many more conspiracies knocking around in the fevered Trump brain—lots more. The Mexican government conspired to send itsheir bad hombres to the U.S. ("The Mexican government forces many bad people into our country because they're smart"). The media rigged his microphone to make him lose a debate. Antonin Scalia may have been murdered. The Federal Reserve, under Obama’s thumb, is keeping interest rates low. Obama didn’t go to Columbia University or Harvard. World War I-era Black Jack Pershing massacred Muslim rebels in the Philippines (which Trump thought was apparently a good thing, if untrue). Hillary is dying. Hillary is on drugs (“at the beginning of the last debate, she was all pumped up”).

Larry Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer with a focus on health, science and American history.

https://www.alternet.org/mexico-has-its-own-fake-news-crisis-and-journalists-are-fighting-back

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-legal-team-shared-office-space-with-top-conservative-legal-group

Trump’s Lawyers Sharing Space With Anti-‘Deep-State’ Group

The powerful conservative non-profit happens to be suing the administration over, among other matters, Uranium One.

BETSY WOODRUFF

LACHLAN MARKAY

03.22.18 2:44 PM ET

President Donald Trump’s legal team has done work out of the Capitol Hill offices of a conservative nonprofit group run by one of the president’s lawyers.

Two sources familiar with the situation say attorneys representing the president in the probe into Russian election meddling have met at and worked out of the headquarters of theAmerican Center for Law and Justice, a 501(c)(3) legal advocacy nonprofit run by Jay Sekulow, a member of the president’s legal team.

A spokesperson for the ACLJ did not dispute this report.

"The American Center for Law and Justice has maintained a Washington D.C. office for many years,” said Gene Kapp, a spokesperson for the organization. “The work done by the ACLJ is separate and distinct from the work performed by those who serve as Counsel to the President. Any non-ACLJ related work that occurs at the ACLJ offices is reimbursed in compliance with all applicable tax laws.”

From a strictly legal perspective, the arrangement appears above board, so long as ACLJ is charging market rates to rent the space, according to Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform programs at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog.

“The only way this would be an issue is if ACLJ was offering its services at less than fair market value, or using ACLJ resources without being compensated” by the president, the White House, or the Trump campaign, Fischer said in an email.

As Sekulow represents the president in matters related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, ACLJ has also pursued litigation that, while not directly related to that investigation, aligns with efforts by the president and his allies to deflect from allegations that the Russian government worked to elect Trump in 2016.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-supporters-are-single-biggest-purveyors-fake-news-study

Any number of factors helped tilt the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, from Hillary Clinton's fatally flawed campaign to the billions of dollars in free advertising our political press awarded her Republican opponent. Still, no candidate in modern American history has benefitted more from the proliferation of "fake news" on social media than the former host of "The Apprentice." For evidence, one need look no further than the latest findings of Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Research Project.

After studying the Twitter feeds of 13,000 users across the political spectrum, the Project determined that Trump supporters are among the most prolific purveyors of "misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news about politics, economics or culture.” (For the purposes of its research, the Oxford team compiled a "watch list" of approximately 100 websites with a history of publishing conspiracy theories or overt propaganda.)

The numbers are striking. Less than 16 percent of the sample group—2,000 accounts who have either shared explicitly pro-Trump links or contain the hashtag #MAGA in their bios—were responsible for 55 percent of the "junk news" tweeted out. Of the 47,000 Facebook accounts the Project examined, Trump supporters posted 60 percent of the content deemed spurious or inaccurate. Meanwhile, left-leaning accounts tended to circulate more stories from the mainstream media.

"The social networks mapped from public Twitter and Facebook data show that the junk political news and information was concentrated among Trump’s supporters," the report concludes. "The two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, prefer different sources of political news, with limited overlap."

Lisa-Maria Neudert, one of the study's lead researchers, believes these findings may contain a "silver lining." As she tells Denise Clifton of Mother Jones, the fact that Trump dead-enders have distributed a disproportionate amount of this dreck "could suggest that most other groups are less susceptible to extremist or conspiratorial content."

One thing is certain: When it comes to promulgating misinformation and outright lies, the president couldn't ask for a more pliant base.

H/T Mother Jones

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https://events.ucsc.edu/event/4756

Read all about The Trust Protocol and The Trust Project and its partners (the The Economist, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Italy’s La Repubblica and La Stampa, and The Washington Post) at the following links:

The Verge: Facebook adds trust indicators to news articles in an effort to identify real journalism

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16658538/facebook-trust-indicators-fake-news-trust-project

CNN Tech: Facebook, Google, Twitter to fight fake news with ‘trust indicators’

http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/tech-trust-indicators/index.html

Commentary

FAKE NEWSis a real problem. A recent study by the Stanford History Education Group concluded that most American high-school and college students are unable to distinguish real from fake information when evaluating online sources. The Stanford researchers described these results as "bleak" and "a threat to democracy."

The findings come as no surprise to me. As an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, I teach a first-year writing course required of all incoming students. Those whom I welcome into my classroom each semester are bright. But many have never received any training in how to evaluate information or make credible arguments.

Although largely unacknowledged, teachers of required first-year composition courses now find themselves positioned as our society's first line of defense against fake news.

Humanities courses have traditionally been the vehicle by which college students learn critical literacy. However, a number of trends over the past two decades -- including the rising popularity of preprofessional majors, the restructuring of general-education requirements to require less exposure to the humanities, and job-market anxieties -- have resulted in fewer students' passing through these courses.

Policies permitting students to place out of humanities requirements through high-school AP coursework have also meant that fewer students are exposed to college-level classes where critical literacy is taught. And when students do sign up for a humanities course, their professors often don't have enough time to spend on the nitty-gritty work of helping them learn to critically assess sources. Instructors who work in the publish-or-perish environment of research universities have even less time.

Required composition courses therefore have often assumed the function of teaching students how to think critically about topics and how to evaluate sources. Because freshman-comp courses aren't "content" based, and because composition teachers are hired to teach, not publish, we have more time to do this painstaking, one-on-one work.

Teaching critical reasoning is not as simple as it might sound. Most students don't fully understand that if they want to make a claim about something -- let's say, for instance, they want to argue that Obamacare is inefficient and hurts people -- they have to research it to find out what experts in the field have said. As I meet with students about their initial research, I will frequently hear them say something like, "I found a blog by a girl named Kelly who says that now she has to pay more for health care than she did before Obamacare." Or, "I found a website called Focus on the Family that says Obamacare forces people to pay for contraception." This moment happens every semester with many of my students, even at an institution like USC, which recruits high-performing students from across the country.

So this is a large part of what I do in my "writing course": I teach students how to distinguish between news and propaganda. I teach them about blogs and anecdotal evidence and sponsored content and peer-reviewed articles, and I help them see that not all the links they click on are equally valid sources of information. This comes as a great revelation to many of them. I teach them that Kelly's website doesn't work as evidence, and that Focus on the Family has a political agenda that makes it imperative to double-check the claims the group makes. Eventually students learn this and become pretty good at it.

It takes time and effort for students to write multiple drafts, and for me to correct their work. At USC, one-on-one conferences with the instructors are an integral part of the first-year writing course. For every paper I assign (four or five a semester), I meet with each student for a 20-minute conference. This is the kind of intensive work it takes to walk students through the basics of how to make legitimately sourced arguments. Being critical is hard work.

Writing teachers are our country's first line of defense against a post-fact culture. But perhaps one reason we find ourselves in a critical-reasoning desert today is because writing teachers are also, uniformly, among the most undervalued and overworked sector of the academic community. Composition teachers have always been the proverbial poor relations in the university family. Required "freshman comp" courses date back to the post-Civil War period. The courses originally fulfilled weeding and surveillance functions, ensuring that graduates could write error-free expository prose. Today freshman comp retains its stigma of being a "service" or skills-based course, a finishing school preparing students for the real academic labor of the upper-level arts and sciences.

Composition's lack of cultural capital and status is reflected in the fact that so many of its instructors are adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty members. My university's program offers its instructors, who work outside the tenure track, job security and full access to health and retirement benefits. That is not the case, however, for many of the more than 70 percent of composition instructors nationwide who qualify as "contingent."

The age of the internet and social media -- and of fake news -- is such a new development that we have not yet come to terms with how best to educate students and citizens on how to successfully navigate it. The infrastructure is in place. Now is the time to invest in college-composition programs and give them the resources and recognition they deserve as guardians of civic literacy.

CHE

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https://www.alternet.org/media/pope-fake-news-sin

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https://www.alternet.org/culture/america-flunks-freshman-comp-putting-our-democracy-risk

happens every semester. I’m sitting at home, tempted to jump head first out the window as I grade papers from my college freshmen writing course. One student has cited a Facebook meme as evidence to present the case for the criminalization of abortion. Another has referred to the expertise of an unidentified Reddit user as the conversation closer on issues of war and peace.

The next morning I will give a repeat performance, apparently due to popular demand, of my lecture on legitimate sources. I’ll execute a dramatic and exciting crescendo — comparable to the guitar solo at the end of Lynyrd Skynryd’s “Free Bird” — when I emphasize that social media feeds, message boards and various other forms of internet chatter do not make for credible research outlets. My soft landing occurs with the display of academic journals and journalistic publications with solid reputations as reliable disseminators of information.

Little did I know, as I passed every few months through each stage of this predictable pedagogical routine, that the health of American democracy is at stake. It turns out that tens of millions of Americans belong in my freshmen writing course, and, if their failures of citizenship are any indication, would struggle to pass if enrolled.

As everyone scrambles to correctly assign blame for the degradation of American democracy in 2016 through fake news Russian disinformation campaigns, commentators act as if they are attempting to determine who is responsible for letting a toddler jump into the pool. Was it the social media CEOs for having no standards regulating content? Was it Vladimir Putin, whose interference some have called an “act of war?” Or was it the DNC for their failure to adequately guard against hacking?

The conversation would remain important, but it would not rise to the level of urgency if the American people were not susceptible to the spread of information transparently false to anyone who has read a substantive book, or even a newspaper, in the past year.

Gore Vidal once remarked, “Half of the U.S. population reads a newspaper. Half of the U.S. population votes. Let’s hope it is the same half.”

Now, fewer than half of Americans read the newspaper, and an increasingly alarming amount report that they rely on social media for news, but many of them are still participating in the Democratic process. I often see bumper stickers that announce, “I’m Catholic and I vote” or “I’m NRA and I vote.” It seems that a lucrative merchandising opportunity exists for someone who invents the sticker, “I don’t read and I vote.”

The documentation of Americans’ ignorance on fundamental issues of history and governance is by now so thorough that it hardly bears repeating. For example, only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government. These are people commonly referred to as “elitists.”

The problem is not just that Americans don’t know. It is that they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know how to figure it out. Like my students who attempt to meet their research requirement on Twitter, American voters are misinforming themselves with lies and inaccuracies from unreliable sources.

If the overwhelming majority of Americans cannot even identify the three branches of their own government, it should strike no one as a surprise that they are unaware of refugee policies in Europe. One of the fake news stories I saw circulate on Facebook in the months leading up to the presidential election described “millions” of refugees arriving in Germany, or sometimes Italy, and essentially “taking over” the country. The post often produced as photographic evidence, doctored images from the early 20th century. Apocalyptic updates on the refugee invasion of European nations served as warning against what would happen in America if Hillary Clinton became president.

The most consequential offenders in the dissemination, and success, of fake news are not the Russians or social media company executives, but the American education system, and the parents who are content with raising children who know little about their country, much less about the rest of the world.

Only nine states require civics as part of the high school curriculum, and many colleges have reduced or eliminated requirements in history and political science. As unimaginable as it seems, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni published a report last year that only seven of the nation’s top 25 liberal arts colleges require their history majors — this is not a joke — to take a course in U.S. history.

The notion that the only knowledge that matters is that which can enable students to acquire high-paying employment has also contributed to the intellectual failures of Americans.

What the scandal of 2016’s hacks, Russian meddling and disinformation proves, is that a significant portion of Americans are ungovernable and unfit for the task of citizenship in a free country. It certainly does not have to stay that way, but reversal would demand an entirely new approach to education, popular political discussion and the preparation of children for the adult world.

As long as the focus remains solely on easily identifiable villains — foreign dictators, greedy tech magnates — American democracy will remain an easy target for illusionists and conmen.

David Masciotra is the author of Mellencamp: American Troubadour

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https://www.alternet.org/media/google-boosting-all-manner-fake-news-about-texas-church-massacre

Google is continuing to allow the monetization of fake news via its advertising network AdSense, this time surrounding the November 5 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, TX. Advertising networks Revcontent and content.ad are also featuring advertisements on fake news stories about the attack.

On November 5, a gunman opened fire and killed at least 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, TX. The alleged gunman, Devin Patrick Kelly, was court martialed while in the Air Force in 2012 on charges of “assaulting his wife and child” and has been accused of stalking ex-girlfriends. Law enforcement officers are now saying that the shooting was related to “a domestic situation.”

A Media Matters search found that Google’s AdSense supplied advertisements for many websites pushing the fake news that Kelly was a member of the antifascist group antifa, with many seeming to base their pieces on a fake news article from prominent fake news website YourNewsWire. Those websites included Real Farmacy, USN Politics, myinfonews.net, Clear Politics, SBVNews, RedStateWatcher, and TruthFeed.

Some of these websites that were using AdSense, such as Clear Politics and SBVNews, also carried advertisements from content.ad, while TruthFeed also featured advertisements from Revcontent. Other websites not using AdSense that pushed the baseless claim, such as Conservative Fighters, The Conservative Truth, and borntoberight.com, featured advertisements from Revcontent or content.ad instead, including the YourNewsWire piece (that article went viral, drawing at least 235,000 Facebook engagements within almost 24 hours of the attack, according to social media analytics website BuzzSumo, and was shared on gun parts manufacturer Molon Labe Industries’ Facebook page). 

Another false claim about the shooting came from Freedum Junkshun, a “satire” website run by a man whose made-up stories have been used by fake news websites to misinform. It claimed that the shooter “was an atheist” on the payroll of the Democratic National Committee. That article was funded via advertisements from both AdSense and content.ad. And fake news website Freedom Daily, which has repeatedly violatedAdSense’s rules against race-based incitement of hatred, published the false claim that the shooter was a Muslim convert named Samir Al-Hajeed. AdSense advertisements funded that article.

It isn't just Google's advertising service that is struggling with how to handle fake news; among the top Google search results of Kelly’s name following the attack were tweets and a video that also baselessly claimed he was a member of antifa. YouTube, which Google owns, also prominently featured a video pushing the false claim as one of the top results for the alleged shooter’s name.

In early November, a Google senior executive testified before Congress that the company had “taken steps” to demonetize misrepresentative websites. Yet the fact that multiple websites are using AdSense to monetize misinformation about the Texas mass shooting via AdSense signals otherwise. Indeed, AdSense, along with Revcontent and content.ad, have generally become the advertising networks of choice for those who push fake news. And this comes amid continuing criticism of Google’s inability to not feature misinformation during or after crisis events. These companies clearly have a long way to go to fix their misinformation problem.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/guess-who-breitbart-and-sarah-palin-are-blaming-california-wildfires

collection of right-wing websites teamed up with half-term nitwit Sarah Palin to spread a fake news story that appeared to pin the Northern California wildfires that have tragically killed at least 40 people onto an immigrant man who was arrested at a park in Sonoma, California. Jesus Fabian Gonzales—who “often sleeps in the park and is well-known to law enforcement”—was arrested Sunday after starting a small fire that he says he lit to stay warm, and one that “was so small a responding sheriff’s deputy was able to mostly put it out before firefighters arrived.” Gonzales was taken into custody without incident for one count of arson, but by Tuesday, Breitbart, InfoWars, and other sites were blaring sensationalist headlines, including one that stated that the “homeless arsonist behind Calif. wildfire that killed 40 people is an illegal alien”:

Breitbart News and InfoWars offered no evidence to link the man’s arrest to the fires and their accounts of the man’s arrest were disputed the same day by Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano.

“There’s a story out there he’s the arsonist for these fires. That is not the case. There is no indication he is related to these fires at all,” Giordano said in a news conference also broadcast on the department’s Facebook page and area TV stations. “I just did want to kill that speculation right now so we didn’t have things running too far out of control.”

Speculation from, say, Palin, who tweeted that “bet you not a single mainstream news organization is going to cover this story. Not PC or something.” No, it’s just fake, dumbass. In fact, *USA Today*notes that Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Crum said that “the only questions Breitbart News and InfoWars asked were about Gonzales's ethnicity and whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement had placed a detainer on him, which would hold him for an additional 48 hours at the jail.” It’s almost like they have an agenda here!

And one of the fake news websites that ran with the story also appeared to think California was being hit by one giant fire, rather than the at least one dozen major fires that firefighters are courageously battling, and some hours away from where Gonzales was arrested. But when your goal is to blame immigrants for just about anything, who cares about the facts?

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ggl unintened conseq?

https://www.alternet.org/media/editorial-googles-threat-democracy-hits-alternet-hard

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Google funding fake news site behind Harvey lie

:{

From the moment that Harvey hit Houston, mosques in the city opened their doors. But a fake news story tried to erase it, making up a story about a mosque closing its doors to non-Muslims. A fake news site sullied the image of a Canadian Islamic scholar and imam. The imam subsequently confirmed that he'd never even been to Texas. We investigated and found numerous sites pushing this story, including one funded by Google's AdSense program. Google has previously committed to fighting fake news -- but clearly there is more work to be done.

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http://www.alternet.org/media/6-examples-fake-news-about-antifa

twitterbots

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http://www.alternet.org/bogus-conspiracy-theory-about-slain-dnc-aide-seth-rich

In mid-May, President Trump encouraged Fox News to publish a false story about slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich in order to distract attention from the ongoing investigation of ties between his campaign and Russia, according to a lawsuit filed in New York federal court on Monday.

The 33-page lawsuit provides a glimpse into the extraordinary duplicity that fueled Fox News’ reporting on the Seth Rich story. Rich, a voter data analyst in DNC, was murdered on a Washington street last April in what D.C. police believe was a botched robbery.

The allegations in the lawsuit may have legal consequences for Trump and Fox News.

The lawsuit was filed by Rod Wheeler, a former police detective and longtime paid Fox News commentator hired by Rich’s family to investigate the crime. Wheeler claims Fox News commentator Ed Butowsky and correspondent Malia Zimmerman collaborated with the White House to spread the story that Rich, not the Russians, had provided DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

'Pressure'

Trump was personally involved, says Wheeler. Butowsky, he alleges, sent him a text May 14, two days before the story ran, saying, "Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It’s now all up to you. But don’t feel the pressure."

Butowsky told Wheeler he hoped the story would rebut allegations of Russian support for Trump during the 2016 campaign, according to Wheeler.

“Everyone, there’s so many people throughout Trump’s four years and maybe eight years are always going to fall back on the idea that he is not legitimate and the Russians got him elected," Butowsky said, according to the lawsuit. “This [information about Seth Rich providing emails to WikiLeaks] changes all of that.”

On May 16, the day the story ran, Butowsky told Wheeler in a voice mail:

“A couple minutes ago I got a note that we have the full, uh, attention of the White House, on this. And, tomorrow, let’s close this deal, whatever we’ve got to do. But you can feel free to say that the White House is onto this now.”

The suit also alleges that Butowsky maintained “regular contact with Trump administration officials,” including Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon and Sarah Flores, the public affairs director at the Department of Justice, regarding “his efforts relating to Seth Rich.”

The Fox News story, promoted as a "bombshell," quoted Wheeler as saying that Rich had been in touch with WikiLeaks and someone in the government was blocking the investigation. Wheeler says both quotes were fabricated.

Extorting the News

Wheeler says Butowsky disclosed the plan to “extort” Hersh in a phone conversation May 19. He says Butowsky said he planned to send Hersh a five-second tape recording of his voice and a demand that he disclose one of his FBI sources on the story.When the story was denounced by Wheeler and the Rich family, Butowsky proposed blackmailing investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to “save” the story.

“You have three hours to write back who at the FBI you spoke to, with his name, that read you the Seth Rich report,” Butowsky allegedly said. “If you don’t give us that in three hours, a full recording of everything we have will be at every news agency tonight with your name and phone number on it. If you give it to us, you will never hear from us again."

The lawsuit does not say why the tape recording would have been so threatening to Hersh.

On May 23, Fox News retracted the story, saying it did not adhere to the agency's standards.

On Monday, Sean Spicer confirmed to NPR that he had met twice with Butowsky about the story, but denied Trump was involved. Butowsky told NPR he was "joking" about the president's involvement.

Asked to comment on the allegations, Hersh replied, via email, "Hey, I live in the real world."

Consequences

Trump’s role in the story has two possible implications, one for the Russia investigation, the other for Fox News.

Trump’s involvement in promoting a false story would only be significant for the ongoing Russia investigation if other solid evidence of obstruction of justice emerges. Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, says such evidence is lacking.

"While [Trump’s involvement] can be cited as part of a pattern,” Turley said in an email, “there is still not a compelling mosaic of a crime. This is a particularly small tile in any mosaic theory. There is a danger when otherwise lawful acts are assembled to create a criminal claim.”

Trump’s involvement is also relevant to the bid of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, to buy the Sky, a European satellite TV network.

In June, British authorities delayed approval of the $15 billion transaction and asked regulators to further examine whether the deal would give the Rupert Murdoch family too much control over the country’s media.

“The transaction may increase members of the Murdoch Family Trust’s ability to influence the overall news agenda and their ability to influence the political process,” British culture minister Karen Bradley said in a statement.

The bogus Seth Rich story provides British regulators a glimpse into how Fox seeks to influence the news agenda and the political process: with fabricated quotes, blackmail threats and the encouragement of the president of the United States.

Jefferson Morley

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.

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