Rather than hire actual diverse workforces, or recruit actual diverse student bodies, businesses and universities are using AI generated fake images of people in order to show their diversity. Seriously.
The FAA and other officials, using high tech gear, are unable to locate any drones among the media reports of unknown drones cruising over the skies of Colorado, then Nebraska, and now California and North Carolina. This post includes a listing of numerous well publicized drone sightings, alleged near misses and collisions that turned out to have never occurred. But such wide spread publicity led to mass hysteria, which is itself a technique of propaganda messaging.
State of Colorado says no evidence of criminal activity, finds evidence of people confusing stars, planets and toys as a drone fleet in the sky.
Get a good laugh at this C-130 with a destroyed left wing and left engines – and the headline saying “no major damage”. Uh huh.
After Boeing’s internal records show employees criticizing the safety of the 737 MAX, Boeing insists “this is not who we are”. This is known as the “begging the question” fallacy, which is to assert that something is true, in spite of actual events, and assert everyone agrees with this. This method is extremely common in corporate and government propaganda efforts.
The graphic shows the equivalent square miles to the acreage burned in Australian wildfires. Its a huge mess of fires but this provides tremendous context to the scope. ABC (US) News ran a graphic implying that about one third of Australia was on fire 🙂 The accurate portrayal, in this Google Map, was created by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Update January 10, 2020: 1.1% of Australia’s land mass has burned, 98.9% has not yet burned. This compares to 15% of Australia’s total land mass burning in the summer of 1974-1975.
CNN and many media outlets falsely reported on a confrontation that occurred in Washington DC in January 2019. The media had the story backwards, reversed from what actually occurred, with many media outlets falsely accusing students of racism. Today, CNN has settled the lawsuit filed against them. Several related lawsuits remain pending.
The news headline says Oregon ranks high in natural disasters, which the text explains, is wildfires in the State.
This claim comes from a press release from a small, little known online Internet insurance sales web site. This type of press release is put out in hopes of garnering free publicity – and it certainly worked for them – in large part because the media, like all of us, is more likely to succumb to a fear-based scary headline.
However, if we practice factfulness and look at the long term trend in Oregon fires we see that a small rise at the right end of the chart has been translated into a crisis and a catastrophe. The chart above is the official chart from the Oregon government’s Fire Statistics page, and shows actual acreage burned and total fires burned in Oregon since 1911.
The slight increase at the extreme right edge is the basis for the scary headline. By leaving out all historical context and by focusing on large percentile increase in a tiny number at the right edge of the chart, the media creates unwarranted fear and hysteria in viewers.
This poster is a persuasive bit of propaganda. Most of it is not true. The parts that are true are that the Corn belt is a very productive region, and about 80 million acres (close to 100 million in the poster?) are growing corn. This item had been shared into my Facebook news feed.
The media’s focus on scary, fear-based propaganda messaging – and avoidance of discussing workable solutions that are already underway – leads to intense negativity and anxiety. The result has been a majority of young people believing humanity may be extinct in ten years, even though there is zero evidence to support such nonsense. We are literally scaring people to death via false and inappropriate propaganda messaging. Some journalists are looking to “solutions journalism” moving away from the whining negativity of current news reports that focus on problems and seldom examine workable solutions,. This new approach offers hope and a positive way forward.
And as noted in the linked column, almost no one watches cable TV news: viewership is just 1% to 2% of the population. But its focus is on emotional click-bait creating shareable content for social media – and the perpetually outraged culture. Ultimately, cable TV news, say studies, leave you dumber and misinformed.