Read the story on my Travel blog: National Geographic spent decades as a racist reporter of life – and that is their own conclusion – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
Snopes has just destroyed its own reputation. Their co-founder was plagiarizing dozens of articles from elsewhere, plus writing fake columns and article on the site under a pseudonym. I may no longer link to Snopes except to note that Snopes is now officially an Internet misinformation service.
Just about all of the numbers in this USA Today “news report” are wrong, and easily cross checked for the correct numbers. This. Is. Journalism. Where facts are strictly optional.
“27 police officers injured during largely peaceful” protests. Or something. Several examples of creative reporting, including the MSNBC reporting saying protests are not unruly as a building burns behind him. Words used to have common meanings but apparently not any more. This post is not about the protests about the reporting.
A national TV reporter hyperventilates on a live broadcast about people not wearing masks as someone walks by and points out his own crew isn’t wearing masks either. Because this is faked news intended to get your emotions going one way or another. Television news is just a big act now days. I may not be a real TV reporter but I play one on TV …
The media focuses on doom and gloom based frequently on rampant speculation. No one “reports” anymore. Instead, they prognosticate and speculate about the future with made up gloom and doom, most of which makes no logical sense. The reason for the gloom and doom is due to an odd bit of psychology. Negative information always takes precedence over positive information – it is a basic survival mechanism to pay attention to bad things. The media know this. And strangely enough, news consumers seek out more bad news to validate their feelings of anxiety.
Two photographers demonstrate how many “Covid-19 crowd” photos have been faked to make it look like crowds of people are in close proximity to one another.
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.
We are faced with a constant bombardment of negativity – yet most of it is flat out false. We live in the best of times in human history, and even our environmental footprint is improving dramatically, contrary to the constant drone of fear mongering.