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.
Reporters are idiots. They fall for this story every year, year after year. And not one bothers to question the advocacy group’s press release. Not one.
Link to an essay on the role that “technical authority”, media propaganda, and how “consensus of experts” are used to influence the public and to exert control over us. This essay is an eye opener.
When is something a “crisis” and when is it not? “Crisis” is an intentional word used to evoke emotions – or to call for action. One can choose to use the word “crisis” to suggest something awful (even if not really) or can deliberately choose not to use the world “crisis” to minimize the optics of the situation.
The bogus World Happiness Report is back. The news media loves to run stories about this annual nonsense report that defines happiness as living in a Scandinavian country. I analyzed and demolished this report back in 2016.
Laziness leads to Reuters showing a thumbnail graphic that is badly out of date, and which may mislead readers into thinking the Covid situation is much worse than it is now. This is not nefarious or intentional propaganda – it is most likely just laziness.
According to the NY Times “Unfettered conversations” are taking place on a new cloud-based app. Is the NY Times suggesting all conversations should be monitored by the secret police or their proxies, the tech companies? This seems bizarre.
Newsweek and the Washington Post have both done stealth edits to long ago articles and did so for political reasons. Trust journalism? Why?
When an organization suffers an embarrassing fiasco of their own making, they often respond with the silly “This is not who we are” claim, just after they’ve demonstrated that this is indeed who they are. This is known as the “Begging the question fallacy”.
Today, a PBS legal counsel was caught advocating for fire bombing the White House and sending children of Trump supporters to re-education camps. PBS has apparently fired the counsel, and made the usual “This is not who we are”, just after their own counsel demonstrated that this might be who they are… begging the question once again.
The controversy over hostile social media content advocating violence, hate, and lies on social media – and the deplatforming of individuals and entire services (e.g. Parler).
Was Parler deplatformed for “conservative” ideas or for users advocating violence?