Tag: media

3 = 17

The Associated Press is Fake News:

In stories published April 6, June 2, June 26 and June 29, The Associated Press reported that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump. That assessment was based on information collected by three agencies – the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency – and published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which represents all U.S. intelligence agencies. Not all 17 intelligence agencies were involved in reaching the assessment.

Well, someone ELSE said the other 14 agencies agreed, right? And the media wonders why they are held in such contempt.

Infogalactic in L’Express

A French take on Infogalactic. The original article in French is here.

Presented as “trustworthy” and “unbiased”, these encyclopedias are the privileged terrain of racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Because they considered Wikipedia to be unreliable and contaminated by the “social justice warrior”, several extreme right-wing figures have invented their own online encyclopedias. Their names: Metapedia , Infogalactic, or Conservapedia .

These sites now have several hundred thousand contents. A success such as the first of them now exists in no less than sixteen languages. The second, currently only available in English, will also be launched in France by the end of the summer …

Supremacy, anti-semitism and complicism

At first glance, these three encyclopedias resemble Wikipedia . The design, like the participative concept, have indeed been borrowed from him. On the other hand, the difference is quite clear. Founded by extreme right – wing American and Swedish figures, the sites do not hide their political

On the home pages of Metapedia and Conservapedia, there are two columns relaying theses and theories negationist, supremacist, antisemitic, racist, islamophobic, antifeminist, complotist, or homophobic. Infogalactic is more subtle. Its founder, who calls himself Vox Day, is the first to denounce the “extreme right bias” (movement to which it belongs elsewhere). “We are trying to make available to the Net surfers a neutral platform, which allows them to form their own opinion”.

Even if you look at it, the news from the main page is always cleverly chosen. Those celebrating the success of President Donald Trump , for example, are regularly highlighted. As for the thematic pages, some, rather well documented, are next to others containing objective nonsense.


For Infogalactic, the Pizzagate was real

An example is evocative. The site Infogalactic has a page dedicated to “fake news” . Among these misinformation is the ” Pizzagate”, a conspiracy theory according to which the former director of campaign of Hillary Clinton would have organized a pedophile network from a pizzeria.

On the page “fake news”, is quoted the Pizzagate. On the page “fake news”, is quoted the Pizzagate. Problem: the site also contains an entire page on this same event . And there, more question of “fake news”: the Pizzagate has for the authors well existed. Pseudo-evidence, such as the number of missing children in the pizzeria region, is even advanced. Asked about this by L’Express, Vox Day explains that according to him, the media “were lying” about this scandal. He accuses them of having conducted “no search, no reportage” before reversing the facts. Notwithstanding the New York Times and other newspapers that conducted the investigation.

For now, these platforms remain less popular than Wikipedia. While the latter is the fifth most visited site in the world, Infogalactic is only 14,710th, and Conservapedia 18,066th in the United States, according to the Alexa ranking. But their traffic would not stop growing, boosted by “anti-Wikipedia revolt.”

It’s a bit of a hit piece, of course, but it was well worth providing the reporter with a few quotes, as the article generally backs up our criticisms of Wikipedia. International awareness continues to grow. Traffic continues to grow. And we’ll have an exciting new feature to announce soon. And for the record, here is what I actually had to say about Pizzagate.

All I know about Pizzagate is that the mainstream media is obviously lying about it. If you look into the timeline of the media’s coverage, you will see that they started claiming Pizzagate was fake news from the very start, just as soon as the news first broke. They never looked into it, they never reported on any of the evidence gathered by the chans, they just unilaterally declared it to be fake news without any research or reporting.


No one in the mainstream media bothered looking into why a little pizza shop owner was listed as one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington DC. If nothing else, you’d think they would have asked at least one or two questions about that anomaly. And they haven’t addressed the fact that the DC police say no shots were fired by the actor arrested at Comet Ping Pong while the Washington Post reported that at least one shot was fired.


Then note that CNN just fired three respected and award-winning employees for getting caught putting out fake news.


Anyhow, since Pizzagate is an INVESTIGATION, not a conclusion, it’s not even correct to say it is a single “story” at all. There are multiple aspects to Pizzagate, so some of them may be true while others are false. I haven’t spent any time looking into it myself, so I don’t have any opinions in that regard, but I will say that I find the mainstream media’s behavior to be suspicious. 

Media Con #2 in action

You may recall that I mentioned the three cons that reporters run on people they want to submit to playing punching bag for an article. Bre Faucheux turned down Rachel Poser of Harper’s Magazine three times, prompting this threatening variant on Media Con #2.


Your name appears in the piece and it is my responsibility to make sure you and your views are represented accurately.

To help put this in context, consider this little glimpse behind the media curtain.

When I told my editor at Literally, Darling I wanted to write a story about conversations I’d been having with a white nationalist, she told me she thought it would be a good idea, but wanted to be careful that we didn’t “normalize” him. I understood this to mean she wanted to make it clear nobody at Literally, Darling supported or condoned Mr. Patriarch’s views (we don’t).

Neither the reporter, the editor, nor the fact-checker is even remotely interested in ensuring that the target or his views are represented accurately. To the contrary, they are very careful to make sure that neither the target nor his views are portrayed as positive in any way. So, what they do write the story in accordance with the negative narrative, then cherry-pick a kill-quote or two, then attempt to get the target to confirm the accuracy of the kill-quote.

What they are attempting to do is to bolster the narrative with the assistance of the bamboozled target. Bre was wise to turn continue to turn them down, because there is absolutely no benefit to her from bolstering the Harper’s narrative about the women of the Alt-Right.

Three Fake News scalps

CNN throws three employees under the bus, hopes that you’ll believe they’re totally reporting the truth now:

Three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday. The article was removed from CNN.com on Friday after the network decided it could no longer stand by its reporting.

“In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignation of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a network spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

On Thursday, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a story involving an investigation into a Russian investment fund with possible ties to several Trump associates.

According to the network, an internal investigation found that “some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.”

Citing a single unnamed source, the story reported that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” The story, which only appeared on the network’s site, was quickly disputed on Friday, as one Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci — who was mentioned in the story — pushed back on  Frank’s reporting, insisting he “did nothing wrong.”

“Once it was determined that editorial processes were not followed, CNN deleted the story from CNN.com,” the network said Friday on its site. “Soon thereafter, the story was officially retracted and replaced with an editor’s note.” The piece “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” the note said. “Links to the story have been disabled.”

CNN blamed the mistake on a “breakdown in editorial workflow,” explaining that that “these types of stories” did not go through the usual departments such as fact-checkers, journalism standards experts and lawyers.

The gaffe cost three employees their jobs: Frank, who wrote the story, Eric Lichtblau, a unit editor, and the person in charge of the unit, Lex Haris.

The network’s investigative unit was told during a meeting on Monday that the retraction did not necessarily mean the facts of the story were wrong. But, rather, “the story wasn’t solid enough to publish as-is,” according CNN.com.

Haris, Lichtblau and Frank had solid reputations among their colleagues.

Frank worked as reporter for USA Today and Newsday before joining CNN. Lichtblau is a former New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter. And Haris was a former executive editor of CNNMoney.

This is what happens when you put your trust in the reliability of Team NeverTrump. The problem is that if this newfound sense of journalistic integrity caused CNN to force the resignation of three employees every time they published Fake News, they’d soon have none left. Of course, they have learned nothing.

CNN boss Jeff Zucker says despite Donald Trump’s war on the network and what the president says is “fake news,” he is certain that CNN maintains the trust of its viewers, as it extends into digital brands to attract a younger audience.

Speaking at Cannes Lions, he said, “CNN has been around for 37 years, our trustworthiness today is the same as it was a year ago, before people in high offices started questioning it. We know that through our own brand research. Just because somebody says you are not trustworthy, that doesn’t mean it is so … CNN’s brand equity is built over 37 years doing hard work in very dangerous places … those who rely on CNN trust CNN more than ever.”

CNN is dying. No one watches it. Because it is Fake News posing as real news.

Primetime viewers in millions: FNC: 2.346 | CNN: 827 | MSNBC: 1.705

“A massive, massive fuckup”

CNN learns the hard way that relying upon Never-Trumpers as sources is a very bad idea:

CNN late Friday deleted a story from its website that claimed Senate investigators were looking into a Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Trump’s transition team, later issuing a retraction in the story’s place.

The now-deleted story, by investigative reporter Thomas Frank, was published Thursday and cited a single, unnamed source who claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into a “$10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration.”

But by Friday evening, the story had vanished from CNN’s website. It was not immediately clear when the story was removed, but a tweet linking to the story, from CNN’s Politics account, was also deleted sometime Friday evening.

After noticing the story’s disappearance, BuzzFeed News contacted CNN. More than an hour later, an editor’s note appeared on CNN’s website. A company representative sent BuzzFeed News a link to the note, but did not answer other questions about why the story was removed.

“The story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” the editor’s note said. It did not say which parts of the story failed to meet the company’s standards. The note also apologized to Anthony Scaramucci, a member of Trump’s transition team and an adviser to his presidential campaign, who was named in the report.

A source close to the network, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter, told BuzzFeed News the story was a “massive, massive fuck up and people will be disciplined.” The person said CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker and the head of the company’s human resources department are “directly involved” in an internal investigation examining how the story was handled.

The lesson, as always: CNN is Fake News.

Access journalism and fake news

The Zman explains the link between the two:

It has been thrown down the memory hole, but Jordan decided the way to help black sports reporters was to give them exclusive access and deny access to honkies. Guys like Ahmad Rashad and Michael Wilbon were given special access. This made their careers, but it also ushered in the era of access journalism. Players granted access to reporters who were willing to sing their praises in their columns and on TV shows.

Something similar happened around the same time in Washington politics. The Clinton machine was ruthless in controlling the media. They would shutout reporters that did not play ball. There’s always been some of this, as people are naturally going to be nice to those who are nice to them and not so nice to people they see as adversaries. The difference was, the Clinton team turned this into a formal policy and the Washington press corp went along with it. They liked being treated like players so they acted accordingly.

The Bush people could not play the same game, as the Washington media is universally liberal, but they did a little bit of it with operations like Fox and the talk radio guys. Rich Lowry of National Review remodeled the magazine to be a GOP mouth piece for exactly this reason. It gave them access to Republicans. The Weekly Standard largely existed as a public relations vehicle for the Bush family. Much of what has gone wrong with Buckley Conservatism is due to the perils of access journalism.

This is why we see the explosion of fake news. The NBA guys want access or at least the illusion of access. To that end, they tweet out rumors and fake news in the hope of getting a reply from an agent or front office guy. That way they can then shoot down their own rumor or fake news with an actual quote from a real person. “After talking with person X, I can now report that the rumor I reported is false.” Fake news about rumors produces gossip that is eventually addressed by a real person in the news.

That seems to be what’s going on Washington with all the fake news. No one in the Washington media bothered to develop contacts in the Trump team. Instead, they mocked and harassed them through the campaign, figuring they were currying favor with the Clinton people. Now, they have no access so they create fake stories hoping to get a response from the Trump people. In lieu of real reporting, it is provocative fake reporting in the hope of gaining access to real people in the Trump White House.

This is all pretty much news to me, but it’s as explanatory as anything else I’ve heard suggested. Personally, I find it a little strange that Fake News has exploded at the very time that it has never been easier for the average individual to do a little looking around the Internet to debunk it.

The Wikipedia of the Alt-Right

Wired acknowledges the existence of Infogalactic:

Vox Day thinks that Wikipedia is the worst. But the things that bug him aren’t the typical complaints you’ll hear about the crowd-sourced encyclopedia—that it’s plagued by trolls, say, or that its pages on Pokémon lore are overly comprehensive.

Day is bothered because he believes that Wikipedia is a Democratic tool, run “by the left-wing thought police who administer it,” he tells me over email. Yet the millions of articles and stubs that make up the end product are used as fact. And that makes the science fiction writer and alt-right personality, who uses Vox Day as his pen name, angry.

So last fall, in the midst of a public debate about what, exactly, constitutes a fact, Day decided it was time to do something about the Wikipedia problem. He chose to launch his own version of it. He made a copy of the entire site and invited his followers to start rewriting its pages. “Wikipedia was the easiest and the most important of the social justice-converged social media giants to replace,” Day told me.

That site, Infogalactic, is made with Wikipedia’s MediaWiki software—so by design it looks a lot like Wikipedia. At first glance, so does its content. On the homepage is a featured article about peregrine falcons; a highlighted image of a Botticelli masterwork, housed in the Uffizi in Florence, is featured underneath.

But break into some of the more contentious topics and differences begin to emerge. On Infogalactic, Mike Cernovich is a respected bestselling author, “independent journalist,” “writer, attorney, and documentary filmmaker.” On Wikipedia, the Twitter pundit is a “social media personality, writer, and conspiracy theorist.”

The idea is that a stringent, Trump-supporting member of the alt-right shouldn’t have to read the same ideas as a Marxist, or a bleeding-heart college professor. (Day initially considered the tagline, “your universe, your view.”) But Infogalactic is only one of a number of crowdsourced encyclopedias tailored to various conservative factions….

On their own, none of these sites draws a huge audience. According to Alexa’s traffic rankings, Conservapedia is the 18,066th most popular site in the US. Infogalactic clocks in at 14,710. Wikipedia, by comparison, ranks fifth. But since last fall—just as the notion of alternative facts gained cultural primacy—such sites have seen a clear rise in traffic and interest.

Not bad, all things considered. I wouldn’t say the thought policing at Wikipedia makes me angry, but that’s pretty mild as the disqualify-and-discredit game goes. The reporter actually appears to recognize that there is a market for Infogalactic, he’s just not sure about the extent of its appeal; there are no gotchas or kill quotes, just an accurate presentation of the current facts. And while it would have been nice if they’d mentioned our perspective filters and other plans for Phase Two, we don’t have them up and running yet and so it’s entirely fair to leave them out.

I’m just pleased to be informed that in less than nine months, Infogalactic has already surpassed Conservapedia. And if you want to help Infogalactic continue to grow, please support it by joining the Burn Unit and signing up for a monthly donation.

The God-Emperor wins again

Funny, is it not, that Donald Trump keeps winning these “national referendums” on his presidency, even when the media’s polls predict otherwise.

Republican Karen Handel won the special congressional election in Georgia on Tuesday, fending off a challenge from Democrat Jon Ossoff in the heavily Republican House district.

Handel’s victory in the closely fought contest, which drew national interest and was the most expensive House race ever at over $50 million spent by both sides, comes as good news for President Donald Trump. Democrats had promoted the contest as a referendum on the president.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, Handel leads Ossoff 53 percent to 47 percent in a race that many expected to be much closer. Handel had 127,021 votes to the Democrat’s 114,390 ballots.

The thing is, even if Ossoff had won, that would have changed precisely nothing, except the media would be crowing rather than falling into a surly silence. Except that we would not have further proof that the media’s polls are reliably unreliable and we’re back to the old days of needing to reweight their reports four or five points in the Republican’s direction to predict the result.

Tired? Or still not tired?

Media Con #2

Philadelphia Magazine is running Media Con #2 on Jack Posobiec: I just want to give you the chance to tell your side of the story.

Here is hoping Jack has the sense to simply tell them no. Or, I expect, we’ll soon have a fourth illustration in why you Don’t Talk To The Media.

DTTTM: Gavin Mcinnes edition

Gavin McInnes‏ @Gavin_McInnes
I was wrong about @andrewmarantz. He’s a propagandist just like the rest of them. No more talking to liberal media #ProudBoys


They are all. It’s an act. They usually run one of three cons on you:

  1. I’m a big fan.
  2. I just want to give you the chance to tell your side of the story.
  3. Can you educate me on this thing I don’t know about?

They will be your best friend, contacting you multiple times per day and spending hours on the phone with you, right up until the moment they get their kill quote. Then, they’ll quickly vanish and only communicate with you via email, if they even do that. They are very good at this; they do it literally every week, if not every day, to all of the people they want to grind for the media mill.

Don’t talk to the media. No, your clever strategy won’t work. No, recording them won’t make a difference. No, you aren’t a special snowflake who is going to magically transform the ideology of the mainstream media through the sheer power of your presence.

#DTTTM

Clever Takes helpfully provides a cartoon reminder in case you’re having trouble remembering why you should not talk to them.