Tim Cook Describes Fake News as 'One of Today's Chief Problems'

[Cineplex]

Mr. Cook is the CEO of a corporation. If you don't like his company's news aggregation app --for whatever reason-- then it's easy enough to round up some other way to fetch "news you personally can use".

My point here: Your view of Cook's company's app's views are not necessarily an objective assessment.

Since I dare say so, I'll say this: it's also possible that Cook doesn't have a lot to do with whatever shows up in that app's offerings. Honestly the man likely has better things to do than micromanage content of a news aggregator. For instance I'd like to think he's had a hand in shoving an upgrade of the Mini to a higher place on Apple's to-do list...

For news: what I do in picking my own "window on the world" is subscribe to assorted briefings, with whose authors I may find myself either rarely or often in agreement. I choose those briefings because they in turn highlight assorted events or reportage that they find significant, and provide links so I can read them and decide for myself what I think.

For instance I like Politico's labor briefing, Morning Shift. And, I like the Financial Times' myFT mailing, that briefs me on categories of topics I can tell the FT I like to follow just by reading assorted pieces in the paper itself. And, I take an email from a Massachusetts congressman (I'm not from his state) because he details votes taken in the House.

And, I subscribe to a variety of publications that inform me from the right, left and what I call "irrelevant lean", i.e. a few magazines I take because I just happen to enjoy some of their long reads, like those in The New Yorker, i.e. articles that may or may not be of a political nature. I do confess to liking some of the ones that end up on the political side...

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/copy-editing-trump-the-black-history-month-speech​

lol and sometime even though i haven't a Facebook account, I check in to The New Yorker on FB for a video now and then. Here's a video of the guy actually doing the copy editing that my link above had resulted in.

https://www.facebook.com/newyorker/videos/vb.9258148868/10154454355748869
​

Sorry for the slight drift there but I really did want to point out that if you don't like the Apple news app, you can find stuff much more to your own liking, and have a lot of it funnelled to you through social media picks or email briefing preferences. Personally I try to take news from a variety of sources so I know I'm not choosing to ignore the world at large.

The problem with Timmy's News app is that the general public will use it without question (like most Apple things). So this means Apple essentially controls the news to all of it's users. There are millions of people getting their news from just Apples news product. Since Apple likes to tell you how you should feel, there is no doubt that the corporate culture will trickle down to the people curating the news or the people writing the algorithms to curate the news. As someone that has seen the inside of Apple I can tell you they all demand (with unspoken rules) that your thoughts, ideals, and opinions match those of the corporation...if they don't, you will quickly find yourself in a situation that ends with you out the door. Tim's beliefs are very much the same beliefs of Apple employees on the clock...their jobs depend on it. The best public example I can site is Apple's crazy retail hiring practices. Exercises to see who thinks like the rest of the clan.

I have no doubt that if Timmy wants people to think a certain way about something, he will use all the tools at his disposal.

 

[magicschoolbus]

This photo says it all.

 

[LizKat]

This photo says it all.

All that chart tells me is that the right's effort to discredit mainstream reporting is working, Too bad, since that feeds into subsequent ability of clickbait artists (including Bannon & Co in the White House) to govern even more thoroughly "the news". That it turn leads to ever fewer public standards for acceptable journalism than those demonstrated by cable news outfits, whose talking heads formats have long since begun to confuse people who seek "news" from television.

 

[magicschoolbus]

All that chart tells me is that the right's effort to discredit mainstream reporting is working, Too bad, since that feeds into subsequent ability of clickbait artists (including Bannon & Co in the White House) to govern even more thoroughly "the news". That it turn leads to ever fewer public standards for acceptable journalism than those demonstrated by cable news outfits, whose talking heads formats have long since begun to confuse people who seek "news" from television.

Oh please. I'm an independent and I think the MSM is utterly garbage. Both fox with the RNC in their ear and CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, with the DNC in the other which has invaded academia to further their narrative.

 

[Cineplex]

Oh please. I'm an independent and I think the MSM is utterly garbage. Both fox with the RNC in their ear and CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, with the DNC in the other which has invaded academia to further their narrative.

I think the most balanced reporting I've seen for US news is the BBC news on German TV while in Germany.

 

[Snoopy4]

All that chart tells me is that the right's effort to discredit mainstream reporting is working, Too bad, since that feeds into subsequent ability of clickbait artists (including Bannon & Co in the White House) to govern even more thoroughly "the news". That it turn leads to ever fewer public standards for acceptable journalism than those demonstrated by cable news outfits, whose talking heads formats have long since begun to confuse people who seek "news" from television.

Gimme a break. The media is a dumpster fire. Has been for going on 30 years, the internet has simply exposed the bias for what it is.

 

[stars_fan]

Timmy buys into a ton of fake news and likes to spread the fud.

 

[Flight Plan]

Just this week, the fake news media fakely reported on the President's choice for Supreme Court as having said some things that he never said, and then carrying on with a fake premise, hyped halfway to Mars for good effect.

This whole thing was fake news participated in by all the fakestream (oops, I meant liberal) media.

Yes, fake news is a problem. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and MSNBC are not on my reading/viewing lists. Even Fox has crossed to left-of-center with their own brand of fakery, so I don't watch them anymore either.

To get back in my good graces as a reader/viewer, these fake news organizations will all need to stop being fake.

I'm happy to leave the fake newsers alone. I'd rather not have yet ANOTHER government bureaucracy that just needs to be fed with the blood and bones of American companies and the citizens who work for them.

But if anybody starts coming after bloggers that I read and watch, then I'll respond in kind by making complaints about CNN's fakery, or the fakists over at ABC/ESPN/Disney. Or the fakeologists at CBS/Viacom. If the government thinks it can go after satire sites such as The Onion (which is run by a bunch of liberals anyway), then I say it's high time to go after the liberals in Hollywood too. Just because we can have fun doing it.

If it's done fairly to liberals the same way they want to do it to conservatives, then I'm sure it will get dropped before even a year goes by.

 

[Cole Slaw]

In Canada the media is, by and large, a liberal wasteland.
I never watch tv news and only occasionally check out the news online.
I ain't buying what they're selling.

 

[StonewallBrown]

There's a reason why Apple better be VERY careful going down this road. Why? Let me explain.

On February 17, 2011, President Obama--with his most trusted adviser Valerie Jarrett in attendance--held a private dinner in San Francisco, as this photo released by the White House press office on February 18, 2011 shows:

In that picture, you see then-CEO's of eight companies: Apple, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Oracle Systems, Twitter and Yahoo!. Today, these eight companies represent a huge fraction of the activity on the Internet in the USA.

We don't know what was said at that dinner, but one really wonders was a gentleman's agreement discussed and agreed upon to censor the political Right by tweaking the search and discovery algorithms using a combination of software and maybe some hardware? If such a agreement was made with the effective blessing of President Obama, then the eight companies I mentioned could be legally culpable for violating the First Amendment right of free speech, since the censorship was done with the blessing of the US government. Legal authorities could start asking since February 2011, was the searches (in Apple's case) in the iTunes Store and Siri searches on the iPhone since the release of the iPhone 4S biased in this manner?

It's that kind of sensational conspiracy theories, that are making people think the right is losing their minds. Obama wasn't the greatest president. He also wasn't the wors. He definitely wasn't as bad as the Right has accused him of being. No guns taken. No coup de ta. Since non of those accusations came true, let's start another one. Wow. Just stop.
[doublepost=1486838210][/doublepost]

Just this week, the fake news media fakely reported on the President's choice for Supreme Court as having said some things that he never said, and then carrying on with a fake premise, hyped halfway to Mars for good effect.

This whole thing was fake news participated in by all the fakestream (oops, I meant liberal) media.

Yet numerous people have come forward saying HE DID MAKE THOSE COMMENTS. Just because it's something you don't like, doesn't make it fake news. This is how disinformation works. It's goal is to make you question things, that shouldn't be questioned.

 

[SteveW928]

No, what's a problem...

1) That the average person now seems to naive, incapable (lack of critical thinking skills), or lazy to do enough of their own investigation to know what's fake and what isn't.
and/or
2) That this whole 'fake news' thing is being leveraged, by the powers that be, to control information and propagandize the above people.

Yes, there is absolutely purposeful fake news being generated by nefarious people, as well as the hucksters. But, there is also a LOT of it being produced by the main stream media. Journalism seems dead (in the MSM), so they now use the info they are fed by the gov't and even via social media. It's often incorrect or misleading (and that's before the MSM spin!).

 

[Snoopy4]

It's that kind of sensational conspiracy theories, that are making people think the right is losing their minds. Obama wasn't the greatest president. He also wasn't the wors. He definitely wasn't as bad as the Right has accused him of being. No guns taken. No coup de ta. Since non of those accusations came true, let's start another one. Wow. Just stop.
[doublepost=1486838210][/doublepost]

Yet numerous people have come forward saying HE DID MAKE THOSE COMMENTS. Just because it's something you don't like, doesn't make it fake news. This is how disinformation works. It's goal is to make you question things, that shouldn't be questioned.

So, if he supposedly said it to one person, then how did "numerous" people hear it?

 

[StonewallBrown]

So, if he supposedly said it to one person, then how did "numerous" people hear it?

Because he said it to numerous congressional members. He's lobbying for votes. That's just what nominees have to do. Part of the process.

 

[AZ63]

This photo says it all.

Is this approaching the level of trust people have in the federal legislature?

 

[stevet]

Uh, why is this important to a tech company again?

Simple solution: just ignore it.

Because they are on the wrong side of an election that they were lobbying for.

 

[smoledman]

Tim Cook is just upset that Trump got elected.
[doublepost=1486852578][/doublepost]

All that chart tells me is that the right's effort to discredit mainstream reporting is working, Too bad, since that feeds into subsequent ability of clickbait artists (including Bannon & Co in the White House) to govern even more thoroughly "the news". That it turn leads to ever fewer public standards for acceptable journalism than those demonstrated by cable news outfits, whose talking heads formats have long since begun to confuse people who seek "news" from television.

Please cite evidence.

 

[Thomas Veil]

I love how people think CNN is liberal. CNN is far from perfect, but they report the news that happens, not the news as conservatives would wish it to be. When you have the mindset of Donald Trump, anything less than ***-kissing to your side is "liberal".

This photo says it all.

It sure does. It says far more Republicans isolate themselves inside their little bubbles than do Independents and Democrats.

 

[d0nK]

The reality that Apple cares about people that want to do something other than surf and do social media stuff with a Mac are fake.
Apple have gone full-on fantasy-land regressive.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Public Policy Polling? You can't be serious. According to them we should all be celebrating a Hillary landslide.

Yeah, keep laughing.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Tim Cook is just upset that Trump got elected.

Please cite evidence.

 

[LizKat]

Please cite evidence.

Evidence that the right seeks to discredit mainstream media?


http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/to...efforts-degrade-mainstream-medias-credibility

When the Brian Williams scandal broke, conservatives touted it…as a breakthrough moment in their war on media bias...

The leap from one newsman's fictionalized war story to systematic liberal bias in mainstream media is a long one; Williams's apparent flaw was self-aggrandizement, not ideology. But the conservative response is more than just a reflexive use of the right’s most enduring media critique. Conservative activists learned long ago that in order to tear down the MSM, they would have to do more than make a case for bias. They would have to go after journalists’ accuracy as well…

For conservatives, the [Dan Rather/George W. Bush/Air National Guard story] was the exemplar of the connection between accuracy and bias…Why did journalists make these mistakes and editors fail to correct them? Because a liberal worldview kept them from questioning assumptions and double-checking information.

The Brian Williams case, with its lack of any overt political angle, represents the next stage in the evolution of the accuracy argument. Conservatives who pillory the mainstream media because of Williams have no need for the bias argument. The point is to continue to degrade mainstream media’s credibility (which has plunged dramatically since the 1990s), making room for their own explicitly ideological models. As [Sarah] Palin put it, the Williams scandal helps “justify our complete turning away from his ilk in the news media” and toward, presumably, sources like Fox News, Breitbart, and talk radio.

This evolution in the media bias argument illustrates how the right has come to use different metrics for conservative media and mainstream media. Inaccuracies in conservative media do not derail conservative personalities in the same way as Williams's inaccuracies have, because an argument can have factual inaccuracies but still be ideologically "true." Lacking those overt ideological claims, mainstream media can be discredited by being factually wrong.

That divergence has consequences, both troubling and absurd. It leads to the bizarre spectacle of people like Palin and the team at "Fox & Friends" holding themselves out as arbiters of accuracy. And the more that journalistic accuracy is associated [with] liberal bias, the more likely it is to become politicized. In an era when ideologues increasingly choose their own facts, the partisan policing of accuracy threatens to do in factuality altogether. ​

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/13/inside-the-mercers-diy-media-empire.html

This is a piece about the Mercer Family Foundation:

In 2008, though, things started changing. The foundation cut a single check that was bigger than the previous two years’ contributions combined: a cool million bucks to the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank known for its efforts to discredit mainstream science on climate change. It also made the first of many contributions to a group called the Media Research Center, which rips mainstream media outlets and reporters for perceived liberal bias. All told, it gave five times as much money in 2008 as it did in 2007. The next year, the family’s foundation shelled out even more, including a contribution that was small but telling: $50,000 to the Council for National Policy, a nonprofit group comprised of the most influential social conservative leaders in the country—including, at least at one point, Donald Trump’s current campaign bosses, Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. In every subsequent year, the foundation has given the group $50,000, except in 2014, when the sum dipped to $25,000. In 2014, all told, it gave out $18.3 million.​

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/opinion/sunday/charlie-sykes-on-where-the-right-went-wrong.html

Charlie Skyes noting that the right (including himself) had long made an effort to discredit MSM:

One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored.

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.​

https://www.thenation.com/article/fake-news-is-not-the-real-media-threat-were-facing/

What the conservative media machine does, in tandem with its delegitimization of real news, is much more dangerous. Its leaders take any story that, however glancingly or speculatively, throws doubt upon the patriotism, honesty, or competence of public figures they dislike, and immediately cast it as the greatest outrage in American history. They return to it as often as possible, greeting every new revelation, however tiny or questionable, as a smoking gun.

Just for the Obama administration alone, the list of such scandals is almost endless: “Operation Fast and Furious”; the IRS auditing scandal; the supposed “ransom” paid to Iran as part of the nuclear deal; the loans made to the Solyndra solar panel company; alleged misdeed involving the Secret Service, the General Services Administration, and the EPA; Benghazi (Benghazi!); and of course Hillary Clinton’s e-mail.

Anyone relying on The New York Times for news over the past eight years would have seen little of genuine importance in most of these stories, and little to challenge the conclusion that Barack Obama has presided, by historical standards, over a virtually entirely scandal-free administration.

Anyone relying on Rush Limbaugh or Fox News would have seen in them a pattern of corruption and malevolence unmatched in American history, and one which the untrustworthy mainstream media deliberately covered up. This is not “fake news.” It is a blatantly ideological distortion of real news.

But, as Charlie Sykes has noted, because of the delegitimization of real news sources, the machine’s audiences simply do not, for the most part, believe it when any mainstream media outlet seeks to correct the distortions.​

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/12/the...discredit-the-news-that-they-dont-agree-with/

This piece is worth the read just to see how many different views there are on right and left of what, exactly is "fake news" and who wants you to think their view is the only one worth having.

 

[BuddyTronic]

It's a sad day when people choose not to believe in facts.

And no Trump supporters, "alternative facts" are just lies.

Very little facts at all in the news. I find myself questioning everything and looking for real proof and real facts on every story. To me the problem is that every side wants to influence our minds, but they seem to think they can do it by telling tall tales as if they were real facts.

It's true that the Trump "alternative facts" are often nonsense, but on the other side of it you have the previous administration insisting that "Russia" has done so many things - but when you check into it, it's all cooked up lies too and NOBODY seems to care about that one - they just keep building on last weeks lies.

Someone needs to post a list of issues and simply state whether they are true or false. It would take 2 seconds of your time to view such a. list and if you disagreed with any of it, you'd be welcomed to post information supporting or refuting. Quora.com is pretty good for this, but there would be room for more websites to debunk ALL the news - I have a feeling that "honest news" could be a hot commodity in the coming months. Give me a shortcut to the truth please.

 

[nick42983]

Apple News is a prime conduit for fake news. It consists almost entirely of liberal/leftist sources. Cook can put his money where his mouth is and stop shilling for the cultural Marxist rot pumping out of Hollywood and the rest of the mass media.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Funny -- when I opened Apple News for the first time and saw Fox and Breitbart, I had the opposite reaction: what's this fake news doing here?

 

[LizKat]

The reality that Apple cares about people that want to do something other than surf and do social media stuff with a Mac are fake.
Apple have gone full-on fantasy-land regressive.

If you take a brief look at any of Apple's accessibility features, say the ones for iPhone, it's clear your statement is a complete crock. Apple's long been in the forefront of rolling out assistive computing for the disabled, and continuing to update its interfaces as related peripherals arrive in the market.

https://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/​