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

[magicschoolbus]

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".


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

Aw. Someone's party is the weakest ever since 1920. No one is listening to you and your isolated main stream media bubble.

 

[LizKat]

Aw. Someone's party is the weakest ever since 1920. No one is listening to you and your isolated main stream media bubble.

Whoever posits any kind of trend based on the results of the competely anomalous 2016 elections is brave.

 

[Snoopy4]

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.

Actually, no. They are repeating Blumenthal, that's hearsay.

 

[magicschoolbus]

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.

Citing Salon is like citing infowars. Leftist liberal rag.

 

[dav1dd]

The chief problem is a lack of journalistic integrity. Too many news outlets are bought and paid for by special interest groups that only want to push their agenda.

 

[LizKat]

Citing Salon is like citing infowars. Leftist liberal rag.

This is the part that I found interesting in that citation, the different views of what is "fake news". I was particularly struck by David Mikkelson's remark that I bolded below:

While there isn’t an official, universally accepted definition of fake news, a variety of outlets and experts across the ideological spectrum have identified common themes. BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman, one of the first to report frequently and extensively on the fake news phenomenon, defines fake news as “false … stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs.” The New York Times’ Sabrina Tavernese wrote that, “Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks.” David Mikkelson, the founder of the fact-checking website Snopes.com, describes fake news as “completely fabricated information that has little or no intersection with real-world events.” Mikkelson goes on to explain, “not all bad news reporting is ‘fake,’ and that distinction should be kept clear.” Slate senior technology writer Will Oremus argues fake news is “fabricated,” “sensational stories” that imitate “the style and appearance of real news articles.” Fox media analyst Howard Kurtz defines fake news as “made-up-stuff being merchandized for clicks and profits,” clarifying that he doesn’t “mean the major media stories that some … find unfair or exaggerated.” And CNN and Conservative Review’s Amanda Carpenter wrote that “fake news is malicious, false information that somehow becomes credible” often “printed on what appears to be a professional looking website.” Carpenter also distinguished fake news from “commentary that never purported to be straight news in the first place” or “political speech someone doesn’t happen to agree with.”
​

Mostly I take exception to the likes of Newt Gingrich who was also cited in that piece for branding an entire mainstrem media outlet as "fake news", which appellation he laid on the New York Times. Whenever someone lays out either the NYT or WaPo in particular as "fake news" I am tempted to click into any section of the mentioned paper, cite a piece and ask the person who called that paper "fake news" what's wrong with the piece I cited. Are there misstatement of facts? Was something left out? Have you inquired of the public editor why the paper got away with it? Really?

LOL so it's an account of the Superbowl, right, and they got the right team named as the winner, right score at the end,,,, so the whole WaPo can't be fake on the day after the Superbowl, must be something else. Some days it's like a snipe hunt, eh? Find the fake news? Ludicrous. The WaPo goes to the trouble to spell the name of the new foreign minister of some Central Asian country correctly and some of us sit around calling the WaPo fake news but we couldn't locate that country on a blank outline map of Eurasia if our life depended on it.

Who lacks credibility sometimes is not US mainstream press so much as the people who don't bother reading it. Would be funny except that this is one of the ways totalitarianism sneaks up on a country: when the man at the top tells you what's true and what's not true, and you can't figure out any more when he's lying. It's the job of the Fourth Estate to help us sort that out. For my money, as imperfect as our mainstream press may be, I'll read their offerings before I read the reactive and derivative sites that now claim to print the kind of "real news" that makes Donald Trump happy.

 

[canadianreader]

I used to wonder whether, when cries of "fake news" arose, people meant everything in a newspaper or just political reporting. Then I began to realize that somehow we've managed to politicize almost everything, including stuff like whether variant recipes for chicken soup represent cultural appropriation, so that my original query might seem almost moot.

Still, I sometimes wonder if people who consider mainstream media as a source of "fake news" actually read many of the pieces from media outlets they seem willing to condemn as "fake news" publishers en masse. I was musing just now over what "fake news" objectors would think of the piece cited below. It's hard for me to believe that "fake news" complainants would think ISIS is never involved from abroad on attempts to recruit --and to stage attacks-- in places as far flung as India and the USA.

Not ‘Lone Wolves’ After All: How ISIS Guides World’s Terror Plots From Afar​

But perhaps I've not been paying attention and maybe people who consider mainstream media as just purveyors of disinformation have come around to thinking ISIS is inconsequential. I'd find that fairly astounding.

Or maybe some people are just categorizing media outlets too broadly. In my view, "fake news" is a critique best served up piece by piece.

ISIS is real whether it is financed by some hidden hands to make people scared or self financed by oil it is a threat and it is very much based on some religious texts that some say are not valid or made up centuries ago.

 

[smoledman]

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.

Like that is ever going to happen.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Who lacks credibility sometimes is not US mainstream press so much as the people who don't bother reading it. Would be funny except that this is one of the ways totalitarianism sneaks up on a country: when the man at the top tells you what's true and what's not true, and you can't figure out any more when he's lying. It's the job of the Fourth Estate to help us sort that out. For my money, as imperfect as our mainstream press may be, I'll read their offerings before I read the reactive and derivative sites that now claim to print the kind of "real news" that makes Donald Trump happy.

​

I doubt that most folks who suck as the teat of Breitbart have ever taken a real journalism course or even studied the subject on their own.

 

[LizKat]

The chief problem is a lack of journalistic integrity. Too many news outlets are bought and paid for by special interest groups that only want to push their agenda.

Like the Mercer Family Foundation? Follow the money wherever it goes and you'll find this group working to counter even moderate Republican initiatives, never mind those of independents, Democrats, progressives.

https://www.publicintegrity.org/201...donor-fueling-donald-trumps-white-house-hopes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-of-the-best-political-investments-in-history
​

[doublepost=1487000919][/doublepost]

ISIS is real whether it is financed by some hidden hands to make people scared or self financed by oil it is a threat and it is very much based on some religious texts that some say are not valid or made up centuries ago.

Please don't misstake the point of my having cited that piece in the NYT. And by the way, the focus of that piece is not the focus of your own post, i.e. the piece is not at all some kind of exposition of whether or not ISIS is "real".

The piece itself examines terror attacks that, rather than being "lone wolf" or self-radicalized in origin, have apparent connections to remote points of direction, what the flaws and risks of that approach are for perpetrators and planners, and how counterterrorism units across the world have begun to evolve in response.

It has often enough been the left rather than the right that has suggested "Islamic terror" is a misnomer and that homebrews reading about ISIS just went off their rocker and acted alone. Here the NYT is writing about the achievements and failures of ISIS in its attempts to project jihad around the globe. Yet the right castigates the NYT as "fake news". Even when the sense of a piece would appear to support some assertions of the right.

The questions then, for right, left or independent: how does it serve me to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Can I not read a paper and judge for myself whether something is news I can use, news I don't feel like reading, news with a slant, just opinion, or a complete fabrication? Why not? Who's telling me what is true?

In context of this thread and of my own previous post, my contention is that those who broadbrush entire mainstream news outlets as "fake news, fake news" don't read enough of it even to know what the heck "mainstream media" publish every day. Further, that by discrediting "mainstream media" wholesale, whoever does that risks playing into the hands of someone like Donald Trump who wishes to define what is true and what is false all by himself, with no interference from a meddling Fourth Estate.

 

[Autrement]

There in lies the problem, you see negative news as being the truth and reject somebody that sees it differently.

No, HEREIN lies the problem. This is exactly the mindset that drives me crazy. News and facts are not about "somebody that sees it differently." If it's an opinion article, sure. But all the times that Trump and his mouthpieces have cried out fake news, it's not "fake news" because it's based on reporting of facts, and run through fact checkers. Even the stuff about the Russia dossier was constantly given with big caveats about many facts being unverified and unverifiable, although other things in the dossier were verified. He's just using "fake news" as a cudgel to attack negative stories about him and his administration.

As long as we have free access to information facts will always rise to the top.

I have nothing to say about this besides that its hopelessly naive. There are people out there on every side politically who want you to believe something false or exaggerated, and who are going to take advantage of the way algorithms work to promote something or attack something else.

It's not about censoring, it's about using algorithms to make sure that stories of dubious provenance are not promoted as news and given authority by media/technology.