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Phone Baloney: The 9 Fakest Fake-News Checkers

Trump-media-TWSince President Donald Trump won the presidential election in November, there’s been an explosion of “fake-news” checker sites, some cloaked behind a veil of anonymity.

trustIn some cases, Americans really have fallen for “fake news.” Just days ago, 20th Century Fox apologized for creating “fake news” sites – such as as the Houston Leader, the Salt Lake City Guardian, Sacramento Dispatch, the New York Morning Post and Indianapolis Gazette – as part of a promotional campaign for its psychological thriller, “A Cure for Wellness.”But on the heels of media hysteria over the trend, now it seems everyone claims to be a foremost expert on the topic of spotting “fake news.”

“Trust us,” they say.

“We’ll help you navigate Facebook and filter out the fake news stories,” they promise.

But just who are these self-appointed gatekeepers who claim to be the ultimate arbiters of what is or is not “fake news”?

WND found “fact-checker” sites run by:

  • A gamer.
  • A leftist, Trump-hating, feminist professor who specializes in “fat studies.”
  • A sex-and-fetish blogger.
  • A health-industry worker.
  • Organizations with billionaire Democratic Party activists and donors.
  • And another guy who went to extreme lengths to conceal his identity.

But most of the self-appointed “fact-checker” sites had one thing in common: President Trump – and the news sites that dare to give him a fair shake – are overwhelmingly their favorite targets.

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The websites often show an obvious bias against conservative-leaning outlets. And many fail to include clear explanations of the criteria they use for determining whether a news site is legitimate. Other “experts” offer little or no biographical information establishing their qualifications for making judgments about journalism quality.

WND has compiled the following list of the Top 9 “fakest ‘fake-news’ checkers.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

There’s a Difference: Fake News and Junk News

There’s a Difference: Fake News and Junk News

Media junkies on the tragic path to extinction believe the junk news, non-junkies see through the manipulation.

The mainstream media continues peddling its “fake news” narrative like a desperate pusher whose junkies are dying from his toxic dope. It’s slowly dawning on the media-consuming public that the MSM is the primary purveyor of “fake news”– self-referential narratives that support a blatantly slanted agenda with unsupported accusations and suitably anonymous sources.

Many of these Fake News Narratives are laughably, painfully bogus: that President Trump is a Russian tool, to take a current example. (That President Obama was a tool of the neocon Deep State–no mention of that. According to the MSM, America doesn’t even have a Deep State–har-har…the joke’s on you if you are credulous enough to swallow this risible absurdity.)

But the real danger isn’t fake news–it’s junk news. Junk News (the title of a 2009 book by an Emmy Award–winning journalist– Junk News: The Failure of the Media in the 21st Century) —is related to Junk Science and Junk Food.

Junk science is presented as “science” but cherry-picks data to support a specific but unstated agenda–an agenda that requires downplaying or overlooking conflicting data.

One common example of junk science is the approval of new medications by the FDA. If you actually dig into Phase III data, you may well find that the “benefits” of the new wonder-drug are barely above statistical chance, and the potential interactions with commonly prescribed (or imbibed) drugs are ignored.

This is how we end up with medications with an unfortunate side-effect: deathfrom misadventure, addiction, in combination with other commonly prescribed meds, etc.

(For more junk science, check out how meds going off-patent magically get FDA approval for additional –and immensely profitable– patent protection.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won

16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won

Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.

Since at least Donald Trump’s election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump’s constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.

We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than “epidemic,” insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when “an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts.”

The “agent” in this case is hysteria over Trump’s presidency, and the “susceptible hosts” are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like—well, like a virus.

It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.

Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Google Permanently Bans 200 “Fake News” Sites

Google Permanently Bans 200 “Fake News” Sites

The crackdown has begun.

In a blog post by Scott Spencer, director of product management for sustainable ads, posted on Wednesday, Google said it has banned 200 publishers from accessing its Adsense advertising service for posting fake news stories. Google said it had cracked down on sites which contained 1) Ads for illegal products; 2) Misleading ads; 3) Bad ads on mobile; 4) Ads trying to game the system and, 5) Promoting and profiting from bad sites. But the emphasis was on the so-called “fake news” category which has dominated media buzz for the past two months.

This is how Spencer explained his action:

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

* * *

We’ve had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content.

Google has faced criticism over its handling of fake news stories, including allowing a fake news website to rise to the top of its results displaying an incorrect story claiming that President Trump had won the popular vote.

In his post explaining how Google attempted to crack down on “bad ads, sites and scammers,” Spencer explained that Google had expanded its policies against misleading websites in November, leading to the crackdown.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fake News as Official Policy

In the first part of this review, we looked at the climate and energy disruptions that have already begun in the Middle East, as well as the disruptions which we can expect in the next 20 years under a “business as usual” scenario. In this installment we’ll take a closer look at “the perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamics of global crises”.

While a clear understanding of the real roots of economies is a precondition for a coherent response to global crises, Ahmed says this understanding is woefully lacking in mainstream media and mainstream politics.

The Global Media-Industrial Complex, representing the fragmented self-consciousness of human civilization, has served simply to allow the most powerful vested interests within the prevailing order to perpetuate themselves and their interests ….” (Failing States, Collapsing Systems, page 48)

Other than alluding to powerful self-serving interests in fossil fuels and agribusiness industries, Ahmed doesn’t go into the “how’s” and “why’s” of their influence in media and government.

In the case of misinformation about the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, much of the story is widely known. Many writers have documented the history of financial contributions from fossil fuel interests to groups which contradict the consensus of climate scientists. To take just one example, Inside Climate News revealed that Exxon’s own scientists were keenly aware of the dangers of climate change decades ago, but the corporation’s response was a long campaign of disinformation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

YouTube Joins The “Fake News” Crusade, Shuts Down Popular Conservative Channel

YouTube Joins The “Fake News” Crusade, Shuts Down Popular Conservative Channel

Late last night YouTube blocked the channel of the influential conservative politics and law website, “Legal Insurrection,” citing copyright infringement claims.  The creator of the website, Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson, told Fox News he was given no warning of the action and no opportunity to defend himself, saying “it’s very frustrating, it’s very scary, to have 8 years of content removed without a chance to defend yourself.” 

Without notice, YouTube replaced Legal Insurrection’s channel with the following notice:

YouTube

While the infringement notice from YouTube cited “multiple third-party claims”, earlier this morning, Legal Insurrection posted the following update to their website noting the complaint came solely from the Modern Language Association and was based on a couple of short excerpts borrowed from a 2-hour video from MLA that were “well-within fair use.”

UPDATE 1-13-2017 9:50 a.m. — I just received notice from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Language Association based on excerpts of audio of pro- and anti-Israel speakers at the MLA Annual Meeting we reported on in this post, Massive DEFEAT for BDS at Modern Language Association.

We intend to fight this both at the YouTube and legal level. It is highly questionable that MLA owns the copyright for oral presentations at the Annual Meeting, and even if it did, the limited excerpts we used from the nearly 2-hour video posted by MLA on YouTube are well-within fair use. What I think is really going on here is that anti-Israel activists at MLA complained to MLA that MLA had posted the audio on YouTube. MLA took down its own 2-hour video and now seeks to silence our reporting.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Fake news’? Time to choose: Corporate media fakes us into 2 central lies for more illegal war on Iran: ‘threat to Israel’ and ‘nuclear program’ EVEN AFTER 12 YEARS of anyone checking the facts soooo easily refuting these claims as known lies (8 of 15)

‘Fake news’? Time to choose: Corporate media fakes us into 2 central lies for more illegal war on Iran: ‘threat to Israel’ and ‘nuclear program’ EVEN AFTER 12 YEARS of anyone checking the facts soooo easily refuting these claims as known lies (8 of 15)

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. And then you win.”  ~ unsourced, and attributed to Gandhi’s analysis of British empire response to having their hypocrisy exposed: claiming to bring Christian love and progress while looting resources with forced local labor.

“When we now know that all claims for war with Iraq were known lies as they were told (and verbally explained here), and CNN provides similar innuendo for war by an unsourced alleged report with concerns of what might occur in the future allegedly stated by an unnamed US source reporting on an unnamed foreign source, this is propaganda and not news.”  ~ My 2010 analysis of “fake news” reporting from CBS, ABC, CNN to lie Americans into illegal war on Iran.

The Washington Post added to President Obama’s rhetoric for Americans to be aware of “fake news”: easily refuted lies of omission and commission in media. This article series reveals the inversion of those claims: .01% “official” news by corporate media (six conglomerates) is easily documented as fake in our most important reporting.

‘Fake news’? Time to choose article series (links added as series progresses):

  • Corporate media fakes us into wars that aren’t even close to lawful, are Orwellian illegal Wars of Aggression (1 of 15)
  • Corporate media fakes us into Orwellian illegal Wars of Aggression with lies known to be lies as they were told (2 of 15)
  • Corporate media fakes us into ongoing bankster looting of increasing total debt impossible to repay, while ignoring solutions worth trillions (3 of 15)
  • Corporate media fakes us into their fake world never admitting to a history of their easily documented lies (4 of 15)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer

IN JANUARY, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further.

This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.”

Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviors might be.

The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There are a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combatting those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Washington Post Admits Its ‘Russians Hacked A US Utility’ Story Was ‘Fake News’

Washington Post Admits Its ‘Russians Hacked A US Utility’ Story Was ‘Fake News’

Over the weekend we noted that the Washington Post was caught spreading “fake news” about an alleged attempt by “Russian hackers” to take over a Vermont Utility (see “Washington Post Caught Spreading More Fake News About ‘Russian Hackers’“).  Within hours of reporting that the “Russian hackers” had gained access to the electrical grid, the Burlington Electric Department in Vermont had to issue a statement confirming that the provocative Wapo story simply wasn’t true and that a laptop found to be infected with malware was never actually connected to the grid.  An embarrassed Wapo was subsequently forced to change it’s sensationalized headline and publish a retraction.

Now, as they often do, it appears this Wapo “fake news” rabbit holes gets even deeper.  Not only are “federal officials” now confirming that “Russian hackers” never targeted the Vermont electrical grid, but the whole mishap was derived from an employee’s attempt to check his Yahoo email account which, as Wapo reports, resulted in his computer connecting to a “suspicious IP address” that is “found elsewhere in the country suggesting the company wasn’t being targeted by Russians.”


The Post now reports that the Vermont utility hack was just an employee connecting to a flagged IP address… https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-government-hackers-do-not-appear-to-have-targeted-vermont-utility-say-people-close-to-investigation/2017/01/02/70c25956-d12c-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html 

Department of Homeland Security / FBI Claim of Russian Hacking is Fake News

On December 29, 2016, the Hill posted an article discussing a 13 page report by the FBI and DHS claiming that their 13 page report was “evidence” of Russian hacking in US elections.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/312132-fbi-dhs-release-report-on-russia-hacking

Wikileaks has repeatedly stated that the source of its leaks was a disgruntled Democratic Party insider.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html

However, President Obama issued a press release on December 29 2016 using the DHS-FBI report to justify increasing sanctions against Russia.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/12/29/statement-president-actions-response-russian-malicious-cyber-activity

I therefore decided to see what the evidence was of Russian involvement in US Elections. The Hill article linked to this 13 page government press release as its proof of Russian hacking.
https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR_16-20296.pdf

The government press release written by DHS-FBI did not mention Wikileaks in its report. Nor did the report provide any evidence of Russian hacking in the US elections. Instead, the press release stated that “technical indicators” of Russian hacking were in the “CSV file and XML file attached with the PDF.” However, there was no CSV or XML file or link attached with the PDF. I was eventually able to find these two files at this link.
https://www.us-cert.gov/security-publications/GRIZZLY-STEPPE-Russian-Malicious-Cyber-Activity

To see the evidence of Russian hacking first hand, I downloaded the CSV file and converted it into a spreadsheet. The CSV file and the XML file both contained the same data. Here is the XML link to this data which can be viewed online in a web browser.
https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR-16-20296.xml

Both files provide a list of 895 “indicators” of Russian Hacking. Unfortunately, nearly all of these indicators are simply IP addresses. In other words, it is a list of 895 servers from from more than 40 countries around the world. But the list also includes a few website domain names. (Domain names are simply the name of the website such as Youtube.com). I looked up these website domain names with the the following tool which tells us who owns the domain names and where they are located:
https://www.whois.net/

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great “Fake News” Scare of 1530

Fake news has always been around for humor purposes, but the real “fake news” scares happen when the establishment is so used to getting away with lying, that any alternate narrative is demonized as factually false, irresponsible, and dangerous.

“The Onion” was next to “The Economist” in the newspaper stands for almost two decades. “Weekly World News”, which one-ups most British tabloids with regular Elvis sightings and vivid descriptions of two-mile fish orbiting in the rings of Jupiter, is still next to “Foreign Policy” in the same newspaper stands. This was never considered problematic in the slightest. Why, then, is a unified establishment screaming bloody murder about “fake news” all of a sudden?

To see the pattern here, it helps to know a little history – let’s look at the great “Fake News” scare of 1530. It has a lot of elements similar to ours today.

“The statements that make [established] people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. […] If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.” — Paul Graham

After the Black Death hit Europe hard around 1350, the monasteries were chronically short on manpower. The families that had used to send a child or two to become monks or nuns simply needed all their kids to work in the fields, to ensure food production, before such luxuries as manning the monasteries could even be considered. Therefore, any work that required involving monasteries became increasingly steep or scarce for the coming century.

This is relevant as those monasteries were the only places that produced books, all of which were in Latin, and all of which were in complete synchronization with the messages of the Catholic Church, the owner of the monasteries and therefore the owner of all mass media at the time.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fake News? It’s All Fake!

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

– Lucretius

BALTIMORE – In January of this year, the Empire Herald reported that a “meth-addled couple” had eaten a homeless man in New York City’s Central Park. Later, Now8News reported that a can of cookie dough had “exploded in a woman’s vagina”; the woman was alleged to be shoplifting.

The fellows depicted above certainly mesh perfectly with the image of meth-addled cannibals conjured by our imagination… A few interesting questions regarding this event remain unanswered to this day. Did they marinate their meal? Fill it with stuffing? What were their wine and salad choices? Was their dinner roasted on a spit, cooked in a jungle wok the traditional way, or were these pale gourmets connoisseurs of wino tartare?

Tueasday’s big news: Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was shot and killed. The assailant looked a lot like a 21st-century version of Gavrilo Princip, who lit the fuse for World War I by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Bosnia. By the time it was over, 16 million people were dead…

An Associated Press photographer at the scene reports this man shot Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, at a photo gallery in Ankara on Monday.The assassin and his victim, Andrei Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey. While making the Travolta-like dance move caught in the photograph above, the assassin shouted “Allahu-akbar! Don’t forget Syria! Don’t forget Aleppo!”. Not a “moderate” rebel we would guess, but rather a sympathizer of assorted head-choppers. The assassination was photographed by several people and most of the pictures look like stills from a Hollywood movie. This gives the incident quite a surreal quality. It is as if it was staged specifically for the the evening news. No unfocused shaky-cam stuff forcing you to squint if you want to see something – these days, we get our daily snuff in high definition! Obviously, modern audiences demand and deserve certain quality standards.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How We Ended Up Here: A Brief History Of “Fake News”, And The Role Of FaceBook

How We Ended Up Here: A Brief History Of “Fake News”, And The Role Of FaceBook

With major media outlets having launched their campaign against fake news, which can be seen in in action in the screengrab below in which ABC News is disputing a news item…


You can see the Facebook “fake news” warning label in action here — “disputed by ABC News” https://www.facebook.com/Bipartisanism/posts/1226204234123249?mc_cid=ac1a251744&mc_eid=b08cb83114 

German Minister Seeks Jail Time, Fines In Criminal Crackdown Against Facebook “Fake News”

German Minister Seeks Jail Time, Fines In Criminal Crackdown Against Facebook “Fake News”

With Facebook having announced last week the launch of measure to flag and eliminate fake news from appearing on its website, Germany does not think the process is fast enough, and according to Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas, German judges and state prosecutors need to crack down straight away on fake news disseminated through social media platforms such as Facebook. Interviewed by Bild am Sontag, Maas, a Social Democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition, has repeatedly warned the U.S. technology company to respect laws against defamation in Germany that are more rigid than in the United States and added that the newspaper the principle of free speech does not protect against slander.

Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas

“Defamation and malicious gossip are not covered under freedom of speech,” Maas said cited by Reuters, just days after other top government officials called for legislation to tackle “hate speech” and fake news on Facebook and other social media platforms. He added that the government is keeping close tabs on how efficiently Facebook removes illegal content.  If removal rates fail to grow, “urgent legal consequences” could follow.

 

Urging a criminal crackdown, the Justice Minister said “authorities must prosecute [hate speech], even on the internet,” noting that offenders could face up to five years in jail. “Anyone who tries to manipulate the political discussion with lies needs to be aware (of the consequences).”

“We expect significant improvements in Facebook’s removal practice. The standard for removals must be German law,” Maas told Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Friday.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Fake News”, Censorship, Darwin and Democracy

“Fake News”, Censorship, Darwin and Democracy

Censorship is not helpful to democracy–rather, it is the death of democracy.
The mainstream media is awash with hyper-active headlines about “fake news.” How can we make sense of this sudden obsession?
Perhaps we can start by separating “news” from “analysis” from “commentary.” “News” is “he said this, she did that, this happened.” Analysis tries to make sense of trends that are apparent in the news longer-term–for example, why did Trump win? Is the economy actually healthy or not? “Commentary” is opinion that establishes a point of view and defends it while attacking other POVs.
All three of these news flows are constantly being spun /manipulated to support specific agendas and narratives. Now we are being told some of these news flows are false/ misleading and their intent is to disrupt democracy.
I would counter that censorship is not helpful to democracy–rather, it is the death of democracy. It’s all too obvious in the MSM hysteria over “fake news” that the narrative being pushed is: any criticism of Hillary or questions about her health, foundation, etc., were BY DEFINITION Russian propaganda.
Never mind that few if any voters changed their mind as a result of the “Russian hacking” (the Podesta emails); voters were already so polarized that the content of the the emails did not influence their decision, which was based on deeper foundations than “news.”
The fear of those who want to preserve democracy is that under the excuse of “eliminating Russian propaganda” the status quo will restrict everyone who is inconveniently challenging the status quo narratives with data-based analysis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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