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New Project Aims to “Fact-Check the Fact-Checkers” Accused of Liberal Bias

March 29, 2018

New Project Aims to “Fact-Check the Fact-Checkers” Accused of Liberal Bias

Reston, VA – With the rise of the term “fake news,” many individuals have turned to self-proclaimed fact-checking sites like Snopes and PolitiFact; the objectivity of these sites tends to be questioned by conservatives as having a covert liberal bias.

On Tuesday, the conservative Media Research Center unveiled a new project entitled “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers,” which is designed to “ensure the fact-checkers themselves are reliable, or exposed as liberal partisans if they aren’t.”

The Media Research Center explained in its announcement:

Sometimes you have to check the fact-checkers.

More and more, major news outlets are relying on “fact checkers” to, allegedly, ensure that the news is factual, sources are reliable, and statements are accurate.

In theory, this is admirable. In practice, it has proven to be simply another opportunity for the media to push their leftist agenda.

Fact checking groups — such as PolitiFact — routinely cast judgments while failing to disclose their own left-wing bias. Their allies in the media try to cast these groups as neutral third parties when, in fact, they are card-carrying members of the liberal echo chamber.

It’s no wonder that the public has so little faith in the fact-checkers. A 2016 Rasmussen poll found that an astonishing 62% of American voters think the fact-check-ers are biased.

The Media Research Center is flipping the script on these faux-fact-checkers. It’s time to turn the tables and give the public the real facts.

While Americans attempt to separate truth from propaganda, especially in regards to politics, some of these reportedly neutral third-party fact checkers— accused by conservatives of having a progressive bias— has left some consumers unsure of their reliability.

“In an era of ‘fake news’ and inaccurate reporting, it is important now more than ever that the fact-checkers themselves are exposed for their biases,” MRC President Brent Bozell said in a statement.

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

truth in media, fact checking, fact checkers, fake news, media research center, snopes politifact, objectivity, bias, misinformation, news, media

Snowden Explains Deep State’s Influence on Presidents Obama, Trump

March 22, 2018

Snowden Explains Deep State’s Influence on Presidents Obama, Trump

Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden was recently interviewed by Italian publication La Repubblic. The publication noted the 5-year mark of Snowden’s historic act of blowing the whistle on the NSA’s expansive surveillance programs and that “many thought he would end up very badly, but when he connects via videolink for this interview with la Repubblica, he seems to be doing very well: the frank smile and peaceful face of someone who is easy in his mind.”

In an excerpt from the exclusive interview, Snowden explained how the presidencies of both Obama and Trump are shaped by the Deep State following an illuminating question by journalist Stefania Maurizi.

Stefania Maurizi: We saw that President Obama, who was an outsider to the US military-intelligence complex, initially wanted to reign in the abuses of agencies like the CIA and the NSA, but in the end he did very little. Now we see a confrontation between president Trump and so-called Deep State, which includes the CIA and the NSA. Can a US president govern in opposition to such powerful entities?

Edward Snowden: Obama is certainly an instructive case. This is a president who campaigned on a platform of ending warrantless wiretapping in the United States, he said “that’s not who we are, that’s not what we do,” and once he became the president, he expanded the program.  He said he was going to close Guantanamo but he kept it open, he said he was going to limit extrajudicial killings and drone strikes that has been so routine in the Bush years. But Obama went on to authorize vastly more drone strikes than Bush. It became an industry.

As for this idea that there is a Deep State, now the Deep State is not just the intelligence agencies, it is really a way of referring to the career bureaucracy of government. These are officials who sit in powerful positions, who don’t leave when presidents do, who watch presidents come and go, they influence policy, they influence presidents and say: this is what we have always done, this is what we must do, and if you don’t do this, people will die.

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

 

Rand Paul: Deep State Exists, Uses Intelligence for Political Purposes

March 22, 2018

Rand Paul: Deep State Exists, Uses Intelligence for Political Purposes

Washington, D.C.— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Tuesday during an appearance on The Laura Ingraham Show podcast that the term “deep state” accurately describes how an unelected bureaucracy of national security officials in positions of power exert influence without Congressional oversight.

“Absolutely, there is a deep state, because the deep state is the intelligence agencies that do not have oversight,” he said. “Only eight people in Congress know what they’re doing, and traditionally, those eight people have been a rubber stamp to let the intelligence communities do whatever they want. There is no skeptic among the eight people that are supposedly overseeing the intelligence community.”

The “Gang of Eight”  that Paul referenced is made up of the majority and minority leaders of the House of Representatives and Senate, along with the chairmen and ranking members of the two intelligence committees, and are the select few members of Congress with real-time access to America’s most sensitive intelligence.

Paul pointed out that he believed Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others used intelligence collected “without any judicial warrants” for political purposes, in addition to “try to bring Trump down.”

“John Brennan and James Clapper were doing whatever the hell they wanted, without any judicial warrants, and I think there were numerous people in the Obama administration who were using intelligence — one, to try to bring Trump down; but two, also, they were using it for political purposes,” he said. “And this is very, very worrisome.”

Paul evidenced his point by noting Brennan’s politicized tweet over the weekend calling Trump a corrupt demagogue, and promising that America would “triumph” over him.

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

 

Brazil’s Largest Newspaper Abandons Facebook; Says News Feed is “Banning Professional Journalism”

February 17, 2018

Brazil’s Largest Newspaper Abandons Facebook; Says News Feed is “Banning Professional Journalism” 

São Paulo, Brazil— The largest newspaper in Brazil, Folha de S Paulo, announced late last week that due to Facebook’s recent changes to their news feed algorithm resulting in what the paper claims is “effectively banning professional journalism,” it would cease publishing content on the social media platform.

The Guardian reported that the popular Brazilian newspaper has an online and print subscription base of nearly 285,000 subscribers and had roughly 204 million page impressions last December, according to the Communication Verification Institute, a non-profit media auditor. The company’s Facebook page has nearly 6 million Facebook followers.

The executive editor of Fohla, Sérgio Dávila, told The Guardian that the paper’s decision reflected “the declining importance of Facebook to our readers,” but added that the recent algorithm changes to Facebook’s Newsfeed had precipitated the decision. The paper claimed the new algorithm “privilege[s] personal interaction contents, to the detriment of those distributed by companies, such as those that produce professional journalism.”

Only weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, announced that the company would be changing the algorithm used to determine what shows up in an individual’s Newsfeed to prioritize “meaningful social interactions” and posts by friends, and “trusted” news sources.

Folha noted that the choice to abandon Facebook was “a reflection of internal discussions about the best ways to get the content of the newspaper to reach its readers. The disadvantages of using Facebook as a path to this distribution became more evident after the social network’s decision to reduce the visibility of professional journalism on its users’ pages.”

A separate report in Folha noted that the newspaper’s own analysis found that “fake news pages received five times the number of engagements that professional journalism received” during the month of January.

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

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