"Fake News": The Emergence of a Post-Fact World

[TeacherinExile]

The public trust is essential to the legitimacy of any government.  Whatever weakens faith in a republic's institutions and leaders invites extremism from the Right or Left.  The Fourth Estate is just one of the pillars on which our democracy relies.  That the first amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of the press underscores the essential nature of a free and vibrant press to our republic. 

But more and more lately, the phrase "fake news" has seeped into our public discourse, never more apparent than in President-elect Trump's first press conference.  When CNN's Jim Acosta attempted to ask Trump a question, the following testy exchange took place in the glare of the media spotlight:

"Your organization is terrible," Trump told Jim Acosta when he tried to ask a question.

"You're attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta replied.

"Don't be rude.  No, I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news," Trump shot back, before calling on a reporter from Breitbart.

I fear that the "fake news" meme has entered the American lexicon, bandied about almost as an epithet.  One of the more troublesome aspects of the growing prevalence of "fake news," especially in a highly polarized society such as ours, is that one man's "fake news" is another man's "truth."   

In a recent article historian Frances Fukuyama seems to suggest that "fake news" is symptomatic of the emergence of a post-fact world.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoin...ma-2017-01

Some excerpts appear below, minus Fukuyama's many references to Donald Trump, who certainly has no monopoly on mendacity among politicians of whatever stripe:

One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.

[/url]The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded...

The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.

While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics.

Use of bad information as a weapon by authoritarian powers would be bad enough, but the practice took root big time during the US election campaign...

The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information. 

[Indeed, I would interject here that a modified version of Gresham's Law may apply: "Bad journalism drives out good."]

[i]This highlights a more serious problem than individual falsehoods and their effect on the election outcome. Why do we believe in the authority of any fact, given that few of us are in a position to verify most of them? The reason is that there are impartial institutions tasked with producing factual information that we trust. Americans get crime statistics from the US Department of Justice, and unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times were indeed biased against Trump, yet they have systems in place to prevent egregious factual errors from appearing in their copy...[/i]

[i]The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay...[/i]

[url=https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-emergence-of-a-post-fact-world-by-francis-fukuyama-2017-01#][i]And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.[/i]

Fukuyama's conclusion troubles me not a little, and casts some doubt in my mind as to whether we have really embarked on any real regeneracy in this Fourth Turning.  Still smells like unraveling to me.

[SomeGuy]

Where were the New York Times' fact-checkers in the lead-up to the Iraq War?

[Warren Dew]

(01-14-2017, 04:37 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Where were the New York Times' fact-checkers in the lead-up to the Iraq War?

They were fired when they flagged some articles about some sniper down South.

Somehow back in 2001, the stories about 9/11 being a Bush administration conspiracy never gained traction, mostly because they never gained significant coverage.  Now, leftist papers are all up in arms about the stuff.  Perhaps they view it as infringing on their turf.

[pbrower2a]

(01-14-2017, 04:37 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Where were the New York Times' fact-checkers in the lead-up to the Iraq War?

Official sources in the United States, a/k/a the Public Record, have traditionally been safe.  Such official information as arrests, criminal indictments, jury verdicts, births, marriages, deaths, and wartime casualty lists are ordinarily definitive. On such items, nobody ordinarily needs to fact-check the data. (Although I do genealogy, and I once found a man who died of uterine cancer according to the public record -- obviously, someone put a woman's death record in the place of his. But transposition errors, misspellings, and typos happen all the time. We can;t afford to be too literal.

Official statements of elected public officials and appointees have generally been reliable.  Deceit and delusion can make such statements suspect. I am tempted to believe that most people believed that the successor of Washington and Lincoln would not lie to start a war. As the reality leaked out, distrust in government increased.

I think we can accept that the disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq degraded mass trust in the government for its veracity to the detriment not only of Dubya, but also of President Obama. People had to start testing what they heard not against some standard of objective fact, but instead what they already believed, which reflects the extreme polarization that bedevils American political life. If one is a liberal one generally believes Barack Obama. If one is on the Right, one generally distrusts practically everything that he says.

The distrust that Americans have in public officials will not likely ameliorate shortly.

[SomeGuy]

Warren,

How about the 99%+ odds of Hillary Clinton winning the election?  The inability of a lot of these outlets to see how they have managed to destroy their own credibility over the years, and their consequent finger-pointing at teenagers in Macedonia as the cause of all of their problems is quite amusing.

[pbrower2a]

(01-14-2017, 03:18 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: The public trust is essential to the legitimacy of any government.  Whatever weakens faith in a republic's institutions and leaders invites extremism from the Right or Left.  The Fourth Estate is just one of the pillars on which our democracy relies.  That the first amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of the press underscores the essential nature of a free and vibrant press to our republic. 

But more and more lately, the phrase "fake news" has seeped into our public discourse, never more apparent than in President-elect Trump's first press conference.  When CNN's Jim Acosta attempted to ask Trump a question, the following testy exchange took place in the glare of the media spotlight:

"Your organization is terrible," Trump told Jim Acosta when he tried to ask a question.

"You're attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta replied.

"Don't be rude.  No, I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news," Trump shot back, before calling on a reporter from Breitbart.

I count on Donald Trump relying upon the 'reptilian press' to get his message out. The Personality Cult is already forming around someone whose behavior is disgusting and who has shown no qualms about saying falsehoods and no willingness to retract the falsehoods when they are exposed as such. For the President-Elect the culpability for anyone disagreeing with him is with the person who fails to believe in him.

I had severe distrust of him before the election, and I see no reason to believe that I will change my opinion of him unless he starts telling us verifiable truth.

News media will have to decide whether they will get access to the president and  likely Congress as well at the cost of becoming conduits for propaganda or having to turn away from official sources. We may have the situation in which an organization like CNN must  turn completely away from politics to such traditional non-news as culture, 'fashion', show biz, stock and commodity markets, weather, sports, science, and consumer technology. Because the intellectual discourse of Donald Trump is roughly at the level of the National Enquirer, that is about the level of communication that will exist on politics. For the rest of us we may have nothing but rumor. When the ruling elite decides what the news is, as in the old Soviet Union, we get little but propaganda.
I fear that the "fake news" meme has entered the American lexicon, bandied about almost as an epithet.  One of the more troublesome aspects of the growing prevalence of "fake news," especially in a highly polarized society such as ours, is that one man's "fake news" is another man's "truth."   

Quote:In a recent article historian Frances Fukuyama seems to suggest that "fake news" is symptomatic of the emergence of a post-fact world.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoin...ma-2017-01

Some excerpts appear below, minus Fukuyama's many references to Donald Trump, who certainly has no monopoly on mendacity among politicians of whatever stripe:

One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded...

"Cheaper" does not mean "better". On occasion someone has a camcorder and a story. Imagine such a scenario as the JFK assassination happening again* -- there might be hundreds of people with moving images to supply to news media. On November 22, 1963, there is but one reliable video source -- that by Abraham Zapruder, himself a prosperous businessman. Motion-picture cameras and film were expensive, intru8sive, inconvenient, and difficult to use in 1963. Fast forward to 9/11, and people who had camcorders (far more people) had good reason to get them out.

(By the way -- that's why I ask people attending a strike, protest, or demonstration to take cameras along and be prepared to use them. The official story could be very different from reality, especially should there be violence.

[/url]

Quote:The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.

While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics.

Use of bad information as a weapon by authoritarian powers would be bad enough, but the practice took root big time during the US election campaign...

The United States may be becoming an authoritarian regime this very month. Donald Trump is more like the authoritarian leaders of China and Russia than like... Angela Merkel. But know well -- your network affiliate might be interested in your local strike, protest, or demonstration, especially if something goes violent. Where the courts and cops are honest, they may want to crack down on violence in protests. If counter-protesters decide that to "Make America Great Again" requires people with baseball bats attacking protesters -- then such merits exposure.

Just remember -- the segregationist cause in the Jim Crow South died because maintenance of the racist order required violence to make it work. We need not drain the swamp: we need only shine a blinding light upon it.

Quote:The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information. 

[Indeed, I would interject here that a modified version of Gresham's Law may apply: "Bad journalism drives out good."]

The ultimate gatekeeper is undeniable truth. Political violence of any kind is not part of the American heritage; it must be done in comparative secrecy to have its intended effect. Criminal acts such as beatings and arson merit and get no privacy.

Quote:[i]This highlights a more serious problem than individual falsehoods and their effect on the election outcome. Why do we believe in the authority of any fact, given that few of us are in a position to verify most of them? The reason is that there are impartial institutions tasked with producing factual information that we trust. Americans get crime statistics from the US Department of Justice, and unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times were indeed biased against Trump, yet they have systems in place to prevent egregious factual errors from appearing in their copy...[/i]

[i]The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay...[/i]

About half of all Americans live in one 'factual' universe and the other half lives in another. Which universe will prevail? We are in a race that will determine whether truth shall win out or raw power will crush anything in its way.

[url=https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-emergence-of-a-post-fact-world-by-francis-fukuyama-2017-01#]

Quote:And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that

Quote:everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.

Quote:Fukuyama's conclusion troubles me not a little, and casts some doubt in my mind as to whether we have really embarked on any real regeneracy in this Fourth Turning.  Still smells like unraveling to me.

I am tempted to believe that the longer that people adhere to 3T habits, the harsher the 4T gets and the worse are the personal results for more people.

*I am using these horrible event as an illustration of one of the best-known events of its time. No repeats -- please!

[Odin]

(01-14-2017, 07:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Warren,

How about the 99%+ odds of Hillary Clinton winning the election?  The inability of a lot of these outlets to see how they have managed to destroy their own credibility over the years, and their consequent finger-pointing at teenagers in Macedonia as the cause of all of their problems is quite amusing.

I don't remember any major poll having 99% odds. IIRC the guys at 538 had it at 70-30 right before election day. AFAIK know polls were not that off, what happened was that a lot of the Clinton's voters were in already very blue states, but she lost WI, MI, and PA by 78,000 votes.

[SomeGuy]

(01-14-2017, 10:49 PM)Odin Wrote:

(01-14-2017, 07:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Warren,

How about the 99%+ odds of Hillary Clinton winning the election?  The inability of a lot of these outlets to see how they have managed to destroy their own credibility over the years, and their consequent finger-pointing at teenagers in Macedonia as the cause of all of their problems is quite amusing.

I don't remember any major poll having 99% odds. IIRC the guys at 538 had it at 70-30 right before election day. AFAIK know polls were not that off, what happened was that a lot of the Clinton's voters were in already very blue states, but she lost WI, MI, and PA by 78,000 votes.

Well there was HuffPo, ABC's George Stephanopoulos, MSNBC's Sam Wang...

Nate was getting a lot of push back from people for putting Clinton's chances as low (70% right before the election, as you said) as he did.

[Odin]

(01-14-2017, 10:53 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-14-2017, 10:49 PM)Odin Wrote:

(01-14-2017, 07:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Warren,

How about the 99%+ odds of Hillary Clinton winning the election?  The inability of a lot of these outlets to see how they have managed to destroy their own credibility over the years, and their consequent finger-pointing at teenagers in Macedonia as the cause of all of their problems is quite amusing.

I don't remember any major poll having 99% odds. IIRC the guys at 538 had it at 70-30 right before election day. AFAIK know polls were not that off, what happened was that a lot of the Clinton's voters were in already very blue states, but she lost WI, MI, and PA by 78,000 votes.

Well there was HuffPo, ABC's George Stephanopoulos, MSNBC's Sam Wang...

Nate was getting a lot of push back from people for putting Clinton's chances as low (70% right before the election, as you said) as he did.

I was meaning the major mainstream pollsters.

[SomeGuy]

I agree that HuffPo, ABC, and MSNBC are pretty fringy, "fake news" kind of outlets, but whom exactly did you have in mind? 

[pbrower2a]

CNS, Lucianne.com, Breitbart, FoX Propaganda Channel, RT, Daily Kos... the extreme is the North Korean News Agency

[Warren Dew]

(01-14-2017, 07:52 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-14-2017, 04:37 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Where were the New York Times' fact-checkers in the lead-up to the Iraq War?

Official sources in the United States, a/k/a the Public Record, have traditionally been safe.  Such official information as arrests, criminal indictments, jury verdicts, births, marriages, deaths, and wartime casualty lists are ordinarily definitive. On such items, nobody ordinarily needs to fact-check the data. (Although I do genealogy, and I once found a man who died of uterine cancer according to the public record -- obviously, someone put a woman's death record in the place of his. But transposition errors, misspellings, and typos happen all the time. We can;t afford to be too literal.

Official statements of elected public officials and appointees have generally been reliable.  Deceit and delusion can make such statements suspect. I am tempted to believe that most people believed that the successor of Washington and Lincoln would not lie to start a war. As the reality leaked out, distrust in government increased.

I think we can accept that the disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq degraded mass trust in the government for its veracity to the detriment not only of Dubya, but also of President Obama. People had to start testing what they heard not against some standard of objective fact, but instead what they already believed, which reflects the extreme polarization that bedevils American political life.  If one is a liberal one generally believes Barack Obama. If one is on the Right, one generally distrusts practically everything that he says.

The distrust that Americans have in public officials will not likely ameliorate shortly.

Interesting that you bring up WMD.  The belief in WMD was largely fueled by a series of New York Times articles published in the leadup to the Iraq War.  I think that's what Someguy is referring to.  Look up Judith Miller on Wikipedia for more details.

[TeacherinExile]

Some more political commentary to chew on, as it relates to "fake news," this time sourced from Jacobin magazine.  (Yes, I know it's a "socialist rag," but insight--if not necessarily the "truth"--is where I find it.)  Its articles are "fair-minded" only in the sense that it levels its attacks at both Democrats and Republicans, which its editors and contributors see as handmaidens of corporate capitalism.

"Truth and Politics"  https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/trump...-buzzfeed/

Some passages are excerpted below:

At a press conference dominated by speculation over an alleged leaked memo detailing links between the president-elect and Russia, Donald Trump lambasted CNN as a “fake news” organization. The outburst, directed at CNN’s Jim Acosta, was met with a mixture of laughs, gasps, and applause from those in the room. This week Trump has similarly attacked BuzzFeed for publishing the document, which the outlet conceded was “unverified and potentially unverifiable.”

While some mainstream journalists turned to CNN’s defense, few extended the same solidarity to BuzzFeed. Certainly there are ethical questions pertaining to the release of unverified documents in any case, but for many critics it’s enough that BuzzFeed supposedly epitomizes the “clickbait” and “infotainment”-heavy character of new online media — regardless of inconvenient facts regarding BuzzFeed’s resources, the size of its readership, or the credentials of its top journalists. While a president-elect shouting down CNN is sinister, BuzzFeed is fair game — after all, we’ve all dissed it at some point or other, right?

It wasn’t so long ago the cry of “fake news” was heard most strongly among sore Clinton supporters, attributing Trump’s apparently inconceivable victory to the phenomenon — many going as far as to demand Facebook take action. Likewise in the United Kingdom, many “Remain” voters complained of fighting an uphill battle against misinformation during the EU referendum, and on both sides of the Atlantic we’ve been subjected to hot-take theories on the rise of the so-called “post-truth era.”

To the liberal mindset, “fake news” is so offensive because it inhibits the public’s ability to be well-informed enough to participate in democratic society in good faith. At first glance the sentiment may be agreeable enough, but scratch the surface and its implications begin to look more elitist. If people do not have access to a well-rounded set of views mediated by “objective” journalists, so the thinking goes, how are they supposed to arrive at considered conclusions?

Here we see the implicit assertion of the need for “real” news — imbued with all the favored buzzwords of the media world: impartial, neutral, balanced — cast as a hero that will deliver us from the evils of the “fake news” corroding our democracies...

The impulse to legislate away supposed “fake news” outlets on liberal democratic grounds — as in the case of those who turned their frustrations to Facebook’s algorithm — shies away from the very thing that makes democracy dynamic: politics...

It’s no coincidence that until now the accusation of “fake news” has most commonly been reserved for badmouthing the insurgent media outlets — including leftist ones — that are so irritating to establishment commentators. Such a tactic reeks of elitist snobbery, both towards smaller independent media projects and their presumably obtuse readers.

As it happens, the tactic is not a new one. In the early part of the twentieth century, the writer Walter Lippmann proselytized about the need for a disinterested media comprised of a professionalized stratum of journalists employed to manage the ignorance of public opinion through the top-down mediation of government policies. Lippmann’s proposals, still influential today, sought to deal with two key problems: first, a damaging critique of the (uncritical, arguably “fake”) way US newspapers had reported the Russian Revolution; second, a growing anxiety of the potential for the new technologies of mass media to rouse public opinion beyond manageable limits. Sound familiar?

While journalistic concerns about maintaining integrity (if that’s what we want to call it) amid an evolving technological landscape today seem as strong as ever, what’s less stable is who gets to define the parameters of the legitimate, authoritative, “real” news. Since the “fake news” label caught on, many establishment outlets have been unable to resist defining themselves against the term.

But Trump’s latest remarks demonstrate the malleable boundaries of the charge, leading even establishment outlets to take umbrage now that they’ve been forced to defend themselves — not against other journalists, but the president-elect of the United States...

Given the atomization of what now constitutes "the media" in the digital age, coupled with the endemic polarization of our body politic, the phenomenon of "fake news" is not going away anytime soon.  Indeed, the atomization and polarization seem to be feeding off one another in altogether unhealthy ways.  Is that a "positive feedback loop"?  Someone better acquainted than I in systems theory might be able to shed some light on that.

[David Horn]

(01-14-2017, 04:37 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Where were the New York Times' fact-checkers in the lead-up to the Iraq War?

How does a newspaper fact check the CIA?  Unless someone on the inside leaks and corroborates it, outside intelligence will have a hard time getting a hearing.

They did report on the IAEA positon that no WMDs seemed present and the weapon program had been discontinued.

[David Horn]

(01-14-2017, 07:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Warren,

How about the 99%+ odds of Hillary Clinton winning the election?  The inability of a lot of these outlets to see how they have managed to destroy their own credibility over the years, and their consequent finger-pointing at teenagers in Macedonia as the cause of all of their problems is quite amusing.

The teens in Macedonia did have a hand in it, because some people just chose to believe.  Comey had an impact.  So did the Russian hacks.  That doesn't absolve Hillary and Dems of anything.  If everything that bent the election went the other way, Hillary may have won.  The other Dems?  Probably not.

[David Horn]

(01-15-2017, 01:26 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: Interesting that you bring up WMD.  The belief in WMD was largely fueled by a series of New York Times articles published in the leadup to the Iraq War.  I think that's what Someguy is referring to.  Look up Judith Miller on Wikipedia for more details.

OK, except she's a FoX commentator now.  If she sucked then, and I agree she did, why is she OK now?

[SomeGuy]

Dave,

All I am hearing is a lot of whining about how your candidate didn't win because of those mean Russians, those ignorant rednecks, and those crazy kids in Macedonia, and that the traditional press, despite what was clearly cheerleading for the Iraq War during its runup and cheerleading for Hillary in the months before the election, doesn't bear any responsibility for any of it and should maintain its privileged position in the national discourse, by government (or corporate) fiat if need be.

I'm not sure that's a tenable position.

[Warren Dew]

(01-15-2017, 03:52 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-15-2017, 01:26 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: Interesting that you bring up WMD.  The belief in WMD was largely fueled by a series of New York Times articles published in the leadup to the Iraq War.  I think that's what Someguy is referring to.  Look up Judith Miller on Wikipedia for more details.

OK, except she's a FoX commentator now.  If she sucked then, and I agree she did, why is she OK now?

This wasn't an isolated occurrence at The New York Times, given it was not the first time it occurred there.  The problem was the culture at that paper that facilitated and promoted sloppy reporting and false claims as fact.  That culture continues to persist, making that paper worthless as a news source.

I don't watch Fox, or any television, so I have no way of judging what she's up to now.  That said, one can do less damage as a commentator than as a reporter, since it's generally recognized that commentators exist to provide opinion, not fact.

[SomeGuy]

Speaking of the line between opinion and reporting, how about NYT's new habit of rewriting articles after they have been posted in order to make sure the right "message" comes across?  Nor are they the only ones to have been called out on it.

The modern media's problems run a lot deeper than Podesta's emails or some kids in Macedonia.

[pbrower2a]

(01-15-2017, 04:25 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Speaking of the line between opinion and reporting, how about NYT's new habit of rewriting articles after they have been posted in order to make sure the right "message" comes across?  Nor are they the only ones to have been called out on it.

The modern media's problems run a lot deeper than Podesta's emails or some kids in Macedonia.

Revision, as for subsequent events. An obituary for Carrie Fisher that showed her mother Debbie Reynolds as still living became obsolete the next day.