Tag: Fake News

Nunes, Media Mogul

The Lapdog is fighting back!

If you do not like the news then make it up…..something the GOP excels at doing.

Trump’s own little boot licker has started a way to fight Fake news…….

Devin Nunes isn’t just complaining about what he sees as liberal “fake news.” He’s created his own media company to fight back, reports Politico. The Devin Nunes Campaign Committee has provided the money behind a site called the California Republican, which promises “the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis.” (It was slow to load on Sunday, perhaps because of increased attention; it also has a Facebook page.) Two sample headlines: “CNN busted for peddling fake news AGAIN!” and “Understanding the process behind #ReleaseTheMemo.”

The latter is a reference to Nunes’ efforts as chair of the House intelligence panel to release a memo alleging bias by the FBI and Justice Department in the Robert Mueller investigation. Nunes has long complained that pretty much all coverage about him and his ally President Trump is tainted by bias, and a spokesperson emphasized the point when asked about the media company: “Until Politico retracts its multitude of fake stories on Congressman Nunes, we will not go on the record.” But Vox noticed that the California Republican seems to have issued its first tweet in the wake of the story: “We are real news, POLITICO.”

This whole thing is getting silly and yet pathetic…..if I do not agree with these types then everything I write is Fake News and everything they write is Fake News…

Calling something Fake News simply because you do not agree with the subject is silly…..but convincing people is as simple as taking to Twitter and calling stuff Fake News.

Speaking of Fake News……a historical look-see……..

Before Facebook, there was the coffee house. In the 17th-century, panic gripped British royal circles that these newly established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent. In 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation “to restrain the spreading of false news” that was helping “to nourish an universal jealousie and dissatisfaction in the minds of all His Majesties good subjects”.

Now, 350 years on, legislators across the world are seeking to do the same. Last week, the House of Commons digital culture, media and sport committee flew to Washington DC to grill representatives of big tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google. The title of their session echoed Charles II: “How can social media platforms help stop the spread of fake news?”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/11/fake-news-long-history-beware-state-involvement

Back to this person….this Nunes tool…..is in support of a person….not the nation….he deserves NO respect and should be arrested for violating the oath he took to become a Congressperson…….he is not protecting the rule of law……instead he is protecting a person.

Shep On Uranium One

Ever since the Dems have been calling for an investigation into the dealings of the Trump admin and the Russia bunch the Right wing has been desparetely searching for something thast they could use to counter all the bad news the trump camp is getting pertaining to Russia and its influence.

Well about a month agao they found their holy grail and the Uranium One story and the Clintons…..the problem is that it so much bullshit and even a FOX News journalist has shown just how fake this story is….and Shep Smith debunmks the story that all of FOX News has been passing off as fact….

Read the article and then watch his report in video……

Fox News’ Shepard Smith took six minutes out of his show Tuesday to debunk what has become Republicans’ attack du jour against Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration: “Uranium One.”

The narrative — on which the White House, Republican elected officials and conservative media have leaned in recent weeks to deflect from increasing scrutiny on Russian meddling in the 2016 election — is based on the faulty charge that Clinton sold influence, via donations to the Clinton Foundation, to Russian energy interests carrying out a deal that required her approval.

Smith began debunking the attack by showing a clip of Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/shep-smith-uranium-one-debunk

How much longer will the Right ignore the truth and keep pressing a lie?  My guess is as long as they can for truth means nothing to these slime wads on the Right.

Closing Thought–09Oct17

Hubris Thy name Is Trump!

I mean we all take credit every now and then for something that may not be all that original to ourselves….we all have an ego that needs massaging from time to time….

But our president has out done even the infamous Tennis great McEnroe…….

President Trump defended his throwing of paper towels to Puerto Rican hurricane victims in a weekend interview on a Christian network—and claimed to have invented the term “fake.” The towel-throwing, which San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described as “terrible and abominable,” was simply a bit of fun with the crowd at a distribution center, Trump told Mike Huckabee on Trinity Broadcasting. “They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels,” Trump said, per NBC News. The crowd was “loving everything. I was having fun, they were having fun,” he said. “They said, ‘Throw ’em to me! Throw ’em to me, Mr. President!” Trump accused Cruz of “doing a very poor job” with her hurricane response.

Trump went on to boast about the term “fake.” “I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake,'” he said. “I guess other people have used it, perhaps, over the years, but I’ve never noticed it.” It wasn’t entirely clear whether he was taking credit for “fake” or “fake news,” but he would be wrong in either case, according to CNN, which Trump often accuses of creating “fake news.” The word “fake” has been around for 200 years, while the term “fake news” started appearing in newspapers in the late 19th century. On Sunday, Trump tweeted that nobody could have done what he did in Puerto Rico “with so little appreciation.” He also shared a video of hurricane relief efforts “that the fake news media won’t show you.”

Daily I am amazed at the lengths this person will go to pat themselves on the back……Trump is setting a whole new bar for the term….HUBRIS!

 

State Run Media

Is it possible that we could be getting a state run news outlet?

Back during the campaign and shortly after he took office I wrote about the possibility of a Trump News Network…..there were several ways that he, Trump, could set up his own news network

Source: A Step Closer To Trump TV – In Saner Thought

We have a bit of a network dedicated to Trump and his views…it is a YouTube channel…..for now it is called “Trump Breaking News Network”……

Well news has come out that a company, a broadcast company, is in the move to push the Trump agenda disguised as news.

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, the Sinclair Broadcasting group cut a deal with Jared Kushner for “good” coverage of the Trump Administration, which seems to have paid off.

Politico reported last December:

Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 viewers[sic]— than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000.

With Fox News suffering several major setbacks in the past year, Sinclair Broadcasting is making moves to become the new giant of right-wing media. Many are now calling Sinclair ‘Trump TV.’

Source: ‘Classic Propaganda’: Sinclair Broadcasting Pushes Aside Fox News to Become ‘Trump TV’ | Common Dreams

Sinclair if successful will be able to push the Trump news to about 72% of the nation.  There will be mandatory stories on these local stations that carry the Trump view and of course will be pushing that the MSM is the enemy and a purveyor of fake news.

They have even hired the communications officer of the RNC as their chief political analyst…if this comes about then we are running close to having state controlled media….and I do not believe that is what the Founders had in mind…..do you?

Of course my more radical Right wing brethren will argue that the MSM is already pushing the “liberal” agenda….and I will say that I can see why they claim such….but I do not think that these main stream media outlets are always pushing fake news…I will admit that they do have a tendency to be used as a propaganda tool….but most are doing their jobs whether we like their reports or not…..

This still smells like some sort of authoritarian power grab to me.

The Longest War Ignored

Morning my friends….I hope all had a good weekend and are ready for another week of stuff.

Let’s get busy!

For months, nay years, we have been warning the population about the creeping demon of disinformation….okay call it fake news….does not matter….it is all the same.

A flash from the past is starting to make a come back….the tired old slogan of anti-communism…..it is being seen once again…can Elvis be far behind?

Anti-communism is back in vogue — not just among the right but also in so-called progressive blue states.

Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency have ushered in a tide of blatantly racist, classist, sexist and politically repressive nostalgia, encapsulated by his ominous slogan, “Make America Great Again.” As Trump and his Republican allies work to dismantle civil, voting, reproductive and immigration rights, another vestige of the past — anti-communism — has begun to reappear.

Fox News is but one purveyor of this ideology. As commentator after commentator sees it, communism stifles the spark that promotes competition and human advancement. In fact, any positive mention of communism is quickly and repeatedly condemned. For example, when MIT Press published a book called Communism for Kids, in April, newscasters immediately made it headline news, denouncing the text as “propaganda and revisionist theory” and lampooned the idea that capitalism causes misery among a swath of the population.

Source: Red Scare Redux 2017: From Right-Wing Radio to Brooklyn

All this is so much fake news and disinformation…..the radical Right has done an excellent job of selling crap to the dolts that hang on their every word…..

It has been a long drawn out war but the Rad Right is winning…..

Never in modern American history has a president so frontally gone to war with the media as Donald Trump, whose speeches and tweet storms blast critical stories as “fake news” and mainstream news outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”

“Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’” the head of media at Human Rights Watch warned reporters and editors shortly after the election. “[Trump’s] basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”

So far, the Trumpian strategy seems to be working, at least with his base. A recent poll found that fewer than 10 percent of Republicans trust the media a lot, and 6 in 10 complain that the media “keep political leaders from doing their job.”

Source: The Right’s Long War on Media – Consortiumnews

A long war indeed……and few pushed back on bullshit……

Right-wing media evolved into a hall of mirrors in 2016, when Breitbart displaced Fox News as the key agenda-setting and attack-leading epicenter of a disinformation-filled, paranoid ecosystem promoting Donald Trump and his pro-white America agenda.

Breitbart not only led the right’s obsessive, hostile focus on immigrants, it was also the first to attack professional reporting such as the New York Times and Washington Post. Breitbart’s disruptive template fueled the political and information universe we now inhabit, where the right dismisses facts and embraces fantasies.

Source: Study: How Breitbart Media’s Disinformation Created the Paranoid, Fact-Averse Nation That Elected Trump | Alternet

Communism is a clever word because of the users are too stupid to find a real word to describe a situation…..most of the dolts that use the term would not know a “socialist”/Communist” if it ran up and bit them in the ass.

Closing Thought–03Jul17

Where Is The News?

There are some here on the blogging world that use people like Alex Jones and Infowars as a news site…..they quote him and use him as some sort of “journalists”…..at best he is a con man and his news balances on the absurd…

Recently he and a guest went on and on about sex slaves and Mars…..

NASA says child sex slaves have not—we repeat: have not—been kidnapped and taken to Mars. NASA issued the ridiculous denial to the Daily Beast after a guest Thursday on The Alex Jones Show claimed otherwise. Robert David Steele—who Space.com notes was listed as a “CIA insider”—told Jones children are being kidnapped, forced into a 20-year mission in space, and ending up on Mars, where they are used as slave labor and killed for their blood and bone marrow. Steele claimed the children are sexually assaulted before being killed to “adrenalize their blood.” Jones chimed in, calling such a process “the original growth hormone.” He also claimed 90% of NASA missions are secret, adding, “Clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening.”
NASA spokesperson Guy Webster explained to the Daily Beast that while there are rovers on Mars, there aren’t any people. He says he’s shocked there’s “only one stupid rumor on the Internet” he has to debunk this week. This isn’t the first outlandish conspiracy theory Jones has given credence to. The Washington Post reports Jones, who has millions of listeners nationwide, claims the Sandy Hook massacre is a hoax and promoted “Pizzagate,” which tied Hillary Clinton to a pedophile ring being run out of a pizza restaurant. During the campaign, President Trump said Jones’ “reputation is amazing” and promised not to let him down.
But that is okay for he gives the public real news while NY Times and CNN only peddle fake news…..
Damn!  At what point does sanity return?  Or will it ever?
And the war on facts goes on……society is losing its battle with ignorance.
Tomorrow will be a short day for me…..I will be spending time with family…..a bit of fun….everyone have a good evening….chuq

All This “Fake” News

A few months ago we had a raging debate about what is news and what is not…..that debate settled down but every now and then a Tweet appears and we have to have it all over again.

I banged away on the subject for awhile…..(of course there was push back…of course there were those that had to question everything that did not agree with their thoughts)……

Source: The Curious Debate Over “Fake News” – In Saner Thought

Source: The ‘Post-Truth’ Mainstream Media – In Saner Thought

And the argument continues because some will not accept that there are those that will do whatever it takes to mislead the population….and those that prefer a distorted view of the news will attack anyone that does not share their pervert sense of right and wrong.

The debate now is whether we continue down this road that leads NOWHERE or do we step back and return to a saner political climate……my guess is….NOT YET!

Red versus Blue is no longer the divide in this country…..

In Stephen Colbert’s epic performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner he ironically stated that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” During the George W. Bush era, comedians like Colbert and Jon Stewart tackled what Stewart referred to as “bullshit mountain.” Less clearly a partisan project, the satire of Stewart and Colbert was directly aimed at the way that concepts like truth and reality had become politically polarized.

And they had a lot of work to do. Back in 2008, we learned that the Bush administration made 935 false statements in the lead-up to the Iraq war. In a 2006 interview, Colbert explained how important it was for him in the Bush years to defend the concept of truth:

Source: The right wing war on facts: The new partisan divide that’s destroying our nation – Salon.com

There is only so much stupidity that a nation can endure…..and ours is being pushed to the limit.

The Joy Of One Dimensional Thinking

Ever noticed that the ones that bitch about “fake news” are the ones that spread it the deepest?

We now live in a world on “fake news”…..both sides accuse the other of passing off “fake news”….that is news that does not fit the paradigm they wish to push…for instance the latest attack in the UK…the Right wants the world to believe that the mayor of London said “there is nothing to be alarmed over” (that is a paraphrase before the grammar police show up)…he in fact did say that but he was referring to the amount of police and military on the streets…..if one would just use the Google button they are so fond of then they would see the whole interview that the quote was taken from (it does not take an IT genius to find the interview)….

This is how their “fake News” becomes mainstream…..enough toads passing on shitty news to the shit for brains on the Right.

These people can only grasp on line of thinking at a time and they will play it for all it is worth until they are given another tidbit to chase.

More on one dimensional thinking later….give the slower people on the Right a chance to catch up to the rest of the world….

“Covfefe”

I love this stuff….turning crap into a major news story.

“Covfefe”……Now there is a fun word….once it was typed Twitter went batcrap crazy over what was Trump saying…..or should I say “typing”…..

There is a wealth of “definitions”…..none are accurate…..I saw that it was Klingon for “dumbass” and on and on……or that it was some demonic word to invoke the powers of darkness….how about this, it probably it was a typo.  But sense there seems to be a grammar police out there it has been turned into a major news story.

The prez did not catch a break when his spox said that Trump and a small group know what he means by “covfefe”….say what?

It’s the story that started Wednesday’s news cycle, and Sean Spicer added some fuel to the “covfefe” fire in the late afternoon. When asked during Wednesday’s press briefing whether “people should be concerned that the president posted a somewhat incoherent tweet last night, and then it stayed up for hours,” Spicer replied no. USA Today reports the reporter pressed: “Why did it stay up so long after? Is no one watching this?” And then Spicer said this: “No, I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.” The Hill calls Spicer’s answer “cryptic”; CNET jokes that it’s left wondering whether covfefe is “some sort of secret code that might mean: ‘Where’s my KFC?’ or ‘Attack North Korea.'”

Come on morons….admit it was a typo and move the Hell on!

Is it a code word for his Russian handler?  To let them know all is okay?   Or is it a “mistake” like in WW2 when spies would misspell every 5th word in a message to HQ to let the “good guys” know that all was okay?

Is it covert or maybe just overt?

I have had the “grammar police” visit here on IST on a couple of occasions…..so I have a little sympathy for the prez on this (enjoy it…it will not last long)…..

This is a society that lives in a 140 character society…grammar has long taken a powder from the discourse.

“Covfefe” means what it sounds like it means….NOT A GODDAMN THING!

May we please move on to something a little more important than a misspelled word?

See you on the “covfefe”……

Closing Thought–26May17

Then There Is All That “Fake News”!

And boy you want some fake news then I suggest you visit some random Right wing blog….does not matter which one they all have the same posts about the same subject…the topic du jour, if you will.

This past election has seen its share of “fake news”……no it was not invented for the 2016 election….it has been around in force since the Clinton years…..probably longer….in fact it has been around for about 100 years.

Think fake news is a new phenomenon? Think again. Dr David Clarke from Sheffield Hallam University looks at a 100-year-old story that fooled the world.

Fake news, false stories that masquerade as real news are not new.

In the spring of 1917 some of Britain’s most influential newspapers published a gruesome story that has been called “the master hoax” – and I think we finally have proof about where it came from.

Britain was at the time trying to bring China into the war on the Allied side.

Source: The corpse factory and the birth of fake news – BBC News

Like so many disgusting things “fake news” was born in the heat of war.

See what you think is new is really a recycled product from an age gone by….

And so begins my Memorial Day weekend….me and my better half will spend some time doing things that adults do (use your imagination…wink….wink).

Enjoy your days with family, food and some fun….chuq