Press Credibility

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

With the advent of Fake news in the being heralded. I wonder how people justify and then expect us to trust the press when things like this happen:

 

 

Are the press going too far in their war against the POTUS? Why or why not? Or something like this story:

 

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/john-kelly-responds-washington-post-steve-bannon-story-234743

 

Apparently Bannon went over POTUS to go threaten DHS sec Kelly, been debunked all over. I wonder if these anon sources are really plants sometimes. But the damage is damage and millions of people see this sorta crap before it's corrected

[~ P O L A R I S ~]

Any time you see a "Truth-o-meter" you can safely call bullshit. Truth value is binary.

[mido9]

I mean 99.99% of shitty news stories are the sort where you read it, check the source, and find out the source has the full story or full video context and the whole thing is bullshit, or etc.

It's basically the sort of clickbait news you'd find insta-debunked in a reddit top comment or something if it actually got posted, it's not some yuri bezmenov manipulation s***, it's just clickbait and "I hope nobody checks us, we're the fact checkers after all"

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

Lying Press

 

Something needs to be done about this decision https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/376/254

 

This is libel (and slander) with malicious intent. 

 

Hate to give a certain European group any credit, but they had an apt word for this sorta deal

[Aerion Brightflame]

Any time you see a "Truth-o-meter" you can safely call bullshit. Truth value is binary.

 

For the hard sciences maybe, but I would disagree when it comes to politics and the media.

 

It's entirely possible to use truthful evidence is a disgenious way. And thus despite being factual correct, you arrive at an incorrect conclusion from what that truth was actually showing. Misappropriating quotes is actually a perfect example of this; If I was telling a joke and went 'And so the puncline went; The Jews should all be shot', later I was then quoted later as having said 'The Jews should all be shot'. Now I ask you, did I say this statement?

 

I did say the statement, but it was devoided of context and given a different meaning. And thus despite the quote being factually true, it could be warranted as false when used improperly.

 

It's similar when you exaggurate something to make your point; If a poll came in say 51% of people agreed with legalising the mass hunting of the poor, then one could say 'The majority of the people want to hunt the poor' - But the statement itself implies a greater extreme of people agreeing that the actual numbers. When one hears 'majority' one doesn't assume that it means 51/49, they assume a larger proportion. It's still factually true to say 'a majority of people believe X' but it winds up being a little disegeninous and thus debately untrue if used in context.

 

If you followed Brexit at all (It's the first example I heard of), then the claim; 'We'll save 32 million a day we could put towards the NHS instead' is the perfect example of this. It is factually true in this case that not being in the EU means we'd no longer have to pay 32 million in membership fees. But it ignores the fact that the money would have to go other places to make up for money we lost from the EU, so it whilst true it is also false.

 

Absolute truth is binary. The Truth is more complex, because you can tell the truth in such a way that it gives it an entirely different meaning the the intention.

 

OT: I still hate this 'fake news' bullshit, almost as much as I despise yellow journalism. (Yellow journalism is basically what this story is anyway, it's nothing new to Trump it's common place in the media when they have an axe to grind. Look at what the tabloids do to Jermey Corbyn over here if you really want to see some fun examples). It gets misused to just dismiss any news stories that go against your worldview as completely false, which is just lazy and builds echo chambers.

 

On the other hand, I got my absolute favour example of it the other day when Trump called any and all polls showing people against his travel ban as fake news. And then cites some polls the next day about how everyone loved him (At least one of which was fictional I think? I'm not sure), it was just f***ing hilarious to me.

 

Seriously though, misapproating a quote is nothing in the scheme's of false sheet the media can run with.

[VCR_CAT]

With the advent of Fake news in the being heralded. I wonder how people justify and then expect us to trust the press when things like this happen:

 

Are the press going too far in their war against the POTUS? Why or why not?

 

Well, the issue with that example is that it's not so much lying as it is phrasing it in a way that's not exact. It's not verbatim quote, that's for sure, but it still means the same thing.

 

Anyways, on the topic at hand and your overall statement: You don't blindly trust the press, as you never should have in the first place.

 

This applies mostly to breaking news, but it's pretty applicable to being an informed consumer overall:

 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cm0G7snUEAIVOfs.jpg:large

 

It's always important to be a critical consumer of news, regardless of what your stance on a subject is. Don't jump to accepting something that immediately appeals to your bias, and don't immediately jump against something that doesn't agree with your bias. Confirm with alternate sources.

 

It's also worth noting that this is somewhat a consequence of having a competitive, capitalist news media. These companies thrive off of people receiving their news from them, and simply presenting objective events alone often isn't enough to get people to go to them. Taking a stance on a topic as controversial as Trump not only ropes in more readers from the people that agree with them, it'll rope in the readers on the stark opposite end.

 

None of this is new. It's not necessarily "fake news" because the news often doesn't outright lie. Will it skew the presentation to influence a different message? Absolutely, and the above image is an example of this. It's not lying, but it's not telling an absolutely accurate truth and appeals to a bias.

 

The problem with the stupid knee-jerk label of "fake news" is that it draws a lot of concerns over freedom of the press. While the press needs to be held to a higher standard, the idea of a government regulated press, especially one with a president that instantly jumps to anything critical of him as "fake", is absolutely concerning. While a biased news media is bad news because it skews the public's information, by no means is having a government regulated news media any better. In fact, I'd say it's worse because it's doing the same thing, but offering now avenues to really fact-check or compare sources.

 

The best thing you can do is just be critical of what you read. Just like how freedom of speech allows people to spew sheet, freedom of the press does the same for the press. Check their sources, compare with other sources, etc. Best example I can give from my personal experience is reading an article over how Trump's order of giving one dude unprecedented power in the national security council or w/e being a result of him not reading what he was signing (incompetence). I checked the source and read alternate articles, such as New York Times, and found no such allegations in those other sources. It's not hard to see the bullshit in news; you just need to not believe everything you read immediately; be smart about how you read your news.

 

Also, do not immediately jump to the conclusion that any news source that criticizes Trump as being "false" or "fake". While you may be advocating other people to be outside of their own bubbles, you need to do the same. Sources such as New York Times are pretty regularly good with their presentation; but you still need to be critical and aware. The knee-jerk reaction that something is false is just as bad as the knee-jerk reaction that something is true.

[(GigaDrillBreaker)]

There is a key issue in OP. The "truth-o-meter" thing isn't talking about the tweet.

 

It is talking about the interview. So, for the sake of understanding what is going on, I looked up the video.

 

To quote directly:

O: "The... judge... rollout went very smoothly, I think"

T: "Yes it did, yes it did"

O: "But the refugee deal, not so much"

T: "I think it was very smooth, 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers, and all we did was vet those people very very carefully"

O: "You wouldn't do anything differently if you had to do it over again? Some of your people didn't really know what the order was"

T: "Well, that's not what General Kelly said. General Kelly, who's now Secretary Kelly, he said he totally knew, he was aware of it, and it was very smooth, it was 109 people."

 

 

So, though he didn't say the word "affected" it could be argued that it was implied. Once again, this could all be considered just a slip of tongue, but OP is misrepresenting what is going on.

 

Like, seriously, does nobody even read? It says it is from the interview on sunday, not some tweet a week ago.

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

There is a key issue in OP. The "truth-o-meter" thing isn't talking about the tweet.

 

It is talking about the interview. So, for the sake of understanding what is going on, I looked up the video.

 

To quote directly:

O: "The... judge... rollout went very smoothly, I think"

T: "Yes it did, yes it did"

O: "But the refugee deal, not so much"

T: "I think it was very smooth, 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers, and all we did was vet those people very very carefully"

O: "You wouldn't do anything differently if you had to do it over again? Some of your people didn't really know what the order was"

T: "Well, that's not what General Kelly said. General Kelly, who's now Secretary Kelly, he said he totally knew, he was aware of it, and it was very smooth, it was 109 people."

 

 

So, though he didn't say the word "affected" it could be argued that it was implied. Once again, this could all be considered just a slip of tongue, but OP is misrepresenting what is going on.

 

Like, seriously, does nobody even read? It says it is from the interview on sunday, not some tweet a week ago.

How could it be implied when he's clearly stated that figure with clearer context in the past.

 

The point is they took the murkiest reading to engage in yellow journalism. Politifact is more than willing to dig into the past when they want to, it's just inconvenient for them now

Well, the issue with that example is that it's not so much lying as it is phrasing it in a way that's not exact. It's not verbatim quote, that's for sure, but it still means the same thing.

 

Anyways, on the topic at hand and your overall statement: You don't blindly trust the press, as you never should have in the first place.

 

This applies mostly to breaking news, but it's pretty applicable to being an informed consumer overall:

 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cm0G7snUEAIVOfs.jpg:large

 

It's always important to be a critical consumer of news, regardless of what your stance on a subject is. Don't jump to accepting something that immediately appeals to your bias, and don't immediately jump against something that doesn't agree with your bias. Confirm with alternate sources.

 

It's also worth noting that this is somewhat a consequence of having a competitive, capitalist news media. These companies thrive off of people receiving their news from them, and simply presenting objective events alone often isn't enough to get people to go to them. Taking a stance on a topic as controversial as Trump not only ropes in more readers from the people that agree with them, it'll rope in the readers on the stark opposite end.

 

None of this is new. It's not necessarily "fake news" because the news often doesn't outright lie. Will it skew the presentation to influence a different message? Absolutely, and the above image is an example of this. It's not lying, but it's not telling an absolutely accurate truth and appeals to a bias.

 

The problem with the stupid knee-jerk label of "fake news" is that it draws a lot of concerns over freedom of the press. While the press needs to be held to a higher standard, the idea of a government regulated press, especially one with a president that instantly jumps to anything critical of him as "fake", is absolutely concerning. While a biased news media is bad news because it skews the public's information, by no means is having a government regulated news media any better. In fact, I'd say it's worse because it's doing the same thing, but offering now avenues to really fact-check or compare sources.

 

The best thing you can do is just be critical of what you read. Just like how freedom of speech allows people to spew sheet, freedom of the press does the same for the press. Check their sources, compare with other sources, etc. Best example I can give from my personal experience is reading an article over how Trump's order of giving one dude unprecedented power in the national security council or w/e being a result of him not reading what he was signing (incompetence). I checked the source and read alternate articles, such as New York Times, and found no such allegations in those other sources. It's not hard to see the bullshit in news; you just need to not believe everything you read immediately; be smart about how you read your news.

 

Also, do not immediately jump to the conclusion that any news source that criticizes Trump as being "false" or "fake". While you may be advocating other people to be outside of their own bubbles, you need to do the same. Sources such as New York Times are pretty regularly good with their presentation; but you still need to be critical and aware. The knee-jerk reaction that something is false is just as bad as the knee-jerk reaction that something is true.

You can argue that they're just playing dirty with the politifact deal, but stories like the WaPo story about Bannon, or Trump threatening to invade mexico are just flat out wrong. They (AP) even refused to revoke their story when the Mexican President issued a press statement saying it had no basis in fact.

 

I'm not saying all trump news is false or wrong. But a good portion of it is. And millions of people seeing this isn't good for the public

[(GigaDrillBreaker)]

How could it be implied when he's clearly stated that figure with clearer context in the past.

 

The point is they took the murkiest reading to engage in yellow journalism. Politifact is more than willing to dig into the past when they want to, it's just inconvenient for them now

Because not clarifying implies something different completely? I'm not saying trump is totally at fault here.

 

He should have clarified, because his statement misinforms the uneducated majority watching the Super Bowl.

 

Politifact should should have clarified, because they misrepresented information just as badly as he did.

 

Whoever put those images together is a dumbass, because it doesn't even scratch the surface of reality.

 

 

For someone like trump, who has reversed statements and positions countless times, the best word to rely on is his most recent.

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

On the other hand, I got my absolute favour example of it the other day when Trump called any and all polls showing people against his travel ban as fake news. And then cites some polls the next day about how everyone loved him (At least one of which was fictional I think? I'm not sure), it was just f***ing hilarious to me.

 

Seriously though, misapproating a quote is nothing in the scheme's of false sheet the media can run with.

Tom there's a difference between claiming a majority based on a 51% poll, and adding in words and ignoring a more defined source to get some sheet to sling. I have seen what they've done to corbyn, but shouldn't that make you more eager to pass stricter rules on the press

 

Also citation needed on the polls.

 

http://hotair.com/archives/2017/02/02/gallup-americans-oppose-trumps-travel-ban-4255-or-do-they/

 

This is pretty good example why Trump should question the polls. They were off by a good 5-6% in the Swing States, and they don't even have consensus now. Again please link me to him citing a fake poll :) 

Because not clarifying implies something different completely? I'm not saying trump is totally at fault here.

 

He should have clarified, because his statement misinforms the uneducated majority watching the Super Bowl.

 

Politifact should should have clarified, because they misrepresented information just as badly as he did.

 

Whoever put those images together is a dumbass, because it doesn't even scratch the surface of reality.

 

 

For someone like trump, who has reversed statements and positions countless times, the best word to rely on is his most recent.

Let me get this straight. We should go from a clear statement from POTUS and Press sec (the next day) affirming it was about detentions. And then add in words to make it seem like it was a general statement? This exact question was asked in a press conf. And Spicer mentioned it was about detentions. Yet they pull this sorta deal. He does not need to keep clarifying. The press's job is to do investigative journalism. 

[(GigaDrillBreaker)]

Because those 109 aren't the only issues with the implementation? To have o-reilly say that it didn't go smoothly, and trump's response being the 109 statistic, it may not be a lie, but it is very intentionally dodging the question.

 

Also, his twitter shouldn't be considered a source of his official positions and statements. Especially considering it isn't even the POTUS account.

[Aerion Brightflame]

Tom there's a difference between claiming a majority based on a 51% poll, and adding in words and ignoring a more defined source to get some s*** to sling. I have seen what they've done to corbyn, but shouldn't that make you more eager to pass stricter rules on the press

 

Given that the comment about the majority was addressing the point of the truth not being binary it's irrelevant to the article in OP and thus I decline to argue based upon it.

 

I don't think stricter rules will stop yellow journalism; So what if it becomes easier to sue a newspaper for libel? They print a big page 1 article claiming 'Corbyn eats babies' and then print a 20 word retraction on page 12 a week later when a challenge is raised. Public perception is already impaired and will remain imparied. And Libels laws can never be allowed to reach the point where newspapers become afraid of running stories because of them without compromising freedom of the press, which should never happen if we wish to retain a free society.

 

The issue of yellow journalism can only be beaten by rednering it unattractive (I.E. people stop clicking or buying it) which can only happen by having an educated populace who can identify the bias or intention at work and work around it. If everyone was capable of critical analysis of the media, then yellow journalism and associated sensationalism wouldn't work. But sadly it is not the case, and is unlikely to ever be the case. Tightening Libel laws is not how I would go about it myself.

 

 

Also citation needed on the polls.

 

http://hotair.com/archives/2017/02/02/gallup-americans-oppose-trumps-travel-ban-4255-or-do-they/

 

This is pretty good example why Trump should question the polls. They were off by a good 5-6% in the Swing States, and they don't even have consensus now. Again please link me to him citing a fake poll :)

I cannot find citation for him claiming things from polls that don't exist, I only saw that as an offhand mention in a post somewhere else so it was probably false. But as for him citing 'any negative polls are fake news' I refer you to:

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-negative-polls-fake-news-twitter-cnn-abc-nbc-a7564951.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4195966/Trump-polls-travel-ban-fake-news-data-decision.html

 

I know it's the dailymail, but both articles feature the same two tweets from Trump, one of which says 'any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election'. The Independent article also cites gallup polls about how Trump's approval rating is low for a president only two weeks in. It also makes reference to a time in the election where Trump claimed he won a post-debate CBS poll that didn't exist, which may be the basis for fabricated polls mentioned earlier.

 

And I will say there is a difference between questioning polls, and dismissing any and all polls that disagree with you as fake news. Polls are predictive, and thus can be wrong either due to poor methodlogy, last minuate disasters, or random quirks of fate. But it is a different thing to call all polls that disagree with you all under the same banner as fake without giving any indication as to why these two things may be different.

[VCR_CAT]

You can argue that they're just playing dirty with the politifact deal, but stories like the WaPo story about Bannon, or Trump threatening to invade mexico are just flat out wrong. They (AP) even refused to revoke their story when the Mexican President issued a press statement saying it had no basis in fact.

 

I'm not saying all trump news is false or wrong. But a good portion of it is. And millions of people seeing this isn't good for the public

 

You can argue that, after playing the sensationalism card against Trump, that a lot of people extrapolated "The News is collectively sensationalist against Trump" to "ALL NEWS IS FAKE!" I get there's a political agenda going on, but the stretch of the news being biased against Trump to the news being entirely fake is too extreme.

 

I'm not denying that the media was sensationalist and wasn't getting all of its facts straight, but that's all the more reason to be critical of what you read. It's easy to jump to blaming something else like the media to scapegoat the mistakes of people immediately believing anything they read; but the easiest thing to do is just seriously double check what you read and don't jump to conclusions; you'll find that the news isn't as fake as President Sensitive Ego makes it out to be.

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

You can argue that, after playing the sensationalism card against Trump, that a lot of people extrapolated "The News is collectively sensationalist against Trump" to "ALL NEWS IS FAKE!" I get there's a political agenda going on, but the stretch of the news being biased against Trump to the news being entirely fake is too extreme.

 

I'm not denying that the media was sensationalist and wasn't getting all of its facts straight, but that's all the more reason to be critical of what you read. It's easy to jump to blaming something else like the media to scapegoat the mistakes of people immediately believing anything they read; but the easiest thing to do is just seriously double check what you read and don't jump to conclusions; you'll find that the news isn't as fake as President Sensitive Ego makes it out to be.

No, no. I concur that media being incredulous of silly things he does like crying over crowd sizes is fair.

 

But other things, such as calling it a muslim ban when it clearly isn't. Saying Trump signed off on a raid w/o vetting, etc. 

 

Those sorta things wrongly damage the president. There's enough dirty on both sides, but the media is not doing investigative journalism. It's a throw what you can find and hope it sticks fest atm.

 

I'd hope that our right to a free press would honor it's role to do journalism. But it seems more and more we need to rely on source documents such as wikileaks to get to that sorta of journalism

 

Sad really

[Tentacruel]

Regardless, you cannot put frickin quotation marks around something that's not a direct quote.  

[(GigaDrillBreaker)]

Regardless, you cannot put frickin quotation marks around something that's not a direct quote.  

actually, that was a direct quote.

 

To quote directly:

O: "The... judge... rollout went very smoothly, I think"

T: "Yes it did, yes it did"

O: "But the refugee deal, not so much"

T: "I think it was very smooth, 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers, and all we did was vet those people very very carefully"

O: "You wouldn't do anything differently if you had to do it over again? Some of your people didn't really know what the order was"

T: "Well, that's not what General Kelly said. General Kelly, who's now Secretary Kelly, he said he totally knew, he was aware of it, and it was very smooth, it was 109 people."

[Tentacruel]

actually, that was a direct quote.

But it's still not a direct quote.  He clearly does not say that only 109 were affected.  Regardless of how close it may seem it's still putting quote marks around something that is paraphrased. 

[(GigaDrillBreaker)]

But it's still not a direct quote.  He clearly does not say that only 109 were affected.  Regardless of how close it may seem it's still putting quote marks around something that is paraphrased. 

The word affected isn't within the quotation marks? The stuff within the quotation was a direct quote. Look again, man.

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/

 

Here a few good examples :)

 

"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.

 

How we will get out of this is anyone’s guess. We might not get out of it, not so long as Trump is president of these United States. We may be up for four—maybe eight!—long years of authentic fake news media hysteria. It is worth cataloging at least a small sampling of the hysteria so far. Only when we fully assess the extent of the media’s collapse into ignominious ineptitude can we truly begin to reckon with it.

 

Since Trump’s election, here’s just a small sampling of fake news that our media and our journalist class have propagated.

 

Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates

After Trump’s electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.

 

Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.

 

At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as “unconfirmed” (rather than “false”). Snopes’s sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.

 

At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: “[T]eenagers in 2016 don’t just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward.”

 

She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump’s win.

 

November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory

On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.”

 

The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico’s Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC’s Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.

 

It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.

 

At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman’s. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.

 

December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure

At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Woellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Woellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”

 

The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.

 

The problem? The central scandalous claims of Woellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”

 

Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.

 

January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball

On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.

 

January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’

Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.

 

To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.

 

January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy

On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”

 

January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter

During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”

 

This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.

 

How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).

 

The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.

 

Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.

 

January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department

On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.

 

The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.

 

There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).

 

More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.

 

As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.

 

January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair

On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.

 

The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.

 

January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax

Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.

 

January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake

Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.

 

Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.

 

January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie

On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”

 

Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.

 

The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.

 

There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.

 

February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico

On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”

 

Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.

 

Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.

 

February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions

Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.

 

A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.

 

At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.

 

In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”

 

February 2: Renaming Black History Month

At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.

 

The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.

 

February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures

On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.

 

The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).

 

Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).

 

The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

 

If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)

 

As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.

 

The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.

 

As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”

 

Maybe It’s Time to Stop Reading Fake News

Surely more incidents have happened since Trump was elected; doubtlessly there are many more to come. To be sure, some of these incidents are larger and more shameful than others, and some are smaller and more mundane.

 

But all of them, taken as a group, raise a pressing and important question: why is this happening? Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this point?

 

Perhaps the answer is: “We’ve let it.” The media will not stop behaving in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.

 

That being said, there are two possible outcomes to this fake news crisis: our media can get better, or they can get worse. If they get better, we might actually see our press begin to hold the Trump administration (and government in general) genuinely accountable for its many admitted faults. If they refuse to fix these serial problems of gullibility, credulity, outrage, and outright lying, then we will be in for a rough four years, if not more.

 

No one single person can fix this problem. It has to be a cultural change, a kind of shifting of priorities industry-wide. Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.

 

Most of us are hoping devoutly for the former. But not even a month into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the outlook is dim."

 

Poll out today shows that people Trust the WH more than the Press. Argue Semantics all you want Giga. The goal of that politifact peice was clear, and people are getting fed up