NewsTrust - Fake News - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Howard Rheingold - May. 13 (Opinion) - Use the following methods and tools to protect yourself from toxic bad info. Use them and then pass them along to others. Promote the notion that more info literacy is a practical answer to the growing info pollution. Be the change you want to see. Although the Web undermines authority (by enabling anybody to publish), authority is still useful as one clue to credibility in a detective hunt that accounts for many other clues. Claims to authority, however, need to be questioned. I might add credibility to my assessment if a source is a verified professor at a known institution of higher learning, an authentic MD or PhD, but I would not subtract it from people without credentials whose expertise seems authentic. If you are going to grant credibility to people whose expertise is based on being a professor of something, make sure that assertion is accurate. Don't stop at simply verifying that the claim to be a professor is valid if you are looking for scientific credibility. The next step is to use the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index that derives a score from the scholar's publications, citations by other scholars, grants, honors, and awards. If you want to get even more serious, download a free copy of Publish or Perish software, which analyzes scientific citations from Google Scholar according to multiple criteria. Or use the h-index to calculate how many times other scientists have cited a particular source. Again, don't trust just one source; triangulate.

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Murdoch’s Pride Is America’s Poison

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Bill Keller - May. 06 (Opinion) - Roger Ailes is (a) the genius who midwifed the astoundingly successful Fox News; (b) the sharpest thorn in the side of Barack Obama; and (c) the most important surviving officer in Rupert Murdoch’s global media army. ou can see why he would be a great subject for a biography. He is also (d) a political operator of the first order, which is why there are now three Ailes books in the works, two of which look to me like pre-emptive strikes by Ailes himself.

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The Art of Getting Net Smart

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Shel Israel, Howard Rheingold - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - Howard Rheingold is a teacher, thinker, futurist and grower of the tallest sunflowers I have ever seen. He’s one the most profound thinkers of what happens online and how it changes the world. Just about every ten years, he checks in with a new book that seems to chart the course for the next decade or so. In 1993, he wrote The Virtual Community , which portended a world where people would share friendship and information with each other online, just as the first browser for the worldwide web was being popularized.

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Keith Olbermann: Machine Gun for Hire

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Carr - Apr. 01 (Opinion) - Given Keith Olbermann’s abrupt removal at Current and his typically temperate response — “Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently” — it seems as if his next stop will be a puppet show shot from a basement somewhere. He’ll never work in this town, or any other, again, right? Wrong. Many of his past employers will testify to his unmanageability and unpleasantness, but the fact of the matter is that somewhere, sometime, after some kind of cooling-off period, Mr. Olbermann will be coming to a television near you. That has less to do with the greater fool theory, which suggests that there will always be someone naïve enough to think that they can accomplish what others have not — that is, make Mr. Olbermann behave like a professional when he is not on the air. (Remember that former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt — two of the principals at Current — blew through many stop signs to get to Mr. Olbermann. They made very hopeful statements when the deal was cut, which were followed by very frustrated noises thereafter.)

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The Tragedy of Mike Daisey's Lies About China

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Max Fisher - Mar. 18 (Opinion) - American consumers can't do much for Central Africa or Afghanistan, but they have real power to improve Chinese labor abuses. Will they be less inclined to believe the next person who tells them how?

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'This American Life' Retracts Episode on Apple's Suppliers in China

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Brian Stelter - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - The show says it was misled by Mike Daisey, whose one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" was the basis of a program that aired in January. Mr. Daisey responded, "I stand by my work."

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Busting Mr. Daisey

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By Jack Shafer - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - This week, the highly regarded public radio show This American Life learned a lesson that many journalists, including me, have learned the hard way: It’s almost impossible for an editor to fact-check a contributor who lies. The show, hosted by Ira Glass, just retracted its Jan. 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” adapted from Mike Daisey’s popular one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which is about working conditions in a Chinese factory that makes Apple products. Daisey’s deceptions were uncovered by Rob Schmitz, a China-based reporter for Marketplace. This American Life will air an hourlong explanation and re-examination this weekend, featuring both Glass and Daisey, about the circumstances behind the retraction. Glass and the show are to be commended for their quick response, and everybody who cares about real journalism owes a debt of gratitude to Schmitz.

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Has Limbaugh Identified the G.O.P.’s Woman Problem?

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Amy Davidson - Mar. 04 (Opinion) - Hint: it's got something to do with money. On Friday, President Obama called a law student at Georgetown to tell her not to take it to heart that Rush Limbaugh had called her a prostitute. “What was really personal for me was that he said to tell my parents that they should be proud,” the student, Sandra Fluke, who, needless to say, is not a prostitute, told Andrea Mitchell, of MSNBC. Is anyone proud of Rush Limbaugh—even anyone in his own party? Before answering, one should read his full remarks about Fluke, who had been a potential witness in a hearing, convened by Republicans, on health-care coverage for contraception at institutions with religious connections. (Georgetown is Jesuit.) On Wednesday, Limbaugh called her “a slut”

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Attack of the Attack Ads: Citizens United and the 2012 Elections

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Evelyn Messinger - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - In 2012, two tidal waves will reconfigure the American electoral system and the news media that cover it. A tsunami made of money will buoy up the structure of entrenched political power, while a huge wave of personal technology will disrupt it. I can predict both of these events with certainty because they've happened every election year over the last couple of decades. Still, the changes in 2012 may be dramatic. Angry citizens around the world have been using a potent combination of mobile phones, social networking and broadcast television to upend established political orders. Now it's Americans who are angry, and this election could spark a new level of activism leveraged by these same tools. At the same time, this will be the first general election since the so-called "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision, which tossed out the last vestiges of regulations limiting campaign financing. Among other effects, this will translate into a record numbers of attack ads next fall. Taken together, these two changes may profoundly affect our democracy, and they deserve a closer look.

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Phone hacking row shows News Corp is no ordinary news company

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jay Rosen - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - Rupert Murdoch's news organisations are not in the news business. What they crave is influence Watching the phone hacking crisis crack wide open over the last few weeks has left me puzzled about its ultimate causes: what is it about News Corp that has produced these events? I don't think we understand very much about this. We can say things like, "Ultimate responsibility goes to the man at the top," meaning Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO. And that sounds right, but it still doesn't explain how any of it happened. "The key people are criminals, liars, or willfully blind..." We could say that, but then we would have to explain how so many of them ended up at one company. Puzzles like these have led many people to the conclusion that there's a culture inside News Corp, that is in some way responsible, and I basically agree with that. Mark Lewis, lawyer for the family of Milly Dowler, said after Rebekah Brooks resigned: "This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an ...

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The Singularity We Live In …

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Craig Newmark - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Around five hundred years ago, another nerd, Johannes Gutenberg, invented some tech, but lacked the marketing skills to go really big. That took a social media practitioner, Martin Luther, who started with a posting on a church door. That had impact similar to a really good Facebook Wall post. However, Luther made use of a social networking platform, the Church store-and-forward network, which really got his stuff around, to considerable effect, in the Western hemisphere. That played out over maybe a few hundred years and led to a new balance of power in Europe and a loss of message control, resulting in many strains of Protestantism, and the democratization of Christianity. The latter led to greatly increased literacy. The social network platform was built by a much earlier social media practitioner, Paul of Tarsus, or St. Paul, to successfully effect mass change. Paul used what I call “e-mail”, or “epistle mail”.

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What did birthers give us? Ignorance

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CBS News - By Tavis Smiley - May. 01 (Opinion) - Gerald Ford once famously said, "Our long national nightmare is over." Those words - uttered more than 35 years ago in the wake of Watergate - could certainly be used this week to sum up the final folly that was the birther issue. How is it possible, in this hyper-informed age of information, that our public discourse could be hijacked by something conceived of such ignorance? The drumbeat of foolish, factually-challenged and thoroughly uneducated rhetoric that defined this debate demeaned our national dialogue at a time when serious and sober conversation is desperately needed. Jobs, health care, ongoing wars, the deficit and the discussion about national priorities are the pressing issues of our time. Instead, we allowed a small, un-informed minority and one publicity-starved reality TV purveyor to lead us down this slippery slope.

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The Boston Marathon, the aborted landing and the lost journalists: #WPNewsquiz

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Katie Rogers - Apr. 22 (Entertainment) - Welcome to BlogPosts's weekly crazy social-news-quiz-on-Twitter-experiment.

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George Monbiot

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By George Monbiot - Feb. 23 (Opinion) - The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to ... astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it? Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there's a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them .

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The business of news

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

MSNBC - By Rachel Maddow - Nov. 11 (Interview) - But [Fox News] never criticized George W. Bush for anything, even when he was doing things that were sort of not conservative. They never criticized him.

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Crowd Coverage of Stewart-Colbert Rally

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - Oct. 31 (Comment) - The Washington Post has teamed up with the folks at Intersect.com to collect reports from the Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert rallies on the National Mall. Watch the story unfold below.

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Jon Stewart walks fine line with rally

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By James Hohmann - Oct. 30 (Opinion) - Despite efforts by left-leaning groups to channel what Stewart has dubbed a "million moderate march" into political activism, most of the thousands who poured into the National Mall for the rally seemed only to want a good time.

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What Would You Call Attack-Ad Funders?

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Andrea Seabrook - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - In Shakespeare's epic tale, Juliet asks, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." My question is, does it work the other way around? Does a fuzzy name make fish smell less ... fishy? This election season, the TV airwaves are saturated in many places, with nasty, snarling attack ads. Some of the ads come from recognizable sources — like the Republican Governors Association and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But the vast majority come from private, often newly formed nonprofit groups that, by law, don't have to tell anyone where their funding comes from. Groups like "Americans for Job Security," "Crossroads Grassroots Political Strategies" and "The Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity" — or, as I like to call it, "The Commission on Butterflies, Rainbows and Unicorns."

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Jon Stewart: The Most Trusted Name In Fake News

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Terry Gross, Jon Stewart - Oct. 04 (Interview) - Stewart sat down with Terry Gross on Sept. 29 in front of a live audience at New York City's 92nd Street Y to discuss his time on The Daily Show, his role in the media, and the upcoming rally — which is being billed as "Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement." "Like everything that we do, the march is merely a construct," he says. "It's merely a format, in the way the book is a format, a show is a format ... to be filled with the type of material that Stephen and I do and the point of view [that we have]. People have said, 'It's a rally to counter Glenn Beck.' It's not. What it is was, we saw that and thought, 'What a beautiful outline. What a beautiful structure to fill with what we want to express in live form, festival form."

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Crap Detection 101

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - Jul. 18 (Opinion) -

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Fox Fires Back at Jon Stewart. Jon Replies Musically...

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Apr. 22 (Comedy News) - Bernie Goldberg criticizes Jon for not being fair and balanced, a slogan he never follows. Jon in turn apologizes for criticizing Bernie Goldberg and Fox News, but it's only because they're a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.

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How To Report The News

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - By Charlie Brooker - Jan. 28 (Comedy News) - A hilarious parody of lazily edited news reports from Series 2, Episode 2 of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.

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Jon Stewart Catches Sean Hannity Falsifying Footage To Make GOP Protest Appear Bigger

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Nov. 11 (Comedy News) - Sean Hannity and his team did more than cover the event. They not only inflated the number in attendance with their words, but actually used footage from a heavily-attended protest this summer to make this health care rally appear more popular. Hannity even pointed out that this was a huge crowd for a Thursday, when the protest footage they used was from a Saturday.

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Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Thomas Frank - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look. What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call." One of the specific answers Mr. Beck wanted, on one of the days I watched his program last week, had to do with White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has been caught on film quoting one of those Mao Zedong aphorisms that wouldn't look out of place on a motivational poster. She also remarked that Mao was one of her "favorite political philosophers," an honor the Chinese Communist shared with Mother Teresa. Obviously Ms. Dunn was yet another person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr. Beck had uncovered within the government. What's more, no one would call that red phone to reassure Mr. Beck, to tell him that the Obama administration isn't crawling with traitors or to explain why his many nightmare scenarios will not actually come to pass.

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Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Rio Palof - Apr. 01 (Comedy News) - (SPOOF) Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication. The move, described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity "twitterers", such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter's profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones. As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York's Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

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