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

Roger Ailes and the rise of Fox News

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Tim Dickinson - Aug. 11 (News Report) - Even Rupert Murdoch is afraid of Roger Ailes, the paranoid boss of Fox News. But 'the Chairman' is using his power to make Americans more rightwing, more ignorant and ever more terrified At the Fox News Chrismas party the year the network overtook arch-rival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network's founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes. "It was as though we were looking at Mao," recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those ...

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In ‘Daily Show’ Role on 9/11 Bill, Echoes of Murrow

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Bill Carter, Brian Stelter - Dec. 27 (News Analysis) - Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause? And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?

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At Rally, Thousands — Billions? — Respond

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

New York Times - By Sabrina Tavernise, Brian Stelter - Oct. 31 (News Report) - Part circus, part satire, part holiday parade, the crowds that flooded the National Mall for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on Saturday made it a political event like no other.

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Jon Stewart Rally Attracts Estimated 215,000

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

CBS News - By Brian Montopoli - Oct. 31 (News) - An estimated 215,000 people attended a rally organized by Comedy Central talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News.

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Signs Of 'Sanity' In Washington

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

NPR - Oct. 30 (News) - People assembled by the tens of thousands Saturday on the National Mall for a "sanity" rally blending laughs, activism and a call to civility from two improbable maestros of moderation, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

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Stolen Portinari painting recovered in Brazil (AP) | Pakistan Education Board

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - Oct. 02 (News) - AP - Police have recovered a painting by one of Brazil's most famous painters two weeks after it was stolen from a museum. View full post on Yahoo!

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Colbert appearance causes mixed feelings

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Hill - By Christina Wilkie - Sep. 24 (News) - Comedian Stephen Colbert’s scheduled appearance on Capitol Hill to testify about immigrant laborers elicited mixed reactions from lawmakers.

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America Is a Joke

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Chris Smith - Sep. 12 (Special Report) - Stewart made himself into the leading critic and satirist of the media-political complex, starting with “Indecision 2000,” The Daily Show’s parody of that year’s presidential campaign. His comedy is counterprogramming—postmodern entertainment but with a political purpose. As truth has been overrun by truthiness and facts trampled by lies, he and The Daily Show have become an invaluable corrective—he’s Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, although in keeping with the fragmented culture, he’s trusted by many fewer people, about 1.8 million viewers each night. Years ago, Stewart lost out to Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel for late-night network jobs, but the shifting media fortunes have made him the long-run winner, with vastly more job security and cultural influence than his conventional talk-show competitors—and most conventional journalists.

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Season of false starts for news organizations

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By David Bauder - Oct. 26 (News) - A balloon racing across the Colorado sky without a 6-year-old boy inside. A major lobbyist not changing its position on climate change. A shootout with terrorists on the Potomac River that never happened It's been a rough season for non-news. The recent spate of hoaxes and premature stories exposes a dangerous fault line for journalists in the world of second-by-second news. Each situation was unique. But they all diminished the credibility of news organizations at a time when the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has reported that 63 percent of Americans believe news stories are often inaccurate -- the worst report card it has ever seen.

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Poll: US belief in global warming is cooling

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Dina Cappiello - Oct. 23 (News Report) - At the same time, there has been mounting scientific evidence of climate change — from melting ice caps to the world's oceans hitting the highest monthly recorded temperatures this summer.

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Crap Detection 101

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Howard Rheingold - Jul. 07 (Special Report) - The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming." Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet.

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A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Richard Pérez Peña - Nov. 13 (News Report) - But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

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MSNBC retracts false Palin story; others duped

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Associated Press - By David Bauder - Nov. 13 (News Report) - NEW YORK - MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday. David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent. Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, the New York Times reported Wednesday. The Eisenstadt claim had mistakenly been delivered to Shuster by a producer and was used in a political discussion Monday afternoon, MSNBC said. "The story was not properly vetted and should not have made air," said Jeremy Gaines, network spokesman. "We recognized the error almost immediately and ran a correction on air within minutes." Gaines told the Times that someone in the network's newsroom had presumed the information solid because it was passed along in an e-mail from a colleague.

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The untruths live on after election

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By Joe Garofoli - Nov. 09 (News Report) - Phoenix - Even after hearing John McCain's election night concession speech - described as gracious by many inside and outside his Arizona Biltmore Resort party - the tone among some of his core supporters in Phoenix was anything but. To some there, President-elect Barack Obama was still a "socialist," the "liberal media" was still "hiding" stories, and others wished that the campaign had hammered Obama harder for "palling around" with 1960s domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. In other words, many of the distortions and half-truths repeated by the McCain-Palin campaign - even after being disproved by independent fact-checkers - still packed a powerful half-life. "The McCain people were reprehensible in some of the things they said," said Joseph Tuman, a professor of political and legal communication at San Francisco State University and author of "Political Communication in American Campaigns." "But I don't think this was any worse than a lot of campaigns." The difference, Tuman said, was that the media landscape has changed. The 24-hour online world - where anybody with a hand-held camera can publish a campaign video - has created a hyperbolic environment where every tidbit is spread globally within seconds. And repeated and relayed endlessly. Voters are drowning in information, much of it rich with distortion.

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Palin suggests Chronicle withheld Obama remarks

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By Carla Marinucci - Nov. 03 (News Report) - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in a campaign appearance Sunday, criticized comments about coal technology that Sen. Barack Obama made to The Chronicle editorial board in January, and suggested that the newspaper withheld the information from the public - even though the interview has been posted on the newspaper's Web site since it was given. At a rally in Ohio, Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, used the taped remarks to attack Obama's energy policy.

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Republicans to Try Burning Obama on Coal

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ABC News - By Jake Tapper - Nov. 02 (News Analysis) - “I’m calling on behalf of John McCain and the RNC to tell you that coal jobs, which are so important to our community are in jeopardy,” says the robocall being made to voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio, among other coal-producing states

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SNL McCain

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chicago Tribune - By McCain stops by 'Saturday Night Live' - Nov. 02 (News Report) - Sen. John McCain appeared on "Saturday Night Live" last night, making light of the fact that his campaign has less cash than that of Sen. Barack Obama. Obama bought airtime on seven networks to show his half-hour informercial Oct. 29. The McCain campaign, the Arizona senator said on "Saturday Night Live," had to settle for shilling collectible products on QVC. "I'm a true maverick -- a Republican without money," McCain joked. At his side was Tina Fey, who did her impression of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

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Political rumors, full of sound and fury, fly fast online

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chicago Tribune - By Bob Secter - Oct. 17 (News Analysis) - Have you read the e-mail from the psychologist who detailed how her South Pacific vacation was ruined by an encounter with a boorish, racist John McCain? Surely your inbox has been clogged with those exposes about Barack Obama's secret life as a radical Muslim who won't recite the Pledge of Allegiance? And how about Sarah Palin posing with a rifle in a U.S. flag bikini and claiming her daughter's baby as her own? Malarkey all. Yet people who routinely laugh off those get-rich-quick entreaties from the ubiquitous Nigerian banker can now be found yapping incessantly on cyberspace, talk radio and around the office about an ocean of specious political muck. "This election is made for an upper-level 'rumor psychology' class," said Nick DiFonzo, a psychologist and rumor expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York. "In the 20 years I've been studying rumors, I've not seen this level."

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Spinning a Web of Lies at Digital Speed

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Noam Cohen - Oct. 13 (Special Report) - Experimental sites like newstrust.net hope to create ratings systems from authorities who evaluate news articles on a range of criteria, and are themselves rated by the raters. (One of my articles was vetted by four reviewers and received a 4 out of 5 in terms of accuracy from its four reviewers.) Fabrice Florin, the founder of News Trust, said sites like his would be crucial to flagging inaccuracy, though he said, “we probably wouldn’t be as effective in less than an hour,” a time span when most of the damage is done in these false reports. He said three reviewers would be enough to warn readers, “if the reviewers are trustworthy.” The only long-term hope, he said, was news literacy training for the public, one of New Trust’s missions. “Our little brains were never in a position to handle that much information,” he said.

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New media feels heat after Apple misstep

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - By Ben Arnoldy - Oct. 08 (News Report) - Oakland, Calif. - A promo for CNN's citizen journalism site, iReport.com, reads: "You won't believe what people are uploading." Maybe readers should take that literally. An anonymous writer posted a false story to the site claiming that Apple Inc.'s CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, sending the company's stock tumbling Friday. The Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed Henry Blodget Monday that it was investigating the circumstances surrounding the article. Unlike stories on CNN's main site, most content on iReport.com can be uploaded by anyone, without editing. The erroneous piece stayed up for more than three hours – long enough to bounce around the blogosphere – before an Apple spokesperson quashed the rumor. Citizen journalism, or user-generated content, has proved successful enough to argue against abandoning it over snafus like this, say new media experts. Rather, the episode serves as a public reminder that "news" now includes both traditional journalism and a crowd-sourced model that treats verification as a public process, not a prerequisite for publishing. Both models have their place, says David Ardia, head of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, but users must give the crowd-sourced model time to work. "If you are consuming this news when it first comes out, you have to recognize that the fact-checking function hasn't happened yet."

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An Antidote to Election Day Woes?

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

A Fine Blog - By Nancy Scola, Allison Fine - Oct. 07 (Special Report) - We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think. Why not? Well, here’s what we’re thinking. We all know that American elections can be messy affairs. As longtime online organizer Jon Pincus recently noted, “voter suppression relies to a large extent on information asymmetry.” That imbalance, if not corrected for, can create just enough hoops that discourage all but the most motivated among us from jumping through them on our way to voting. From voter caging to misleading fliers to faulty machinery to the long waits exacerbated by poorly trained poll workers, it’s often a lack of knowing that jams up the process. And for far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there’s an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time. Enter Twitter. In its few years of existence Twitter has proven amazingly adept at one thing: empowering its users to move around 140-character-or-less chunks around quickly and agilely. How Twitter is being used for political ends is constantly evolving. And while Twitter is easiest to use on the Web, it’s a one-to-one and one-to-many and many-to-many communications powerhouse available to anyone with a cell phone in his or her pocket. That’s powerful, potentially game-changing stuff. We believe that Twitter can be instrumental in this election in correcting for some of the information imbalances that plagues American elections:

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Palin meets her first world leaders in bid to bolster her credentials

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Sara Kugler - Sep. 23 (News Report) - John McCain's campaign has shielded the first-term Alaska governor for weeks from spontaneous questions from voters and reporters, and went to striking lengths Tuesday to maintain that distance as Palin made her diplomatic debut. The campaign banned reporters from the start of the meetings, so as not to risk a question being asked of Palin. McCain aides relented after news organizations objected and CNN, which was supplying TV footage to a variety of networks, decided to pull its TV crew from Palin's meeting with Karzai.

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Charlie Gibson's Gaffe

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Charles Krauthammer - Sep. 12 (Special Report) - "At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of 'anticipatory self-defense.' " -- New York Times, Sept. 12 Informed her? Rubbish. The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong. There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

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Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Michiko Kakutani - Aug. 17 (News Report) - IT'S been more than eight years since "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" made its first foray into presidential politics with the presciently named Indecision 2000, and the difference in the show's approach to its coverage then and now provides a tongue-in-cheek measure of the show's striking evolution. Jon Stewart describes the morning meeting as "a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset." In 1999, the "Daily Show" correspondent Steve Carell struggled to talk his way off Senator John McCain's overflow press bus -- "a repository for outcasts, misfits and journalistic bottom-feeders" -- and onto the actual Straight Talk Express, while at the 2000 Republican Convention Mr. Stewart self-deprecatingly promised exclusive coverage of "all the day's events -- at least the ones we're allowed into." In this year's promotional spot for "The Daily Show's" convention coverage, the news newbies have been transformed into a swaggering A Team -- "the best campaign team in the universe ever," working out of " 'The Daily Show' news-scraper: 117 stories, 73 situation rooms, 26 news tickers," and promising to bring "you all the news stories -- first ... before it's even true."

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McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Michael D. Shear, Dan Balz - Jul. 29 (News Report) - The attacks are part of a newly aggressive McCain operation whose aim is to portray the Democratic presidential candidate as a craven politician more interested in his image than in ailing soldiers, a senior McCain adviser said. They come despite repeated pledges by the Republican that he will never question his rival's patriotism.

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