NewsTrust - Media and Politics - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

How to peek through Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles, the B.S. detection software

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Nieman Journalism Lab - By Andrew Phelps - May. 20 (Opinion) - Last November I wrote about Dan Schultz and his Truth Goggles, a piece of software he’s developing in partnership with PolitiFact that highlights suspicious claims in news articles. It’s as simple as spellcheck. Now, as Schultz finalizes his graduate thesis at the MIT Media Lab, he’s conducting a user study to understand how people (anonymously) respond to a prototype of the tool. It’s our first look at the software in action, and he wants you to give it a try.

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Mitt Romney, the Unlikable Presidential Candidate

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

The Daily Beast - By Michael Tomasky - May. 13 (Opinion) - It’s been a long time since the country elected a man as personally unappealing as Mitt Romney. Will Americans overlook their deeply held conviction that he’s a jerk? Very few votes are going to be cast on the basis of what Mitt Romney did or didn’t do to John Lauber in 1965. So that, per se, isn’t Romney’s problem. But this is: The story lands as another brick on pile of evidence amassing that he’s just a disagreeable human being. A few days ago I wrote about Barack Obama’s biggest problem, which is that despite all the many areas in which Americans rate him higher than Romney, the one on which they give Romney the edge happens to be pretty important: handling the economy. Now we get to Romney’s biggest problem. The likability factor. He ain’t got it. And he ain’t got much of a way to get it.

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Stewart Analyzes The Evolution Of Fox News' Gay Rights Coverage

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jon Stewart - May. 11 (Comedy News) - This issue is just racism 2.0 and it aligns perfectly with the GOP agenda of rich white males. Justtheobvious: This issue is just racism 2.0 and it aligns perfectly Bingo ! They already have the middle class and poor on their 'fiscal' oppression list. So

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Who's Buying Your Election? New FCC Ruling Requires Broadcasters to Post Data On Ad Purchases

Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - May. 04 (Interview) - We speak with Robert McChesney, co-founder of the national media reform organization Free Press, and Justin Elliott, a reporter at ProPublica working on a project called "Free the Files," that asks people and journalists across the country to visit TV stations, acquire paper data on political ads, and then post the files online at ProPublica.org.

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Rosen’s Trust Puzzler: What Explains Falling Confidence in the Press?

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Pressthink - By Jay Rosen - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today. Why? That is my question in this post. What makes it a puzzle is that during that same period, several other things were happening. Journalists were becoming better educated. They were more likely to go to journalism school, my institution. During this period, the cultural cachet of being a journalist was on the rise. Newsrooms were getting bigger, too: more boots on the ground to cover the news. Journalism was becoming less of a trade and more of a profession. Most people who study the press would say that the influence of professional standards, such as you would find in this code, was increasing.

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Rick Santorum's Dystopia of the Year 2014

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Paleofuture - By Matt Novak - Mar. 25 (Opinion) - According to Rick Santorum, if Obama is re-elected Americans will be forced to fill up their heads with gasoline Probably inspired by Hunger Games mania, Rick Santorum recently released the most dystopian campaign video we've seen in quite a while. Called "Obamaville," the video depicts the bleak world of 2014: President Obama has been re-elected, the playgrounds sit empty, freedom of religion is under attack, and apparently we're all cyborgs powered by putting gasoliine directly into our heads. THANKS A LOT OBAMA! As a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I watched closely and noticed a few interesting images that the campaign chose to include in the video. Some of the weirder images are below. If you notice the same timecode for some images it's because these images were only up for 2 or 3 frames, and trust me, that's where the gold is!

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Mike Daisey: Reports of my Death have been Greatly Exaggerated

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

mikedaisey.blogspot.com - By Mike Daisey - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers. Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before. Except that we all know that isn’t true.

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HBO’s ‘Game Change’ Goes Easy on Sarah Palin, John McCain in 2008 Saga

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Daily Beast - By Michelle Goldberg - Mar. 10 (Review) - If you're a fan of Sarah Palin, or if you just haven't followed the recriminations from John McCain staffers in the wake of the 2008 campaign, you will likely find Julianne Moore's portrayal of her in the HBO movie Game Change to be sexist. It's not just the depiction of her shocking ignorance""*at one point, she has to be told that the Queen of England doesn't conduct that country's foreign policy, while at another, she is confused to hear that Saddam Hussein was not behind the September 11 attacks. She's also absurdly vain, going on the...

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The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Timothy Messer-Kruse - Feb. 20 (Opinion) - For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the episode. In some circles that affords me a presumption of expertise on the subject. Not, however, on Wikipedia. The bomb thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago sparked America's first Red Scare, a high-profile show trial, and a worldwide clemency movement for the seven condemned men. Today the martyrs' graves are a national historic site, the location of the bombing is marked by a public sculpture, and the event is recounted in most American history textbooks. Its Wikipedia entry is detailed and elaborate.

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"MyFacts"

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Doonesbury - By Gary Trudeau - Feb. 12 (Cartoon) - This week, the Doonesbury comic strip takes on "MyFacts", a fictional online service that packages "faux facts" to support anyone's ideology, from creationism to 9/11 conspiracy theories.

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Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy | Truthout

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

truth-out.org - By Chris Hedges - Feb. 06 (Opinion) - The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement...Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution...Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist...It is a safe bet that among Black Bloc groups in cities such as Oakland are agents provocateurs spurring them on to more mayhem.

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Jon Stewart Has Some Harsh Words For SOPA And Its Sponsors

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Gawker - By Matt Toder, Jon Stewart - Jan. 18 (Comedy News) - On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart attempted to wrap his head around SOPA and its draconian take on internet piracy. He saved his harshest criticisms for its sponsors in Congress and their inability to truly understand (a) the internet and (b) what their bill will actually do.

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Fact-checking in the Echo Chamber Nation

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Bill Adair - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news. "I listen to Rush and read NewsMax," he said. "And to make sure I'm getting a balanced view, I watch Fox." My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends. This is life in our echo chamber nation. We protect ourselves from opinions we don't like and seek reinforcement from like-minded allies. The paradox ...

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Professional fact-checking about as broken as professional journalism

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Salon - By Alex Pareene - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - If I were to, say, swipe your grandfather’s copy of “See, I Told You So” by Rush Limbaugh from his den, and then mail him a gift card good for a portion of the price of an Amazon Kindle, I think your grandfather would be well within his rights to call me a thief and possibly a communist. Politifact disagrees, apparently, as Democrats have been accused of telling the “lie of the year” for arguing that a vote to replace Medicare with a private voucher system does not constitute voting to “end” the program. The government program that would be replaced with a private voucher system. Replacing a thing with something else no longer constitutes getting rid of that thing. FYI. Politifact’s decision, needless to say, frustrated a lot of people. They have been accused of naming this arguably true claim the year’s biggest lie because Rep. Paul Ryan, the man who came up with the Medicare-replacing plan, launched a big letter-writing campaign lobbying for it, complete with a badly lit YouTube video. Paul Krugman and others say that Politifact made this decision in the interest of achieving the illusion of “balance,” because the past couple “lies of the year” have all belonged to Republicans.

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The Hard Truth About Fact-Checking

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Alec MacGillis - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - My colleague Jonathan Cohn and plenty of others have done yeoman's work today in challenging PolitiFact's awarding of its "lie of the year" award to the Democrats' claim that the Paul Ryan proposal approved by House Republican would "end Medicare." There's little more to say on the substance of the matter. But the moment does present a new opportunity to ask a larger question that has been nagging at me the past year or two: why do we need fact-checkers, anyway?

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Can Fact Checking be Politically “Neutral,” When Facts Are Not Equally Distributed Across the Political Spectrum?

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Think Progress - By Chris Mooney - Dec. 20 (Opinion) - Recently, I sat in on an off-the-record meeting about political fact-checking. I can’t report or quote from the event, but it spurred along some general thoughts that had already arisen in the context of writing The Republican Brain, which focuses a great deal on fact-checking—and thus, helped propel this post. Fact checking is a phenomenon that has really taken off over the last half decade or so as, more and more, media outlets as well as independent and/or partisan voices are busily pronouncing on the “truth” of political statements. The reason? Well, there are many, but I would place the growing divide over reality and what is factually true, between the left and the right, as perhaps the leading one.

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Fact checking the AP fact checker

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Power Line - By Scott Johnson - Dec. 20 (Opinion) - According to Pete Yost last week in a superficial AP fact check story: “Republican presidential candidates have claimed that the Obama administration is cleansing government files of references to radical Islam, an assertion so juicy that politicians keep repeating it — even though it’s a wild exaggeration.” But I think the GOP candidates have it right, more or less, and Yost has it wrong. At least they are closer to the mark than Yost. See, for example, Cliff May’s NRO column “What’s Islam got to do with it?” (May cites a report by the Westminster Institute’s Katharine C. Gorka that notes: “Key national security documents have already excised all terminology that associates terrorism with Islam or Islamic concepts such as jihad.”) See also “Obama administration pulls references to Islam from terror training materials, official says.” (The story quotes purposefully ambiguous comments made by Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole at the George Washington University law school. My call yesterday to the Department of Justice for clarification went unreturned.)

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When candidates lie, what's a political reporter to do?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Nieman Journalism Lab - By Dan Froomkin - Nov. 30 (Opinion) - How journalists respond to intentional deception will be a defining feature of 2012 political coverage. Will they allow themselves to become accessories to deceptive politicians? Or will they aggressively and repeatedly expose misinformation and the people who traffic in it?

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Jon Stewart Mocks Barney Frank's Retirement Coverage On Fox News (VIDEO)

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Katla McGlynn, Jon Stewart - Nov. 30 (Comedy News) - After nearly three decades of serving Massachusetts' 4th congressional district, Democratic U.S. Representative Barney Frank announced Monday that he will not be seeking re-election in 2012. On Tuesday night's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart bid farewell to him the only way he knows how: with clips of absurd reactions from the GOP.

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True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Devin Coldewey - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part.

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Fox News Is the 1%

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Robert Greenwald:, Ed Schultze - Nov. 18 (Opinion) - video

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Steve Jobs: Fox News 'A Destructive Force In Our Society'

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Oct. 26 (Review) - Steve Jobs told Rupert Murdoch that Fox News was a "destructive force in our society," according to the blockbuster biography of the late Apple CEO. Poynter was the first to uncover Jobs' blunt words about the network in Walter Isaacson's new book.

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Taboo - or Not Taboo. Make That 15 Commandments.

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Smirking Chimp - By Robert Becker - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - It's good news that bad taboos, which reinforce prejudice, are falling by the wayside. But what about good taboos on which civilization depends, also falling by the wayside?

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Colbert Nails Rush Limbaugh Over Obama Christian Killing Accusations (VIDEO)

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stephen Colbert - Oct. 20 (Comedy News) - On Wednesday night's "Report," Stephen Colbert featured a segment on the inflammatory radio host's recent on-air claim that Obama is sending troops to Uganda for the purpose of "wiping out Christians." Explaining that the "Christian" group Lord's Resistance Army promotes an objective "to remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people," Limbaugh left out that the LRA has terrorized the people of Uganda and other countries for over 25 years by abducting children, brainwashing them and forcing them to become sex slaves as well as torturers and executioners.

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Noam Chomsky on Israel-Palestine Prisoner Exchange, U.S. Assassination Campaign in Yemen

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Noam Chomsky - Oct. 18 (Speech) - MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist and political dissident, spoke Monday night at Barnard College in New York City about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just hours before Israel and Hamas completed a historic prisoner exchange. "I think [Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit] should have been released a long time ago. But there’s something missing from this whole story. There’s no pictures of Palestinian women, and no discussion, in fact, in the story of—what about the Palestinian prisoners being released?

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