Tag: fake news

CBS Deceptively Edits Reporter’s Interaction With FL Governor Ron DeSantis. Here’s What He Really Said.

CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about the way the Sunshine State has rolled out its vaccination program.

In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations.

CBS edited the interaction between DeSantis and Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly confronted the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.

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MSNBC erroneously reported that Capitol attack suspect was a ‘White male’

MSNBC erroneously reported Friday that the suspect in Friday’s deadly car attack at the U.S. Capitol was a “White male.”

During the network’s 2 p.m. ET program “Katy Tur Reports,” NBC News justice correspondent Pete Williams provided reporting on the then-unidentified suspect, who had just died. 

“The question now is, what’s the condition of the Capitol Police officers who were injured when the man — we’re told it was a White male that was driving the car —  when the man got out of the car and attacked the police officers with a knife,” Williams told MSNBC anchor Katy Tur. 

In fact, the suspect was later identified as Noah Green, a 25-year-old Black man from Indiana with ties to Virginia.

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Media Mistakes in the Biden Era: the Definitive List

1. Friday, Jan. 8, 2021

The New York Times reporters Marc Santora, Megan Specia and Mike Baker report Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by “pro-Trump supporters” who “overpowered” him and “struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

But other reports the same day referenced Sicknick dying from a stroke.

The Times waited until mid-February to issue a correction, but still claimed– citing no evidence and no autopsy report– that Sicknick had died “from injuries in pro-Trump rampage.”

There was no explanation as to who fabricated the fire extinguisher story.

2. Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021

The Washington Post‘s Amy Gardner, AP, CNBC, Rolling Stone, and others falsely report that President Trump pressed a lead Georgia elections investigator to “find the fraud,” and told the investigator it would make them a national hero.

However, the actual recording of the call later made public revealed that Trump did not say either of those things.

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The media’s false narrative about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally being a COVID-19 superspreader event

One of the largest motorcycle rallies in the world was still held in Sturgis, South Dakota, during the COVID-19 pandemic last summer, which the media claimed led to more than 266,000 COVID-19 cases, or nearly one in five of every case reported in America at the time. 

The number of cases came from a study by San Diego State University professors published in September, just a month following the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. 

However, the Sturgis city manager, Daniel Ainslie, said the study and other models that predicted their hospitals would be overwhelmed were wrong. 

“I think at the peak during the rally, and even after the rally, about five percent of the [hospital] beds were used for COVID,” Ainslie told Sharyl Attkisson on her show, Full Measure After Hours.

The media linked anywhere from one to about five fatalities to Sturgis, but Ainslie said none were scientifically traced.

“The hard data showed that there were about 260 cases that came from here,” Ainslie said. “Now, the reality was there were probably some additional cases beyond those 260 that were immediately traced here, but to try to state that there were a quarter million, that’s just ridiculous, and it was fanciful, and it was just pushing their narrative.”

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed the San Diego State University study.

“Results from this study should be interpreted cautiously,” analysts write, adding that “the associated data analyses used to obtain nationwide estimates were relatively weak.”

Last year, 460,000 bikers attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, but that was fewer than usual. Although, Ainslie said, the media used footage from previous years to make it look busier than it actually was. 

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The sources who lie and the reporters who protect them

Protecting anonymous sources – or covering-up government misconduct?

Imagine you’re a major media outlet like The Washington Post or CNN. You have a huge platform on the web, in print, or on TV. You publish consequential stories with information from anonymous sources on Trump/Russia collusion, an email Donald Trump, Jr. received about a Wikileaks release, and President Trump’s instructions to a Georgia election investigator to “find the fraud.” Your stories shape agendas and become national news. They fuel conspiracies, divide Americans, and influence elections.

And then you realize you’ve been played. Your anonymous sources gave you false information. You have to issue a correction. Why should that be the end of the story?

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New York Times Writers May Have Deceived Readers in Stories About Project Veritas: Court

Writers for the New York Times may have spread deceptive claims about the nonprofit journalism group Project Veritas, a judge ruled this week.

In stories from 2020 about Project Veritas videos, writers Maggie Astor and Tiffany Hsu inserted sentences that were opinions despite the articles being billed as news, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood said.

“If a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is fact or opinion, that it is opinion,” Wood wrote in a 16-page decision denying the paper’s request to dismiss a lawsuit from Project Veritas.

“The Articles that are the subject of this action called the Video ‘deceptive,’ but the dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by defendants’ counsel certainly apply to Astor’s and Hsu’s failure to note that they injected their opinions in news articles, as they now claim,” he added.

At issue are five articles that Project Veritas alleges contained false and defamatory information. All five were about a 2020 video report from the journalism group on alleged illegal voting practices in Minnesota.

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Media’s Entire Georgia Narrative Is Fraudulent, Not Just The Fabricated Trump Quotes

The Washington Post was busted for publishing fabricated quotes from an anonymous source, attributing them to a sitting president, and using those quotes as a basis to speculate the president committed a crime. The invented Donald Trump quotes, which related to a fight over election integrity in Georgia, were cited in Democrats’ impeachment brief and during the Senate impeachment trial.

But the fake quotes, bad as they were, are just one of many ways the media have done a horrible job of covering election disputes in the state.

According to the media narrative, the Georgia presidential election was as perfectly run as any election in history, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. To push that narrative, the media steadfastly downplayed, ignored, or prejudiciously dismissed legitimate concerns with how Georgia had run its November 2020 election and complaints about it.

That posture was the complete opposite of how they were reporting on Georgia elections prior to Democrats performing well in them. In the months prior to November, some media sounded a bit like Lin Wood when they wrote about Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Dominion Voting Systems, legal challenges in the state, and Georgia election integrity in general.

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