Tag: fake news

Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Yesterday Spread a Significant Lie All Over Twitter

Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

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High-profile failures, errors threaten media’s credibility with already skeptical public

Major media outlets in recent weeks have been struggling under a flood of major reporting failures, scrambling to address significant lapses in reporting as nationwide trust in media reaches record lows.

The Washington Post this week revealed that it had significantly misreported a story in which then-President Donald Trump was alleged to have called one of Georgia’s top elections investigators and urged that official to “find the fraud” in the state’s election data. The Post, which had relied on anonymous sourcing to verify the claim, said that a review of an audio file of the call discovered this month revealed that Trump had never uttered those words. 

Those allegations were explosive at the time they were reported, even finding their way into the impeachment trial memorandum of Senate Democrats. The Post in its correction indicated that its reporter has not listened to the recording prior to reporting on it, instead relying on “information provided by a source” to bolster the allegations in the report. 

Other media outlets picked up on the allegation as well, including CNN, which after the discovery of the recording quietly updated its own report on the alleged scandal. But its 10.5-font-sized “Editor’s Note” did not specify the errors from the earlier report, instead linking readers to a report on the recently discovered recording that itself did not identify the error from the network’s original article. 

The New York Times has been involved in several corrections, some big like the elaborate hoax played on its Caliphate podcast and others small but still affecting reputations on Twitter. Last month, for instance, Times technology reporter Taylor Lorenz had to be corrected when she tweeted an allegation that tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen had used  “the r-slur” during a forum, only to have one of the forum’s moderators deny it happened. Lorenz then tweeted back: “Thanks for clarifying.” 

The Capitol riot on Jan. 6 resulted in more journalism malpractice, so much so that award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote an entire essay about “false and exaggerated” media claims he had uncovered. “False reporting is never justified, especially to inflate threat and fear levels,” he declared.

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Recording Of Georgia Phone Call Shows Multiple News Outlets Ran Fabricated Trump Quote

Multiple news outlets ran a story with fake quotes attributed to former President Donald Trump, according to a now-released recording of Trump’s call with Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

The Washington Post first reported the false quotes via an anonymous source in January and said that Trump urged Watson to “find the fraud,” adding she’d be a “national hero.” The Post updated its article with a lengthy correction on March 11 after a recording of the phone call revealed no such quotes from Trump.

In the audio, Trump said he won the 2020 election and pushed Watson to look into ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, as he was convinced there was “dishonesty” going on there. The former president also told Watson she had “the most important job in the country right now” – not, as The Post claimed, that she’d be a “national hero” if she found fraud.

Multiple publications swiftly followed The Post’s reporting, citing both the newspaper and the anonymous source as evidence. CNN published an article on the phone call declaring “Trump pressured Georgia elections investigator to ‘find the fraud’ in 2020 election.’”

The network issued an “editor’s note” on March 15 after The Post’s quotes were determined to be inaccurate. The “editor’s note” came after a request for comment from the Daily Caller on Monday.

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How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).

That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.

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Biden-boosting influencer ‘Brooklyn Dad’ slammed for taking PAC money

A Joe Biden-boosting social media influencer known as “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” came under fire Wednesday for reportedly failing to disclose that he accepted tens of thousands of dollars from a Democratic political action committee.

Majid Padellan, who runs the nearly 900,000-follower-strong Twitter account — and has been slammed previously for urging Bernie Sanders to drop out of the 2020 presidential race — allegedly accepted more than $57,000 from a pro-Biden PAC, Really American, last year, according to Refinery29.com, which cited tweets circulating Tuesday.

In his Twitter bio, Padellan says he’s a senior adviser to the PAC — but followers slammed him for failing to admit he allegedly got paid to post pro-Biden opinions and theories, according to the outlet.

“Brooklyn Dad being a paid Dem op is pretty unsurprising, it absolutely does pay to have/promote sh–ty political opinions in America,” one user tweeted.

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Backlash After Washington Post’s ‘March 4 Threat from Militant Trump Supporters’ Story a ‘Mirage’

“On the day when former president Donald Trump’s most delusional supporters swore he would return to power — and the House suspended its business because of supposed threats to the U.S. Capitol — Washington looked on Thursday morning much the way it has for the past two months,” the Post wrote on Thursday.

“National Guard members armed with M4 rifles braced for rebellion that never came. Razor wire lined miles of steel fencing that went unbreached. Trump remained in Florida, where it was 70 degrees and sunny,” it continued.

“I really expected to see more Trump people or something,” one individual present was quoted as saying. “It’s weird how quiet it is today.”

The overreaction included the National Guard being asked to remain in Washington, DC, for another 60 days, as reported by Breitbart News.

Republican lawmakers have blasted the continued deployment, which to date has cost nearly $500 million in American taxpayer funds.

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Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List

We the media have “fact-checked” President Trump like we have fact-checked no other human being on the planet, and he’s certainly given us plenty to write about. That’s probably why it’s so easy to find lists enumerating and examining his mistakes, missteps and “lies.” But as self-appointed arbiters of truth, we’ve largely excused our own unprecedented string of fact-challenged reporting. The truth is, formerly well-respected, top news organizations are making repeat, unforced errors in numbers that were unheard of just a couple of years ago. Our repeat mistakes involve declaring that Trump’s claims are “lies” when they are matters of opinion, or when the truth between conflicting sources is unknowable; taking Trump’s statements and events out of context; reporting secondhand accounts against Trump without attribution as if they’re established fact; relying on untruthful, conflicted sources; and presenting reporter opinions in news stories,without labeling them as opinions.

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