Fake news

Wednesday

Cockburn

Five more conspiracy theories Trump can use to distract the media

Donald Trump’s go-to tactic for hijacking the news cycle is simple: bash enemies, mercilessly, and insinuate that they are part of a terrible conspiracy.The President has spent the last few days again tweeting conspiracy theories about the mysterious 2001 death of an aide to then-Rep. Joe Scarborough, who now hosts Morning Joe on MSNBC. Cue outrage and the news cycle shifts in the President’s direction. He does it every time. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265624335898869760 But Cockburn has noticed that the President is straining for something shocking or strange enough to flip the world’s attention. As November approaches, he will become ever more desperate for electoral outrage-fodder.

conspiray theories

Wednesday

Karol Markowicz

How can Twitter decide whether COVID news is ‘untrue’?

Do masks help contain COVID-19? Right now the answer is yes, definitely yes. Sort of. Maybe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sure masks help. Now.But in January, Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said during a briefing, ‘the virus is not spreading in the general community. We don’t routinely recommend the use of face masks by the public to prevent respiratory illness. And we certainly are not recommending that at this time for this new virus.’And on March 1, 2020, the Surgeon General repeated that masks are ‘not effective’ and warned people to stop buying them lest they be in short supply for medical staff.

fatwa twitter

Tuesday

Cockburn

NABJ cancels Huawei-sponsored misinformation panel

The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) was planning to run a panel tomorrow called ‘The Rise of Misinformation’ sponsored by Huawei — a Chinese consumer electronics firm with suspiciously close ties to the Chinese Communist party. Sadly, just over 24 hours before the start time, the NABJ suddenly canceled the event. What happened?A statement released by the NABJ said that the panel had ‘become a distraction from other priorities’, as it ‘had come under attack because controversial technology giant Huawei was planning to sponsor the webinar though it had no editorial control’.

van jones nabj huawei

Sunday

Jack Hunter

Richard Jewell was a victim of ‘fake news’

Few things enrage journalists more than when President Trump accuses the media of creating ‘fake news’ or calls them the ‘enemy of the people’.Reporters and pundits understandably take it as a threat — not only to themselves but also to the First Amendment and the bedrock notion that a free press is necessary for a free society. Some have interpreted Trump’s remarks as emerging fascism or even wondered if they could end up in jail for criticizing this administration (though the media curiously didn’t make as much of a stink when President Obama was trampling reporters’ constitutional rights).Yet to date, no journalists have been locked up. No fascist measures have been taken against the press.

richard jewell

Saturday

Caroline McCarthy

Deepfakes could be good news

Are you scared of deepfakes? Perhaps you should be. A few years old and continually growing more sophisticated, deepfakes are digital simulacra generated through machine learning that are barely distinguishable from the real thing. They’ve been used to fake celebrity porn videos, make Barack Obama seem to call Donald Trump a ‘dipshit,’ and most recently, superimpose Steve Buscemi’s face on to Jennifer Lawrence’s body in a video that was at once mesmerizing and scary (Buscemi/Lawrence bore a strange resemblance to Tilda Swinton).

deepfakes jennifer buscemi

Tuesday

Michael Tracey

BuzzFeed, ‘BOOM!’ and the Russiagate bombshell

Robert Mueller’s office possesses evidence showing that Donald Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress! My goodness, what a bombshell. When the BuzzFeed story alleging this was first published Thursday night, the reaction was as painful as it was predictable. Journalists and fellow-traveler Twitter personalities lit up social media with grand, gleeful pronunciations about the imminent downfall of the Trump presidency. You could almost hear the champagne corks being popped. Within what seemed like mere seconds, the report was blared across all the major TV networks, and the reporters who broke the news were touted as once-in-a-generation heroes. Plaques and monuments in their honor entered the early stages of construction.

buzzfeed news ben smith

Friday

Michele Anderson & Jake Krohn

The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town

This week, the star reporter of the German magazine Der Spiegel was fired after it was revealed that he had been fabricating stories for several years. Here, Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn expose the many inaccuracies in his article about their town, Fergus Falls, Minn. In February 2017, my husband and I attended a concert at our local theater, and were sipping some wine in the lobby before the show started. Several people came up to us at separate times excitedly, and asked, ‘did you meet the German guy yet?!’ I hadn’t, but my spider senses perked up when I heard that he worked for Der Spiegel, a magazine based in Hamburg, and that he was writing about the state of rural America in the wake of Trump’s presidency.

der spiegel