Fake news

The most recent issue of the New Yorker includes a 5,000-word feature on the police (summary: they are racist). In it, staff writer Jill Lepore drops this frightful fact to illustrate the barbarism of America’s uniformed enforcers:'One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.'Cockburn started writing precisely to avoid ever doing math again, but even to him, this claim sounded like a howler. Two-thirds of all emergency room visits by American young adults were for police injuries?

When the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law in 1967, the stated goal was to provide public financial assistance to producers and broadcasters of educational programming. And so PBS and NPR came into existence. They enjoy public funding from taxpayers today. But should taxpayers continue to fund these enterprises, when they clearly focus less on educating the public, and more on pushing commentary and opinion, and now, even libel?Public media has long been defended. Frequently it’s pointed out that public funding for NPR is only about two percent of their federal operating budget, the same excuse we hear when Planned Parenthood pushes back against calls to defund it. Just as frequently, right-leaning outlets seek to point out a clear bias in publicly-funded coverage.

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’.

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.

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.