Fake News #17643

[OneFootInTheGrave]

For a happy new 2017, we may want to keep ourselves entertained with reporting of fake news from "real news" outlets.

I will start with #1. The Guardian

Dec 28th article on Julian Assange, which Glenn Greenwald was kind enough to investigate.

Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a D.C. insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilizing the pre-existing central power network within D.C. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.
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In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like Novaya Gazeta, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player. WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organization with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and President Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources, though not always. For example, we have published more than 2 million documents from Syria, including Bashar al-Assad personally. Sometimes we make a publication about a country and they will see WikiLeaks as a player within that country, like with Timor East and Kenya. The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away.

“Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump. …”
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In his interview with la Repubblica, [Assange] said there was no need for WikiLeaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there.
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Assange “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.”

followed by

This article was amended on 29 December 2016 to remove a sentence in which it was asserted that Assange “has long had a close relationship with the Putin regime”. A sentence was also amended which paraphrased the interview, suggesting Assange said “there was no need for Wikileaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there”. It has been amended to more directly describe the question Assange was responding to when he spoke of Russia’s “many vibrant publications”.

Oh well, onwards and upwards into the new year.

The people who should be most upset by this deceit are exactly the ones who played the leading role in spreading it: namely, those who most vocally claim that Fake News is a serious menace. Nothing will discredit that cause faster or more effectively than the perception that this crusade is really about a selective desire to suppress news that undermines one’s political agenda, masquerading as concern for journalistic accuracy and integrity. Yet, as I’ve repeatedly documented, the very same people most vocal about the need to suppress Fake News are often those most eager to disseminate it when doing so advances their agenda.

|Happy 2017!

[Dauphin]

Retracted within 24 hours? If only all fake news and memes were retracted publicly that quickly!

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Yes, after the "news" spread, liked by thousands on social media, was cited by the likes of WaPo, The Atlantic journos as "proof", it was redacted. I am sure that everyone downstream is redacting as well.

I take it more as "source" fake news with admission.

[Dauphin]

I think redacting (rather than retracting) their articles may give rise to conspiracy nuts and complaints about censorship.

More seriously though, why is fake news considered a new thing to combat now? Hearst and Pullitzer say "Hello"

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Fake news is interesting these days as apparently the free world has president Trump in charge due to it (and Russians).

Point of the first post is an example of "how" fake news can be created, a legitimate site posts an article full of BS, and it becomes a reference point. There are plenty of those, including ones which do not admit their mistakes.

I thought it would be interesting to keep track of some of such obvious examples.

Most of those are harder to prove, like news articles that were coming out in support of Saddam's WMD pre-Iraq invasion. Some may have been genuine fake news, some might have been only eager regurgitation of some press conferee spin, but either way, we may get an interesting record of what is being presented at one time of another as legitimate information via "real news" channels.

I'd consider "real news" to be major news outlets, ie, NYT, BBC, WaPo, Fox, CBS, Bloomberg, RT, Al Jazeera, Telegraph, Times even Sun, Mail etc...

[Dauphin]

I'm more interested in truthiness (as a deficiency in the reader) than with fake news (as a deficiency in the disseminators). If you can solve truthiness, then fake news is less of a problem as you'll be able to be properly critical of the sources of information. People who believe satire news is real new especially need our help.

[BeBMan]

Retracted within 24 hours? If only all fake news and memes were retracted publicly that quickly!

RT had an article explaining that the Lisa-13yrs-gangrape story was made up by Lisa-13yrs only ca. 6 months after the police in Berlin officially declared that Lisa's gangrape story was made up. Probably needed the time for critical examination

[Dinner]

Greenwood got it right. The folks claiming to care about so called fake news just want to censor opposing views. Same as it ever was.

[PLATO]

People who only rely on one source for their news deserve fake news.

[Aeson]

I prefer to get my fake news from many different sources!

[Egbert]

Just believe everything poasted on the OT

[rah]

Especially all of Kid's posts.

[Egbert]

I think redacting (rather than retracting) their articles may give rise to conspiracy nuts and complaints about censorship.

More seriously though, why is fake news considered a new thing to combat now? Hearst and Pullitzer say "Hello"

"Fake news" was around long before Hearst and Pulitzer.

The Romans were right into "fake news". I doubt they were the pioneers of fake news too.