News, propaganda and confirmation bias

[Voodoo]

this sort of fits in here



ICYMI

It's a Witch.... I'm sorry that's insensitive to witches. The more religiously inclined might see a Demon there.

 

[Goldhedge]

That seems like more of a biased juror issue than a news/propaganda issue.

She got a confirmation bias a mile long was my thinking....

 

[Goldhedge]

BREAKING: CRAZY EYES CLOUT-CHASING WICCAN THEATER KID THINKS SHE CAN TAKE DOWN TRUMP
Not an Onion headline

On today’s episode of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec breaks down Georgia Grand Jury foreperson, Emily Kohrs and her uncomfortable obsession with former President Donald Trump and her clout-chasing quest to see him indicted. Poso also dissects the latest from 9/11 lawyer who gave an ominous warning to the people afflicted by the ecological disaster in East Palestine. Poso then gives an unfiltered breakdown of recent polls that show a shocking lack of support for the war in Ukraine, despite what mainstream media reports - all this and more on today’s HUMAN EVENTS DAILY!
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/

 

[Unca Walt]

That seems like more of a biased juror issue than a news/propaganda issue.

One and the same army, just different divisions.

 

[Voodoo]

BREAKING: CRAZY EYES CLOUT-CHASING WICCAN THEATER KID THINKS SHE CAN TAKE DOWN TRUMP
Not an Onion headline

On today’s episode of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec breaks down Georgia Grand Jury foreperson, Emily Kohrs and her uncomfortable obsession with former President Donald Trump and her clout-chasing quest to see him indicted. Poso also dissects the latest from 9/11 lawyer who gave an ominous warning to the people afflicted by the ecological disaster in East Palestine. Poso then gives an unfiltered breakdown of recent polls that show a shocking lack of support for the war in Ukraine, despite what mainstream media reports - all this and more on today’s HUMAN EVENTS DAILY!
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/

NAILED IT. She is a witch wanna be. Maybe we really can create our reality here because she has created a very witch-like persona.

 

[pmbug]

Podcast Episode: So You Think You’re A Critical Thinker

... Alice Marwick ... says many people see conspiracy theories as participatory ways to be active in political and social systems from which they feel left out, building upon beliefs they already harbor to weave intricate and entirely false narratives.

Marwick speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about finding ways to identify and leverage people’s commonalities to stem this flood of disinformation while ensuring that the most marginalized and vulnerable internet users are still empowered to speak out.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• Why seemingly ludicrous conspiracy theories get so many views and followers
• How disinformation is tied to personal identity and feelings of marginalization and disenfranchisement
• When fact-checking does and doesn’t work
• Thinking about online privacy as a political and structural issue rather than something that can be solved by individual action

Alice Marwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and cofounder and Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. In 2017, she co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (Data & Society), a flagship report examining far-right online subcultures’ use of social media to spread disinformation, for which she was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 2017 Global Thinkers. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene which examines how people seek social status through online visibility, and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017). Her forthcoming book, The Private is Political (Yale 2023), examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status. She earned a political science and women's studies bachelor's degree from Wellesley College, a Master of Arts in communication from the University of Washington, and a PhD in media, culture and communication from New York University.
...

Podcast Episode: So You Think You’re A Critical Thinker

The promise of the internet was that it would be a tool to melt barriers and aid truth-seekers everywhere. But it feels like polarization has worsened in recent years, and more internet users are being misled into embracing conspiracies and cults. You can also find this episode on the Internet...

www.eff.org

^ Link includes a transcript of the podcast (so you can read instead of listen, if you prefer)

 

[pmbug]

With respect to statistics and the interpretation thereof:

If you believe that Princess Diana was assassinated, you almost certainly do not also believe that she is secretly still alive.

That may sound obvious, but there are parts of the academy where it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. In 2012, a much-cited paper in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science seemed to show that people willing to reject the official story of Di's death—that she had been killed in a car accident—weren't very choosy about which alternative they embraced: "the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered." When the authors asked for opinions about the contradictory rumors surrounding the demise of Osama bin Laden, they got comparable results. So strong was the correlation, they concluded, that it seemed fair to say that "any conspiracy theory that stands in opposition to the official narrative will gain some degree of endorsement from someone who holds a conspiracist worldview, even if it directly contradicts other conspiracy theories that they also find credible." Or as they put it more pithily later in the paper: "Believing that Osama bin Laden is still alive is apparently no obstacle to believing that he has been dead for years."

The press couldn't resist the idea of a kook so divorced from common sense that he thinks someone could be both alive and dead. The study became a staple of pop-science pieces on conspiracy theories, and of pop-intellectual writing by figures such as Cass Sunstein. And when other experimenters followed up on the paper, they replicated its results.

"Journalists love it," declared Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist from VU Amsterdam, as he addressed the International Conspiracy Theory Symposium at the University of Miami this past weekend. "It's a cool finding. There's just one problem: It's not true."
...

More (long):

This just in: Conspiracy theorists not quite as kooky as previously reported

Greetings from the second International Conspiracy Theory Symposium, where one of the most cited findings in the field has been debunked.

reason.com

 

[pmbug]

Matt Taibbi rants about MSNBC's editorial standards...

...
That exchange between Nance and me was symbolic of a choice the network faced. They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.

We know how that worked out. ...

More (long):

Taibbi: Eat Me, MSNBC | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

 

[pmbug]

... The latest focus of concern is misinformation generated by AI. This innovation could potentially make misinformation seem even more credible than previous technologies did!

In an insightful recent Bloomberg column (unfortunately paywalled), economist Tyler Cowen, my George Mason University colleague, suggests that concerns about AI misinformation may be overblown—not because voters can easily see through it, but because misinformation doesn't have to be very sophisticated to deceive those predisposed to believe it:
...
... The root of the problem of political misinformation is not that the deceptions are highly sophisticated or that a particular new technology (e.g.—social media) makes it easy to produce and spread it, but that voters have little incentive to seek out the truth and evaluate information objectively. Many instead act as biased "political fans," lapping up whatever ideas—including ridiculous conspiracy theories—support their preexisting views and prejudices.

The Demand for Political Misinformation is a Bigger Problem than the Supply - Even in the Age of AI

Economist Tyler Cowen elaborates on some of the reasons why. The root of the problem is that voters have poor incentives to become well-informed and evaluate information objectively.

reason.com

 

[Joe King]

Joe.................serious question.

Do you have any viable proof of this that you can actually go public with or is this simply an opinion? If you have proof will you share it?

I'm glad you asked.

Yes I do, and it's already public.

The Durham report clearly stated that there existed no credible evidence to start the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
....and the Mueller report came up with a big goose egg on it too.

If there existed any evidence at all, why couldn't either of them find it?

For years we heard that liar schiff saying that there was tons of evidence, yet he still has not turned any of it over to anyone. Is he secretly on Trump's side, or what?



Durham's report further stated that the fbi applied a different standard to Trump's investigation than they did to the hag's email scandal investigation.

A different standard? Why would they do that? Doesn't the Constitution guarantee all of us, including you me and Trump, equal Rights in the eyes of our government and equal protection under its laws?

How could it ever be proper and Just for them to investigate one citizen using one standard, but then investigate another citizen using a different standard?
Where in the Constitution does it allow that?


Would you like it if you were to be investigated by the full weight and power of the fed.gov using a standard that only applied to you, and not others? Would that seem fair to you?



Edited to add: a video from five years ago that lays it all out. This was public knowledge back then, but only for those without cnn and rachel madcow in each ear.

 

[Unca Walt]

............silence..........

 

[Joe King]

............silence..........

Is there anything else to respond with?

Well, other than an I was wrong?
.....and people who irrationally hate Trump find it really hard to do that.

Kinda like the bidet finally letting more wall get built, but still unable to acknowledge that Trump was right for wanting it built to begin with.

The people who have spent the past eight years irrationally hating Trump simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the truth of the matter.

 

[Casey Jones]

Irrationally.

That's the key word.

We can discuss, argue, FACTS - when we're in the same reality. When half the discussion group is mired in FANTASY...and insists on ALTERNATE REALITY...there's nothing to discuss.

Nothing to say. All there is, is irrational anger and assertions on the fantasy side; and disgust on the side that clings to empirical facts, that tries to tune out the noise of propaganda.

Over on that **OTHER** site, I see the Joo-Bashers and crypto-Nahsees are coming out of the woodwork. Of all the things to blame the Middle East chaos on...religious precepts, land claims, national subsidies from Western nations, price of oil, the illiterate population and its manipulation by their own leaders...

...they make it about RACE. Time for another pogrom.

We know how that went, last time. I guess they want another round of it.

 

[pmbug]

* bump *

The Center for American Rights (CAR) has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against WCBS-TV, a CBS-owned station, for engaging in significant and intentional news distortion.

The complaint stems from two different broadcasts of the same interview aired on CBS's "Face the Nation" and "60 Minutes" on October 5 and 6, 2024. In both broadcasts, the same question was posed to Vice President Kamala Harris regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but CBS aired two conflicting responses. These discrepancies, CAR argues, amount to deliberate news distortion—a violation of FCC rules governing broadcasters' public interest obligations. The complaint demands CBS release the unedited transcript of the interview to set the record straight.

“This isn’t just about one interview or one network,” said Daniel Suhr, President of the Center for American Rights. “This is about the public’s trust in the media on critical issues of national security and international relations during one of the most consequential elections of our time. When broadcasters manipulate interviews and distort reality, it undermines democracy itself. The FCC must act swiftly to restore public confidence in our news media.”

The complaint cites long-standing FCC precedent that broadcasters cannot engage in intentional falsification or suppression of news and seeks an order compelling CBS to release the full unedited transcript of the interview.

This filing comes shortly after the Center for American Rights' recent complaints against ABC News with both the FCC and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for clear sponsor favoritism in the Harris-Trump debate broadcast by ABC News on September 10, 2024. In that complaint, CAR argued that ABC’s moderators unfairly targeted former President Trump while providing Vice President Harris a free pass on factual inaccuracies.

CBS Accused of News Distortion in Vice President Kamala Harris Interview — Center for American Rights Files Formal FCC Complaint — Center for American Rights

The Center for American Rights (CAR) has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against WCBS-TV, a CBS-owned station, for engaging in significant and intentional news distortion.

www.americanrights.org