November 21, 2016

Is this the "fake news" I keep hearing about?



That's the NYT website right now.

Ironically, one of the key stories — "How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study" — is about the "fake news" problem, which is presented without any sign of self-recognition. The "case study" is, of course, a story that benefited Trump.

63 comments:

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Irony is dead as dead can be. The blind are leading the blind. I've seen AI programs that are more self-aware than the NYT.

Wince said...

It's like the Cosmo cover and the 'fake orgasm' craze.

rhhardin said...

It's not self-awareness but audience. They have plenty of self-awareness to write that stuff in the first place.

hombre said...

The three "news" stories down the left hand column are an interesting juxtaposition to the "fake news" tripe.

Brando said...

How much fake news got through in the pre-internet days when people couldn't instantly fact check and propogate rebuttals? I'm guessing quite a lot that we don't even know about.

rhhardin said...

The NYT is screwing the bondholders, is all. They're going out of business but spending down the assets of the bondholders to do it.

rhhardin said...

Trump will be able to buy the NYT for a dollar at bankrupcy, rename it the New York Herald Tribune and publish it as his own.

David said...

"Trump Turns Staid Cabinet Process into Spectacle"

1. "Spectacle" is quite an upgrade from "chaos." Nice walk back NYT.
2. It's in New York, right under your noses. Who is making it a spectacle?
3. The "spectacle" is occurring with Trump largely invisible personally. A Wizard tweeting from behind the curtain. That is how easily you are played.
4. Spectacles are a device to see more clearly.

It's going to be a hard winter for the Times.

Sebastian said...

"How much fake news got through in the pre-internet days when people couldn't instantly fact check and propogate rebuttals? I'm guessing quite a lot that we don't even know about." Someone should write a history of fake and false news -- including its impact, or lack thereof.

David said...

rhhardin said...
Trump will be able to buy the NYT for a dollar at bankrupcy, rename it the New York Herald Tribune and publish it as his own.


Expect Carlos Slim to get there first.

David Begley said...

Obama and the Left never should have started this whole fake news narrative. A set up. MSNBC and the NYT are the prime examples of fake news.

The worst of it was when Obama said fake news on Facebook cost Hillary the election. Translation: The American people are idiots.

tim in vermont said...

Speaking of "fake news," here is that photo on Hilary Swift's instagram feed before the New York Times apparently applied the "Villain's lair Dutch tilt" to it:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BNB8yWxAcA3/?taken-by=hlswift&hl=en

Larry J said...

The NYT has been a fake news source for a long time. That's why their unofficial motto is "All the News that Fits our Views".

rhhardin said...

Will there be a women self-awareness moment, is the question.

Women don't think the same way as men.

Women assume they're better, men take it on a case by case basis.

The women assuming using the same women's thinking does not occur to women as a problem.

Men do the same thing, but it's a mode leading to self-awareness. Nobody says this case by case consideration leads men into self-deluding error.

An asymmetry.

tim in vermont said...

"Trump Turns Staid Cabinet Process into Spectacle"

L, O Fucking L. If it was Obama, it would have been "transparency." But guess what? Wikileaks shows that an executive at Citibank had an accurate and complete list of Obama's cabinet a month before the election.

https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton

Oddly, the New York Times remains incurious. Doesn't see fit to print anything on that one!

Nonapod said...

2016 will go down in history as the year everybody went nuts. The Cubs won the pennant! Donald Trump became president! Yellow journalism returned in full force.

khesanh0802 said...

More interesting is the column to the left accusing Trump of making a spectacle of his cabinet selection process. I believe it was the Times, or it could have been WaPo, that Friday was complaining Trump was being too secretive about his cabinet selection process. The Cabinet selection process has always been like a beauty pageant for reporters. It's like a bunch of junior high kids speculating on who will date whom for the prom. We are going to be very tired of this bull shit before these erstwhile news sources have anything substantive to report.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Try to keep up Althouse. At the NYT, it's all about the narrative - as long as they stay on their narrative, almost any news story can be fake.

robother said...

"Hands up, Don't shoot!"
Jackie Coaklley Rape Hoax.
John McCain's affair with a lobbyist.

Good to see the the Main Stream Media is finally getting serious about this Fake News problem.

Skeptical Voter said...


If the Times continues in this vein, reading it will become one of those dirty jobs that Mike Rowe featured on his TV show. Only Mike Rowe will be willing to do it.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Truth is the first casualty of war?

MayBee said...

I would like to see the NYT take up the "fake news" that Mike Pence supports electric shock gay conversion therapy.

Dude1394 said...

Well to be honest I consider all nytimes articles fake until it is corroborated by a non democrat media source.

MayBee said...

The Mike Pence fake news thing has people really scared. It would be a public service to the scared people, let them not be afraid of an urban legend.

isthmus legend said...

The irony...

Mike Sylwester said...

When will the NYT do a fact-check article about the Clinton claim that Trump has caused an increase in school bullying?

Susan said...

All the news that's fit to fake.

How very truthy.

MD Greene said...

Before the election (in which I voted third party), I tried to think of which major candidate would do the least damage. I sorta came down on the side of Trump because the media would jump all over him the moment he put a foot wrong and that wouldn't happen with Clinton. But the Times isn't even waiting for Trump to DO anything. It's all hating on Trump -- his cabinet selection methods, his unannounced restaurant dinner, his fake affiliation with Nazis, and on and on and on -- all day every day.

These people have become deranged. It's sad to watch.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

That big red FAKE slapped on the "busing in protesters" tweet and link makes me wonder. Did the NYT ever tell us how the same protesters get to their disparate events -- BLM/Occupy/anti-WTO, anti-Trump, pro-illegal immigrant/pro-Socialism -- if not by bus? They are the same people. They are all part of A.N.S.W.E.R. and all have large illegal immigrant contingents. How are they formed? Who pays for the ads to bring them out and who pays them? Has any organization in the MSM showed ANY curiosity about these violent, menacing mobs?

Strange isn't it?

All the news that's fit to ignore.

Owen said...

Lost in a house of mirrors, all of them.

Lying is hard work. It gets exponentially harder as you try to protect the first lie, or overwrite it, with new lies. A bad feedback loop results and you will crash the whole system. Every time.

Why the gene for Bullshit Detection is highly conserved.

Sydney said...

How much fake news got through in the pre-internet days when people couldn't instantly fact check and propogate rebuttals?
The one that stands out for me is the story that George H.W. Bush was so out of touch he was amazed by a supermarket scanner. I didn't realize until years later, thanks to the internet, that the scanner that amazed him was one that could re-assemble the image on a torn up piece of paper. Not a supermarket price scanner.

Sydney said...

But the Times isn't even waiting for Trump to DO anything.
And the rest of the news media, too. Every week when I talk to my elderly mother she's outraged by some fresh new cabinet or staff member pick by Trump. I ask her who the equivalent cabinet member or staff member is in the Obama administration and she can't tell me.

MayBee said...

Isn't political "spin" just another name for fake news? I realize it's a matter of degrees, but still, much of it is lying.


This whole controversy seems absurd, though, just a few weeks after Rolling Stone was successfully sued for defamation in a fake story- a fake story that was lauded by other news organizations.
Which do you think impacted American life more- a fake rape story that named real people, or a guy driving down the street showing buses and saying they had carried protesters to Chicago?

MayBee said...

Do you all remember the 2008 election where a guy pretending to be a spokesman for the McCain campaign had a fake blog that was regularly quoted in the news saying negative things about McCain and Palin?
After the election, someone found out it was fake and everyone was like, "Oh, well".

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/arts/television/13hoax.html

Note this expose was *after* the election. But this is where the idea that Palin didn't know where Africa was came from.

Fernandinande said...

"Fake News" is a dog-whistle for "MSM". Or vice-versa.

http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/revealed-the-real-fake-news-list

chuck said...

Jeebus. Where is the story "Trump Grabs Alien Pussy"?

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Crazy Jane said...

These people have become deranged. It's sad to watch.

I agree. Pass the popcorn.

mccullough said...

Every story with an unnamed source is a fake story

Bruce Hayden said...

The whole purpose of this is to suppress alternative sources of information. The NYT had their infamous "narrative", too many people ignored it, and their candidate lost. They ignored it because they knew better, thanks to alternative media that would tell them the news that the NYT (etc) were studiously ignoring (such as, for example, that almost all of the violence during the campaign (and presumably since) was funded by Dem loyalists, and coordinated by the DNC and Crooked Hillary campaign). They would point at the violence and blame Trump and his supporters, ignoring the source. As they studiously did for pretty much anything else that might have caused anyone not to vote for her.

I don't think that the real target here is the "fake news" exactly, but rather getting the new media companies, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, etc., to censor information that conflicts with their official narrative. This is dicey though for those new media companies, because they could possibly run afoul of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which gives them a safe harbor against defamation, as long as they are considered Internet Service Providers, and not Internet Content Providers. But, too much editing, in the name of truthiness, could lose them this safe harbor. Also, they have good business reasons to steer away from this sort of management of the news, since, if caught (and some, like Twitter, have been), they could lose a large chunk of their business. I think that the purpose here is to convince these new media companies that it would be just fine to suppress the sort of "news" that the NYT (etc) refuse to cover, because it doesn't comport with their narrative.

Rick said...

NYT Fake News

studies suggest that as many as one in four women experience sexual assault at college.

Stepper said...

Kitty Genovese pleads for her life while 38 bystanders ignore her screams -- so how many years did it take before the NYT admitted that story wasn't completely true?

Unknown said...

Yawn. NYTDS.

n.n said...

TNYTPC

Bruce Hayden said...

studies suggest that as many as one in four women experience sexual assault at college.

The real falsity there was the elastic definition of "sexual assault" (and, yes, that the sampling was bad too...) If you define "sexual assault" to mean any unwanted touching, then, sure. One in four sounds completely legitimate, if not a bit low. If you get enough college kids liquored up together, some guy is going to touch some girl without her express permission. They are there to party, and the haze of alcohol makes this sort of thing inevitable. I suspect that often it is just the wrong guy touching them, not that they don't want to be touched at all. But, then, this statistic gets expanded through misuse to suggest that one in four is rape-raped. Of course 1 in 4 co-eds aren't actually raped, and the incidence of actual rape is significantly below that of other parts of the country for this age group. But, pointing that out wouldn't further the NYT narrative.

Brando said...

"The real falsity there was the elastic definition of "sexual assault" (and, yes, that the sampling was bad too...) If you define "sexual assault" to mean any unwanted touching, then, sure. One in four sounds completely legitimate, if not a bit low. If you get enough college kids liquored up together, some guy is going to touch some girl without her express permission."

That's exactly it. By that broad definition (any touching that was not wanted) can any of us (men and women) say for certain we never committed sexual assault by that definition? Do we always say "can I kiss you" before kissing our spouses, even? It's possible any of those times they were like "not really up for it but what the hell" and we'd never know either way.

It never should be lumped into the same category as say rape, or knowingly touching someone against their will. When we think of THOSE instances, and hear "one in four" it sounds like colleges are violent thunderdomes where no one is safe.

It also trivializes real victims when people go around saying "I'm a sexual assault survivor, this guy hugged me at a party and I didn't feel like being hugged".

MAJMike said...

Guess the NYT sees itself as the Chief of the "Bodyguard of Lies." The Truth they protect exists only in the minds of the LibCong.

Gospace said...

Brando said...
How much fake news got through in the pre-internet days when people couldn't instantly fact check and propogate rebuttals? I'm guessing quite a lot that we don't even know about.


Quite a lot of it. Teddy Kennedy appeared at a rally in Hackensack NY when I was younger, and along with some of my friends, I was there. According the Bergen Evening Record and other newspapers the next day, the crowd filled the square and was packed in, there were no protesters in sight, and the crowd was wildly enthusiastic. They were at a different rally then the half filled square I was in, where only the front row with their pre-made signs showed any enthusiasm, using the signs mostly to cover up the guy enthusiastically shouting (over and over) "Tell us about Chappaquiddick! Tell us about Chappaquiddick!" whenever the few televisions cameras pointed that way.

Today? MSM would probably still report it that way. The cell phone camera video would rapidly spread on facebook and anti-Kennedy blogs, and the truth would be out, labelled as misrepresentation and lies by the media. It's tough to control the narrative with lies about events today.

Alex said...

So are the protests organic or is Soros funding them?

JAORE said...

How Fake News Goes Viral:

Mostly by other news outlets quoting the New York Times.

Big Mike said...

Other than sports scores, is there anything published in the Times that isn't made up to some degree or another? At this point only the people who are deliberately gullible pay any attention to it.

viejo loco said...

The NYT is the very paradigm of "fake" news. They should change their front page motto for their pseudo-sophisticate,mono-lingual readers to "There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and no Izvestia in Pravda." I am sure the Russian Lavrov can explain.

viator said...

How are the people - NY Slimes, I'm talking about you - who specialize in fake news going to referee fake news?

Brando said...

"Other than sports scores, is there anything published in the Times that isn't made up to some degree or another? At this point only the people who are deliberately gullible pay any attention to it."

Sports scores will be the last to go, just as soon as there's a political benefit to a certain sports outcome.

Crimso said...

Some years ago (10?), I was discussing a recent event with a student of mine (a graduate student). He had heard nothing of this event, and I mentioned it had been all over the news. His reply: "The only news I watch is 'The Daily Show.'" So all of the sudden pearl-clutching over "fake" news looks like so much ass-hattery to those of us who have been paying attention for quite some time now.

readering said...

Let me hear from a commenter with a subscription to the NY Times please . . . .

cornroaster said...

The NYT also had an article today with a Wisconsin connection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/many-in-milwaukee-neighborhood-didnt-vote-and-dont-regret-it.html?_r=0

Just a couple of comments on the article:

1. The article stated, "Mr. Albrecht, of the election commission, said other factors contributed to the decline in turnout. This was the first general election under new state laws that required voters to produce an approved photo ID card, and that stiffened the requirements for new voters to prove their residence. This was particularly onerous for the poor, who move often.

Mr. Albrecht said he believed this change had cost several thousand people in the city their vote."

However, the NYT reporter, despite talking to a number of people in the area who did not vote, did not present a single case where the Voter ID law was a factor in preventing them from voting. I am sure that this would have been presented if anyone did state that the ID law kept them from the polls.

2. The article also said, "One exception was Justin Babar, who said he voted for Mr. Trump as a protest against Mrs. Clinton. He blamed her husband’s policies for putting him in prison for 20 years."

Isn't voting against Wisconsin law for a convicted felon? (I don't know.) If so, and this guy served 20 years, it sounds like a possible case of voter fraud in favor of Trump.

JaimeRoberto said...

Maybe if the NYT and others did some journalism to find out who is behind the protests there would be less room for fake news. Instead all I read is the passive voice "protests are planned".

Speaking of fake news, I'm willing to bet that much of the wave of hate crimes that's been reported lately is fake too.

Kurt Bermuda said...

What do the WWF and Huffington post have in common?

Peter said...

The New York Times is one of a number of media company that have two classes of stock, such that most owners have very limited voting rights. The Sulzbergers can, therefore, continue to control the New York Times with their super-voting shares, at least up to the point of bankruptcy. And who knows what a bankruptcy judge would do, if it ever comes to that?

Similar arrangements can be found at CBS and Viacom, and apparently Facebook is considering something similar.

The ability to sell shares in a publicly traded company while retaining control always seemed a strange loophole in corporate law, for why should those who own a majority of the company not have control? Nonetheless investors seem willing to buy such shares, and in any case many small shareholders who do have voting rights never vote their proxies anyway.

It might, however, explain why the New York Times seems willing to promote politics even when doing so may hurt profitability.

Dave in Tucson said...

Check out the bottom story on the left column. Still pushing the "Trump (and/or his followers) are literally Hitler" narrative, in spite of the fact that it didn't move the dial one whit during the election. They have learned nothing.

Also amusing on the bottom middle, "Only we get to say what a safe space is" (or alternately, "Only leftist snowflakes get to have safe spaces")

Michael Fitzgerald said...

Look up "alt-right" online. You will find one article from an economist in 2009, the next mention of this phenomenon is from MSNBC's Chris Hayes in December of 2015, and all others are from Spring/Summer/Fall 2016. You want fake news? You get democrat party media astroturfing fear and hatred to their party members. The alt-right is a figment of the depraved and vicious DNC propaganda machine.

MD Greene said...

We cancelled our 25-year NYT daily subscription recently, and all I miss are the word puzzles (which I can xerox at the library next door as long as I get there before the guy who steals the Sunday edition.)

The screeching got to be too much, even when I agreed with official POV. We now get daily delivery of a local Gannett daily, which isn't great but that still covers regional issues.

I can take news reports that break against my beliefs. That's life. What I can't abide is baked-in contempt for anyone who doesn't genuflect at the Sulzberger altar.


Goju said...

Trump called for a meeting with media celebs. It was funny watching them parade in looking like they were going to a free meal and Trump was going to lay out his media access. Trump roasted their asses. Called the lying assholes out for the lying assholes they are.

I am really getting to like Trump.