When I said we need to truth check you didn’t need to remind me it should be for both sides. Duh… You betrayed a bias. The election is over and we are talking about one man, who is uniquely egregious, not tit tat or equivalency any more. If you don’t know how egregious he is you are biased.
I say (Adaher) that MSNBC is journalism, and FOX news is not. They are both slanted but in different ways, and in response to different aims and goals. They are not the same.
Tonight MSNBC is covering Russian interference in the election in favor of Trump. If you want to know about it are you going to tune in to FOX to see…(More tertiary stage Clinton derangement)?
I suppose a person trying to be as balanced as you are might. I don’t see the intellectual honesty in this though.
Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Other countries have both democracy and rules about news. Hell, we even had rules about news, and we were no less democratic.
Not that the solution needs to be government controlled anyways (and won’t be as long as those who benefit from fake news are in power.) And, if it’s not government controlled, how does it even conceivably hurt democracy? We are the people, and we are trying to fight ignorance and fix the problem. We are participating in freedom of speech.
As for how we take advantage of this? The main lesson I learned is that anger sells. So use that. Find what makes conservatives angry, and then use that to put forth a liberal message.
We know the jobs thing is big, so report on how all these companies are firing people. Point out when it’s the conservatives who want a safe space. Point out how the Republicans are wasting tax money. Or how they are attacking Medicaid/Medicare. Point out that Republicans refuse the regulations that prevent illegal immigrants from getting work. Find a single Republican who refuses to stand for the flag, and push the shit out of that. Push the real conspiracies about government. Throw in how the alt-right is completely pro-life, and that they are trying to take over the Republican party. Show times when liberals are called racist, since apparently that’s a hot button.
In short, fight fire with fire, but make sure our fire actually has integrity, so that it has something their fire does not, and that we can continue to point to as to why it is superior.
That’s a side, and a side you revealed in your comments by bringing up Clinton when she’s no longer a thing. The election is over. Clinton lost. You say you accept that. So why are you still trying to find some hidden truth about her?
The mainstream media reported just as accurately about Trump as they did Clinton. That’s not to say they didn’t report some preliminary stories that turned out to be false–and that some of them weren’t obviously false with a bit of critical thinking.
But there was no bias on either side. That you instantly hear “fake news” and think “MSM hid stuff about Clinton” is a problem. The only stuff they “hid” was stuff that wasn’t true. It means you believed the fake news.
Clinton doesn’t have a seizure disorder, for example. That’s why the MSM didn’t report on it. That was fake.
Some people will believe anything regardless of political orientation. Remember the fake news about Palin? Whether her son was actually her grandson? (That’s still rumbling on!) McCain being infatuated with her? Etc? None of it stood up to scrutiny, of course, but Democrats lapped it up. Just do a search here for threads with Palin in the title (there are 278 of them).
One piece of fake news that was popular in the election was Trump’s supposed quote about “If I wanted to run for president, it would be as a republican. Those voters are so dumb they’ll believe anything.”
Something along those lines, anyway. Lots of lefties ate that up with a spoon.
Not all, anyhow the study linked early shows that there are still a good number of lefties that fail to do basic research.
That debunking that could not kill that meme among several lefties does point however to another clue on why fake news mushrooms among conservatives; very few conservative sources dare to debunk the fake news floating in their info sphere if they support their views.
That was clearly fake news. Clearly the statement attributed to Trump was the truth and when has that ever happened? He can’t handle the truth.
I don’t use dumb to talk about their intelligence though. A better way to say it is that they are so desperate to be right they’ll believe anything that reinforces that they are which of course is dumb. Understandable but dumb. Considering the barrage of negate things said about them I can really understand the motivation. I very much can. When people are under attack they double down. It’s what we do.
Are the Democrats the same way? Possibly. Get back to me when they elect as brazen a conman as Trump and I’ll let you know. I will note that for several years of Reagan and post Reagan the Republic had made the word liberal a toxic word and the foot was on the other hand so to speak and I don’t recall them acting this way but that was pre internet blogger days so who really can say?
I’m not talking about meaningless stuff like misquotes or falsely attributed quotes here. I mean plain out fabrication of false news narratives. That I’ve never seen before though I’m sure it’s not an unique occurance.
As with the case of the other item, sure, I do think some did fall for it but the point made early stands even more here; as it happens several left leaning sources also did debunk that one even if it accepting it was comforting to many left leaning people.
Now, any moment now we will see Breitbart and others debunk or put clarifications in fake stuff like this:
*
Any moment now…
(The fakery is not the temperature, but how they lie to their readers when they omit that what happens in winter does not change the overall trend seen of a warming planet. And Breitbart is omitting that. No matter how many times contrarians got it wrong, the Pravda of Trump and company repeats the same misleading lies that they made in the past.)
Exactly my view. I’m bothered by people who write comments online or call into CSPAN asserting things that can be shown to be false in less than five minutes with google. But are the ones who call or comment representative of the larger population or are they disproportionately active due to their outrage. But legal action to silence those voices would be worse.
Not a formal study but I found the election cycle interesting from a perspective of confirmation bias.
The real solution, not likely to happen, would be for everyone to fact check the things they hope are true as much as they fact check the things they hope are false.
Fake news, and how to end it’s influence. I would think that the solution would be obvious. “We the people” need a honest, open, non-biased, news media who are more interested in correctly reporting a story, than in being the first to report a story regardless of it’s accuracy.
If people want Facebook-accuracy (aka piss-poor) in their media reporting, they have plenty of options available. ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, ETC, ETC, ETC.
or
“We the People” can demand, yes demand, that their favorite news media actually act like responsible news agencies. We can demand that the media outlets supply the Who, What, Where, Why, and When of every news story they publish.
or not.
Fake news: How do Dems use this to their advantage? Seriously? They used it quite well to trash Bernie’s campaign. Unfortunately, it now appears that Hillary could have really used those extra voters.
To me what has been severely weakened and diluted is “real journalism”. I know it still exists, but over the last umpteen years all too frequently the money has gone elsewhere. People have moved away from reading newspapers and watching the news on TV, to getting their information online, and watching FOX/MSNBC, etc., who are a stew of news, slanted news, and opinion. This deliberate weakening of hard news and analysis has had the effect of poisoning the populace to the point that they can’t tell what is real, what is real but shoddy, and what is deliberately fake. Consequently, they mis-trust everything, even the truth. I really don’t blame anyone.
I don’t see it sorting itself out any time soon, but like Diogenes (the original, not the SDMB poster) I will continue to be on the lookout for “an honest man”.
I’ve read so many things since the election that I can’t keep the sources straight but this quote seems appropriate to the thread: When did fact checking become separated from journalism?
Well, we don’t always have time and some of it just doesn’t matter. I just heard today that the “I’d run as a Republican because Republicans are stupid” Trump thing didn’t happen. Not sure whether it did or not, but I don’t have the patience to find out for sure because it doesn’t really tell me anything about Trump I didn’t already know. Fact checking is only for stories that tell you something genuinely new. For example, I fact checked a story my wife linked to today about some kids in Nigeria who made a generator that runs on urine. That was worth looking into, and it is an example of lefty fake news. Right up there with all the other stories about how renewables are just so easy but the energy companies are engaged in a conspiracy to hide it from us.
There’s the Trump who says stupid things, and there is also the Trump who says the exact opposite. If Opposite Day Trump smart? Is that the guy that doesn’t believe that global warming is a hoax put up by the Chinese? Can we have him, instead?
Indeed, that is why we have professional experts, like doctors and lawyer and scientists and, yes, journalists. Once upon a time, we expected them to do the hard work of sorting the wheat from the chaff for us, to a great degree. But nowadays it is all the rage to claim that, because some small number of professionals aren’t 100% correct 100% of the time, then all professionals are always wrong 100% of the time. What a time to be alive!
“No less democratic” is a meaningless phrase, but the Supreme Court overturned the fairness doctrine for good reason. We have a first amendment for good reason. Those other countries that don’t have a first amendment are wrong, and I don’t want to live there.
Countries that have press regulations don’t trust the people. Sure, you can have a democracy without trusting the people, but what’s the point? Why did such countries ever become democratic in the first place? They should have just remained monarchies.
Journalists were never experts, they were just people who knew how to write well. Expecting other people to do your critical thinking for you is a recipe for being lied to. The truth is easier to access than ever before, but some people prefer comforting lies. That is a failing of human nature.