Tag Archives: fake news

Reality Check

Reality Check: 3 Things You Need to Know About Sinclair News Anchors Parroting the Same Script

Video Leave a comment

There is a new video making the rounds of news anchors from Sinclair-owned TV stations, all saying the exact same thing.

All of them.

When you put the news anchor clips together, they are speaking in unison. So what is this video, why are these news anchors reading like drones, and is there a bigger issue here?

Let’s give it a Reality Check.

Next week we will break down the big picture, but today I want to show you the Sinclair news anchor clip and tell you what’s going on here in three main main points.

Before I get to my three points, let me say that I actually know some of the anchors in that video. Some work in Cincinnati for the the Sinclair station there. Others are in El Paso at the Sinclair station there. And some of those journalists, I have worked with before.

Okay, so point No. 1: So what is this video?

Well first, it’s not news. Clearly, this is a promotional segment which the stations are recording in order to express why they are unique. It is done everyday in local television stations.

What’s different about this promotional segment is that Sinclair clearly has one promotions director who is sending down the same copy to all its television stations. They seem to have thought that people in those markets would never know that anchors in multiple markets are reading the same thing. But thanks to the Internet, we know.

Point No. 2: this video is clearly evidence of the fact that these anchors from various markets are simply reading what they are told.

And that happens in every TV market in the country, every day.

Anchors have a job and that job is to sell the copy. But they are not allowed to change the copy. In fact, a friend of mine who works at one of those stations says that station management was required to have the script read, word-for-word, exactly how it was written. They couldn’t even substitute the word “hi” for “hello.”

Point No. 3: this video highlights the biggest problem with media consolidation.

When one company owns so many television stations, they have the ability to push messaging however they choose to vast parts of the country. Now, some people want to jump all over this because it’s Sinclair, which is seen seen as friendly to President Trump. But to raise the alarm over just Sinclair is disingenuous, because media consolidation has been happening for for years. And it’s not just Sinclair that controls messaging.

Next week, we’ll break down how local media consolidation is happening across America, and why decentralized media, thanks for cryptocurrency like Dash Digital Cash, is the answer.

That’s Reality Check. Let’s talk about that on Twitter and Facebook.

Government Accountability, Politics, US

New Project Aims to “Fact-Check the Fact-Checkers” Accused of Liberal Bias

Leave a comment

Reston, VA – With the rise of the term “fake news,” many individuals have turned to self-proclaimed fact-checking sites like Snopes and PolitiFact; the objectivity of these sites tends to be questioned by conservatives as having a covert liberal bias.

On Tuesday, the conservative Media Research Center unveiled a new project entitled “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers,” which is designed to “ensure the fact-checkers themselves are reliable, or exposed as liberal partisans if they aren’t.”

The Media Research Center explained in its announcement:

Sometimes you have to check the fact-checkers.

More and more, major news outlets are relying on “fact checkers” to, allegedly, ensure that the news is factual, sources are reliable, and statements are accurate.

In theory, this is admirable. In practice, it has proven to be simply another opportunity for the media to push their leftist agenda.

Fact checking groups — such as PolitiFact — routinely cast judgments while failing to disclose their own left-wing bias. Their allies in the media try to cast these groups as neutral third parties when, in fact, they are card-carrying members of the liberal echo chamber.

It’s no wonder that the public has so little faith in the fact-checkers. A 2016 Rasmussen poll found that an astonishing 62% of American voters think the fact-check-ers are biased.

The Media Research Center is flipping the script on these faux-fact-checkers. It’s time to turn the tables and give the public the real facts.

While Americans attempt to separate truth from propaganda, especially in regards to politics, some of these reportedly neutral third-party fact checkers— accused by conservatives of having a progressive bias— has left some consumers unsure of their reliability.

[RELATED: Brazil’s Largest Newspaper Abandons Facebook; Says News Feed is “Banning Professional Journalism”]

“In an era of ‘fake news’ and inaccurate reporting, it is important now more than ever that the fact-checkers themselves are exposed for their biases,” MRC President Brent Bozell said in a statement.

“MRC routinely finds instances when fact-checkers bend the truth or disproportionately target conservatives,” Bozell continued. “We are assigning our own rating to their judgments and will expose the worst offenders. Americans deserve the truth. There must be accountability across the board, and that includes these alleged arbiters of fact and fiction.”

Some of the purported “fact-checking” sites the project plans to monitor are PolitiFact, FactCheck, Snopes, Washington Post Fact Checker, AP Fact Check, and CNN Fact Check.

As previously reported at Truth In Media, Emmy-winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson held a recent Tedx talk at the University of Nevada, discussing the “fake news” narrative that gained tremendous discussion during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, saying that “the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign.”

While Attkisson acknowledged that fake news has long existed in various forms, she said that noticed something different taking root within U.S. mainstream media in 2016. Suspecting that the origins of this growing “fake news” narrative were less than organic, Attkisson began researching and said that she connected the origins of this phenomena to a decidedly progressive non-profit organization called “First Draft,” which, she notes, “appears to be the about the first to use ‘fake news’ in its modern context.”…

Upon investigation, Attkisson discovered that one of the major financial backers of First Draft’s anti-fake news coalition was none other than Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, was chaired by major Clinton supporter Eric Schmidt until Dec. 2017. Schmidt “offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft around the start of the election cycle,” Attkisson said. “Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her surrogate, David Brock of Media Matters, privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook to join the effort.”

To learn more about the rise of the “fake news” narrative, watch Attkisson’s enlightening TedxTalk below:

Featured, Gun Rights, US

CNN’s Chris Cuomo Retweets and Defends Bogus News Story

Leave a comment

On February 19th, CNN host Chris Cuomo retweeted an article, written by Cody Davis and published by The Tab, which bore the headline “I was able to buy an AR-15 in five minutes.”

In the 2-year-old article, Davis described a visit to a Virginia gun shop. He wrote that he approached an employee for assistance in picking out “something for home protection and target practice.” According to Davis, an employee later let him look at an AR-15 and obliged Davis’ request to take a photo of Davis with the weapon. Davis claimed that the employee didn’t notice that his license was expired and that he’d tried to share his drivers’ license renewal receipt, and was asked to provide his vehicle registration for verification. Later on, according to Davis:

After he walked me through the paperwork, all five pages of it, I told him I changed my mind and wanted to think more before I bought an AR-15. He told me it wasn’t a problem and listed the store hours if I wanted to come back. I then said thank you and walked back to my car.

Seconds. It took seconds for the salesman to take an AR-15 off the shelf and begin selling it to me. If I had stayed for maybe three minutes longer to fill out less paperwork than I did for the hiring process at my school’s bookstore, I would’ve driven home with an AR-15.

No delay. No extensive background check. Just my recently expired driver’s license, my vehicle registration, and filling out some paperwork.

The headline of Davis’ story claims that he was able to purchase an AR-15, but the content within the article itself revealed that he was not actually “able” to do so, due to his admission that he left the store without completing any paperwork that would have triggered a background check.

Days after Cuomo retweeted the article, backlash began to mount.

https://twitter.com/Chet_Cannon/status/966176686931959813

https://twitter.com/andyndelaney/status/966290309821927425

In response to National Review editor Charles Cooke, Cuomo claimed that his motivation for retweeting the article was to call attention to the man’s lack of identification and his belief that “the system should be better.”

https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/status/966281123348320257

Cuomo continued to respond to criticisms throughout the day.

Election, Government Accountability, Politics, US, Videos

Award-Winning Journalist Tackles Root of 2016’s “Fake News” Dilemma

Video Leave a comment

Las Vegas, NV— A recent Tedx talk given by Emmy-winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson at the University of Nevada examined the “fake news” narrative that took the U.S. by storm during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

While Attkisson acknowledged that fake news has long existed in various forms, she said that noticed something different taking root within U.S. mainstream media in 2016. Suspecting that the origins of this growing “fake news” narrative were less than organic, Attkisson began researching and said that she connected the origins of this phenomena to a non-profit organization called “First Draft,” which, she notes, “appears to be the about the first to use ‘fake news’ in its modern context.”

“On September 13, 2016, First Draft announced a partnership to tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news reports,” Attkisson said. “The goal was supposedly to separate wheat from chaff, to prevent unproven conspiracy talk from figuring prominently in internet searches. To relegate today’s version of the alien baby story to a special internet oblivion.”

First Draft was assembled back in June 2015, according to a report from Fortune. The coalition included Facebook, Twitter and 30 other news and tech companies.

Just a month later, then-President Barack Obama proclaimed “fake news” to be a threat.

“He insisted in a speech that he too thought somebody needed to step in and curate information of this wild, wild West media environment,” she said, pointing out that “nobody in the public had been clamoring for any such thing.”

Attkisson noted how quickly the topic of “fake news” came to dominate US mainstream media as if corporate media had received “marching orders.”

“Fake news, they insisted, was an imminent threat to American democracy,” Attkisson said, noting that “few themes arise in our environment organically.”

“What if the whole anti-fake news campaign was an effort on somebody’s part to keep us from seeing or believing certain websites and stories by controversializing them or labeling them as fake news?” Attkisson questioned.

Upon investigation, Attkisson discovered that one of the major financial backers of First Draft’s anti-fake news coalition was none other than Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, was chaired by major Clinton supporter Eric Schmidt until Dec. 2017. Schmidt “offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft around the start of the election cycle,” Attkisson said. “Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her surrogate, David Brock of Media Matters, privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook to join the effort.”

Attkisson noted that “the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign.” The award-winning journalist then explained that Trump accomplished a “hostile takeover” of the term. “Something happened that nobody expected. The anti-fake news campaign backfired. Each time advocates cried fake news, Donald Trump called them ‘fake news’ until he’d co-opted the term so completely that even those who [were] originally promoting it started running from it, including the Washington Post.”

Attkisson advised that “powerful interests might be trying to manipulate” perceptions of society. “When interests are working this hard to shape your opinion, their true goal might just be to add another layer between you and the truth,” Attkisson said.

h/t PJ Media

International, Social Media, Technology

Brazil’s Largest Newspaper Abandons Facebook; Says News Feed is “Banning Professional Journalism”

Leave a comment

São Paulo, Brazil— The largest newspaper in Brazil, Folha de S Paulo, announced late last week that due to Facebook’s recent changes to their news feed algorithm resulting in what the paper claims is “effectively banning professional journalism,” it would cease publishing content on the social media platform.

The Guardian reported that the popular Brazilian newspaper has an online and print subscription base of nearly 285,000 subscribers and had roughly 204 million page impressions last December, according to the Communication Verification Institute, a non-profit media auditor. The company’s Facebook page has nearly 6 million Facebook followers.

The executive editor of Fohla, Sérgio Dávila, told The Guardian that the paper’s decision reflected “the declining importance of Facebook to our readers,” but added that the recent algorithm changes to Facebook’s Newsfeed had precipitated the decision. The paper claimed the new algorithm “privilege[s] personal interaction contents, to the detriment of those distributed by companies, such as those that produce professional journalism.”

Only weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, announced that the company would be changing the algorithm used to determine what shows up in an individual’s Newsfeed to prioritize “meaningful social interactions” and posts by friends, and “trusted” news sources.

Folha noted that the choice to abandon Facebook was “a reflection of internal discussions about the best ways to get the content of the newspaper to reach its readers. The disadvantages of using Facebook as a path to this distribution became more evident after the social network’s decision to reduce the visibility of professional journalism on its users’ pages.”

A separate report in Folha noted that the newspaper’s own analysis found that “fake news pages received five times the number of engagements that professional journalism received” during the month of January.

“This reinforces the tendency of the user to consume more and more content with which it has affinity, favoring the creation of bubbles of opinions and convictions, and the propagation of fake news,” Folha argued. “These problems have been aggravated in recent years by the mass distribution of deliberately false content…as happened in the U.S. presidential election in 2016.”

“In effectively banning professional journalism from its pages in favor of personal content and opening space for ‘fake news’ to proliferate, Facebook became inhospitable terrain for those who want to offer quality content like ours,” Dávila told the Guardian.

There has been widespread concern among civil libertarians, and independent media, about the continuing use of algorithms that effectively soft-censors content that includes controversial ideas or dissent.

Brazil is the third biggest market in the world for Facebook, with roughly 130 million users, according to statistics portal Statista.