Washington Post story (12/31/16) with revised headline and a never-mind editor’s note. Is this “fake news”?
The putative scourge of “fake news” has been one of the most pervasive post-election media narratives. The general thrust goes like this: A torrent of fake news swept the internet, damaging Hillary Clinton and possibly leading to a Donald Trump victory.
A primary problem with this convenient-to-some narrative is that “fake news” has yet to be clearly defined by anyone. Vaguely conceptualized as misleading or outright fabricated stories, it can mean anything—as FAIR has noted previously (12/1/16)—from outlets that align with “Russian viewpoints” to foreign spam.
A recent series of events further illustrates this ambiguity. Friday night, the Washington Post (12/30/16) published an explosive report about Russian hackers breaking into a Vermont utility company. The headline splashed all over social media:
Russian Hackers Penetrated US Electricity Grid Through a Utility in Vermont, Officials Say
Quickly, the blockbuster story began to fall apart, after Burlington Electric, the utility in question, issued a statement saying they had “detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to [their] organization’s grid systems.” The Post “updated” the story several times throughout the evening, eventually adding a heavily qualified editor’s note that the only cause for concern was some “Russian code” on a laptop of one of the employees. There was no evidence of a hack or an attempted hack, Russian or otherwise.
Two days later, after the story was walked back several times, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell linked to it in a story about cybersecurity issues facing the incoming Trump administration:
After FAIR and others pointed out the error, Rampell’s article was changed, but this episode shows how quickly an entirely bogus premise—that Russia had hacked, or even attempted to hack, an American public utility—can spread without an ounce of skepticism. At the time her column was published, the only “evidence” of an “attempted” Russian hack was some malware code that could have been used by anybody. Rampell, likely influenced by the initial erroneous reporting by her colleagues, made an assumption that this was evidence of an “attempted hack,” a false assumption debunked by the Post itself (1/2/16) two hours after she published. In all cases, everything is rounded up to the most sensational, most Cold War–panic inducing conclusion. “Mistakes” rarely, if ever, happen in favor of less hysteria.
John McCain’s Washington Post op-ed (12/22/16) failed to acknowledge that, according to the Post (6/12/15), the CIA has done a billion dollars a year worth of “nothing” in Syria.
In a separate instance, the Washington Post (12/22/16) ran a column by Sen. John McCain insisting that the United States had “done nothing” in Syria. Had McCain’s editors, again, bothered to read their own paper, they would see that the Post (6/12/15) reported that the CIA has spent up to $1 billion a year on the Syrian opposition, or roughly $1 out of every $15 dollars the agency spends.
This wasn’t merely a difference of opinion; it was a clear, black-and-white falsehood—not only had the US not “done nothing,” it had, by any objective metric, done quite a bit. Even opinion columns can be factchecked; that this one wasn’t, on its most basic premise, suggests that when it comes to fanning the New Cold War—especially on its hottest front in Syria—the Washington Post has lowered its editorial standards to tabloid levels.
All this highlights the problem with limiting the criticism of misinformation to low-rent content farms in Macedonia, as the “fake news” narrative so often does, while inoculating traditional outlets from the charge without a discernible reason to do so.
University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci—whose November New York Times column (11/15/16) helped kick off the latest round of concern over fake news—objected to this counter-objection: “There is no, and never was, ‘perfect news,’” she tweeted. “Pls stop referring to every mode of failure of news as ‘fake news.’ Conflation is not analysis.” When security researcher Marcy Wheeler pushed back by insisting that what the Post had done was, by its own criteria, fake news, Tufekci doubled down:
@emptywheel Dumb, opportunistic jumping at sensational story. Newsroom economics. Retracted. Still not “Hmm, how about Pope Endorses Trump”.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) January 3, 2017
The issue, of course, is not whether the Washington Post engages in the same proportion of fake news as the trollhole websites in question; it’s that when its news is fake, it has a far more significant effect. The Post is still read by far more people than fringe websites, and its reporting is met with far more credulity. It is also assumed that mistakes by the the Post are done entirely in good faith, with no consideration for political or editorial pressure to find dirt on America’s current No. 1 enemy, Russia.
But Tufekci and others have carved out such a narrow definition of “fake news” that it excludes anything emanating from establishment news sources. Indeed, when pressed on this point, Tufekci insisted “traditional media” could not, by definition, engage in fake news:
@adamjohnsonNYC @emptywheel It fails in different ways than what got called “fake news” does. It can fail horribly. But not same. That’s it.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) January 3, 2017
The Post’s misleading and sometimes outright false reporting on matters related to Russia are dismissed as simply “newsroom economics,” and no ill will or political incentive or ideology is ascribed. Because, we—The Good American Traditional Media—don’t do those types of things. A “fake news phenomenon” that cannot, by definition, include mainstream media is a power-serving tautology that shields US corporate media from scrutiny and encourages citizens to simply trust some outlets (we’ll tell you which ones) rather than think critically.
A recent YouGov poll showed a shocking 46 percent of Trump supporters believed the “pizzagate” scandal—a bizarre conspiracy spread on 4Chan and Infowars about Clinton’s campaign manager running a child sex ring out of a DC pizza parlor. This led, justifiably, to widespread mockery and hand-wringing over fake news by the pundit classes.
But most missed that the same poll found that 50 percent of Clinton supporters believed the Russian government had tampered directly with vote tallies—as in, Putin agents directly manipulated election results. While these fears are based, at least in part, on actual (though still unproven) assertions by US intelligence that Russian hackers leaked unflattering DNC emails in an effort to influence the election, the idea that Russia actually hacked the voting process itself is an ungrounded conspiracy theory, and one the White House has repeatedly insisted didn’t happen. But where, one may ask, did 50 percent of Clinton supporters get the idea Russia hacked the election?
Corporate media continue to refer to the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC (and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta) emails as “election hacking,” giving readers the distinct impression the Russians, well, hacked the election. This wildly misleading framing is augmented by a network of pro-Clinton pundits who, in the wake of the election, spent weeks fanning theories that the machines were tampered with.
Fake news, to the extent it is a menace, ought to be measured by how badly it pollutes with misinformation. Given the number of people who think Russia is literally overturning vote totals, this meme and those who spread it certainly fits the description. But it doesn’t get the label that treats it as a serious problem, because “fake news”—in effect, if not by design—includes everyone and everything except US corporate media.
h/t Nima Shirazi
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
The Washington Post has completely destroyed their credibility. What little they had.
You want fake news?
“Singular Corpress ‘Agenda’ Is to ‘Speak Truth to Power'”
There is no such thing as “Russian code”, just as there is no such thing as “English code”. No executing computer program is written in any human-spoken language. All computer programs are written in specially designed computer programming languages, such as Java, C, Fortran, Python, or any of hundreds of other languages. These so-called “high level” languages contain words from spoken “natural” languages, such as “if”, “else”, “do while”, “return”, and many more. But computer source code is translated – “compiled” is the technical term – into machine language, which is the computer’s “native” language, which can be loaded into a computer and executed by its central processing unit. Once the human-readable code has been compiled, there is no trace of it in the resulting machine code, the “binary code”. There is no “if”, no “else”, no “while”, no “select”, no “break”, none whatsoever of the natural-language words that programmers use to create the source code.
Now, it is definitely possible to insert into a computer program a sequence of bytes which represent the characters of some natural language. You can thus insert any string of characters for any human language, including English and Russian, into any computer program. But the bytes which represent those characters are not translated into machine-executable code; they remain as data which can be read, manipulated, combined, extracted, and displayed by the program itself on a screen as English or Russian text.
Which raises another question: why would a nefarious Russian government hacker deliberately insert strings of Russian characters into a piece of malware, thus deliberately leaving such an obvious “fingerprint” calling attention to the Russian government? It seems much more likely that this whole thing is a “false flag” operation engineered by the CIA, NSA, or some other intelligence/security/spy agency – a crude act of provocation, giving the Obama administration another excuse to ramp up its attack on Russia and Putin.
I think that there is a significant problem with climate change, not because I have personally analyzed the primary data, but because of the fact that nearly EVERY reputable domestic and international scientific group has concluded that the problem exists. The only exceptions are a relatively tiny number of individuals.
Similarly, I have not seen the code in question, but again, most of the organizations most qualified to make the determination of Russian involvement seem to have done so – following a record of warnings for at least a decade. Add to that fact that the individuals that work at intelligence/security/spy organizations tend to be reliably GOP aligned – there seems to be a reasonably good reason for concern.
They “seem” to have done so – says who? Those who are issuing the warnings, that’s who – without producing a single piece of evidence that could be verified. What makes them “experts”? The fact that persons (mostly anonymous) are telling us that they are experts. Then there are certain individuals such as James Clapper, who is already well-known for outright lying to Congress when he denied that the NSA is spying on all Americans. After all, it follows a “record of warnings for at least a decade”. So these “GOP aligned” persons are sure to be reliable – why? Well, because it’s those GOP people who are the ones that work at these agencies, and who issue these warnings, so they are obviously the ones who would know.
This line of thinking is one big circular obfuscation. It’s a case of willful blindness feeding upon itself. And – to repeat – even if you had seen “the code in question”, all you would see is a bunch machine-language instructions, such as “increment register 1”, or “branch on condition code = 1”., or “shift left logical”. Nothing “Russian” about any of that.
Climate change has been reported on by private groups and researchers not affiliated with the government in many locations over many years. There is also evidence for climate change that’s been reported in the form of empirical data–temperatures, loss of arctic shelf, rising sea levels. Stuff that isn’t debatable. Stuff where laypeople can see the trends
The reason “everyone” is reporting that “most organizations seem to conclude Russians phished the DNC and Podesta” can be traced back to Hillary Clinton’s claim that “17 intelligence agencies have found…” Those 17 agencies together make up the USIC, but do you really think the Department or Energy and the DEA looked into the matter? Do you think the Marine Corps got involved? No, but the head of those agencies is the one who issues the report and he speaks for all 17 agencies–that’s where that claim came from.
From Politifact (who rated this claim TRUE despite the following)
***The statement added that the recent hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.”
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said.
The 17 separate agencies did not independently declare Russia the perpetrator behind the hacks. Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that this cuts against Clinton’s point, saying, “It is unlikely that all 16 of the agencies had looked independently at the Russian connection, which is what Clinton seemed to indicate.” (Cheung said 16 agencies because he omitted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from his count.)
However, as the head of the 17-agency intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by James Clapper, speaks on behalf of the group.***
“Consistent with the methods?” It was a garden-variety phishing scam. “Scope and sensitivity?” Podesta lost his phone in a cab and typed his password (p@ssw0rd) into a malware site. Just because the code looks like it was created by Russians doesn’t mean the Russian government ordered a hack. Today the FBI admitted to Buzzfeed that they ever examined the “allegedly hacked” DNC server, they just took the words of Crowdstrike–a security firm who was on the DNC payroll and so not exactly agenda-free.
The reality is that the DNC was committing ethics violations and it easily could have been a disgruntled staffer who leaked the emails. There were multiple sets of rich donor credit card info in the leaks, yet none of those people came forward to say their credit cards were used fraudulently. Seems like high-level Russian hackers might have sold that info, whereas a DNC staffer just trying to whistleblow would not have wanted to harm the donors, just those like Wasserman-Schultz and Brazile who were violating the DNC charter.
But whatever. Believe what you want to believe. You either weren’t around for all of the newspapers reporting on the non-existent WMDs before the Iraq War or you care more about being a sheep and trusting your government than you care about the lives of Syrians and Russians who will die under our bombs if we go to war over this BS.
I always as the question from me and all computer experts. Why we can’t stop hacking?
Anybody can answer Because it’s affecting our life now. It’s changing the world and leading to wrong way. Why Rusian Hackers are so famouse?
3 different private security firms have said it was the Russians. A slew of expert such as Thomas Rid have said it was the Russians.
When we already had Lie, Prevarication and Falsehood, do we really need Fake News?
Were the mass media making Fake News when they “reported” the murder, by Iraqi soldiers, of babies in incubators, in Kuwait City, per perjured testimony before Congress, prior to the first Gulf War? Were the phony reports about endangered medical students in Grenada that conveniently lead to the US invasion, an act described by the United Nations called a “flagrant violation of international law,” Fake News, as well?
WMDs? The military “necessity” to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities? The sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor? The North Korean attack on the USS Pueblo, in “international waters?” In the United States, the use of Fake News spans centuries. Feces by any other name still stinks.
The Washington Post and Amazon have common ownership. What you see is what you get.
I see a distinction between bad journalism, which, in this case, was based on reality (Russian malware being present on a computer) and completely fabricated news (Pope Endorses Trump). Bad journalism, even at a respectable publication, can be just as bad if not worse than fake news. It can be worse because so many more people read “real” news sites. It also erodes our trust in the free press.
But I believe intent is an important distinction. It’s like someone dying as a result of someone else’s actions: was it 1st degree murder, or an accident? You could say it doesn’t really matter, because the dead person is dead regardless of intent, but it matters on other levels.
I hope those responsible for this are punished in a fitting way.
Ever since the beginning of time, people have been making up stories, inventing sources, being sloppy, etc. Why ever believe anything ever again? Unfortunately, we rely on the 4th Estate to question authority and disseminate the information to us. We should find sources we trust, knowing that they are human and may make mistakes, but more often than not, are good at what they’re being paid to do.
Pizzagate is similarly “based on reality”, afaik, some emails, a whole bunch of pedophilia rings, and a bunch of weird ass art. It is worse in that it is more elaborate and relies of a sort of mysticism more. But is is the same in its eagerness to misconstrue facts. On that aspect, i think your more positive opinion is merely due to familiarity.
I probably should have been more careful with implying equivalence, they’re not equivalent.. Pizzagate is more .. deranged.. and the claims pull emotional strings much more.
Rule of thumb: Every sociopath knows that half a lie works better than a whole one.
Not necessarily. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s master propagandist, admitted: “If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better.”. And: “This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.”. And: “the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.” And:”The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
In other words: use a steam roller approach to eliminate any possibility of critical thought, or any thought at all. This is what we are being subjected to, over and over, by the mass media. It’s like a scorched-earth policy applied to the collective mind of the populace.
One extreme is believing everything the mainstream media reports is unbiased and infallible; the other is comparing them to Hitler and Goebbels…
You can give up on your asinine debating points.
Don’t bother informing me that they and the U.S. government haven’t killed 6 million Jews, and that they haven’t instigated a world war.
But do recall: in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) the U.S. did kill about 4 to 5 million people. And we are getting ready for the next world war, with Obama’s buildup of troops on Russia’s border, his military “Pivot to the Pacific”, and his call for a trillion dollar military buildup over the next 30 years. Now Trump is advocating a big nuclear weapons expansion. A new world war is now openly discussed in the elite military/intelligence/policy journals.
IN THEIR PROPAGANDA EFFORTS, the government and the media are following Goebbels’ playbook: lie, lie big, at keep at it.
I think your comparison of Hitler’s propoganda efforts to a perceived collusion between the U.S. gov’t and certain media is asinine, so I guess we are at an impasse, especially now that ad hominem logical fallacy has shown up.
Who published the Pentagon Papers? Who reported on the My Lai massacre?
sumwunyumaynotno, I think that you’ve just been called an “ad hominem logical fallacy,” but I don’t think that you really are.
Goebbels, after all, got his PhD from Heidelberg University, so he was better educated than most of the incoming administration’s posse.
You didn’t seem to draw comparisons among the historical individuals involved, just the methods they used to turn what had been considered one of the most educated, cultural and civilized countries in the world into a snake-pit of violence–encouraged by the political leaders, xenophobia resulting in mob violence against immigrants (also encouraged by those same leaders) and an economy based on capitalism partnered with the armaments manufacturers that led to the military machine that attacked numerous countries (none of which had attacked Germany) bringing death to millions all over the world. World War II saw 50,000,000 dead.
If one wrote a factual play for puppets so that no historical figures were used, I can imagine many in the audience would have any easy time seeing parallels, whatever conclusions each person might ultimately reach.
to EC:
The publication of the Pentagon Papers and the expose of the My Lai massacre occurred over 45 years ago. Things have changed since then. Nowadays, the NYT explicitly defends its right NOT to publish. It delayed publishing an article in 2004 until after the presidential election in order not to embarass George W. Bush. See http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/11/01/kell-n01.html and http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/30/gree-m30.html for some details.
Even if similar revelations were to be published today (the Times did publish some Edward Snowden info), that would not change the fact that the NYT and all mainstream media uncritically report the U.S. government denunciations of alleged Russian hacking as if they were established fact. And yet, not a single shred of evidence has been presented to the public to substantiate that claim – just some bullshit insinuation. As I pointed out in my first post, there is no such thing as “Russian code”. It’s mass repetition of the same simple formulas – and that’s why the comparison to Goebbels is appropriate. There is nothing ad hominem about that.
No Body sure that what happened and what is going on. Everybody saying that Rusian hackers played a role in US elections. I am sure the problem exists. There are several things that showing up the involvement of Rusian Hackers.
It’s True that mostly Clinton supporting blaming to Rusian hackers to victory of Trump.
WaPo=fake news
I agree with you. “WaPo=fake news”
Don’t know why this is happening? Just for Money? How badly playing with human
So if WaPo reports that Trump is the President-elect, does that mean that he is not? No? Then WaPo clearly does not equal fake news.
What motive would the Russians have in trying to swing the US election? Rex Tillerson as SOS? Paul Monteforte before that? To me the potential motives add greatly to the weight of the evidence, just as they would in a criminal case.
Look at the headlines/stories and related history of the WaPo, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, and many more — since this nationwide WMD Hoax began. Look at the tape of Van Jones asking why nothing was being done about Russian interference in our elections on the very night of the election (when he knew they were going to lose). It is absolute, premeditated collusion. One of their main goals is not to fight against Fake News. Instead, they seek to, eventually, control all news — so that their is only (their) Fake News. The evolution: from Total Information Awareness to Total Information Control.
Correction: One of their main goals is not to fight against Fake News. Instead, they seek to, eventually, control all news — so that there is only (their) Fake News. The evolution: from Total Information Awareness to Total Information Control. (Further, all of this wholly relates to another Regime Change target. Fake News, Election Tampering, etc., all follow the same WMDs template.)
Curious: Where does everyone get their unfake news from? Which media are considered reliable to you?
http://www.wsws.org
Let me clarify…what media do you trust that actually goes out and gathers information, interviews people, attends hearings and meetings, etc. The site you listed provides commentary on news that other have gathered.
The WSWS is mostly a site for commentary, analysis, and criticism. Their sources are primarily mainstream ones, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times of London, the information ministries and government agencies of countries such as Russia, China, Canada, France, Germany, Brazil, Australia, and many others (including the U.S.). That does not mean that they automatically accept everything from those sources as the unvarnished truth. Neither do I. Evaluation requires some knowledge of history and logic. It does not come easily. No site, including WSWS, should be simply “trusted”.
Also, if you spent more than two minutes skimming that website, you would notice that they often DO their own news gathering, attend meetings, and perform interviews. But the information they provide is not to be found in any of those conventional news organizations. Also, the website offers what I consider some very astute film reviews and criticism.
Independent outlets that are NOT funded by (i.e. beholden to) government, corporations or foundations with ties to special interests.
I was referring to sum’s characterization of my reply as “asinine.” That is an ad hominem attack. It’s a logical fallacy because it Is an attack on the person rather than actually addressing my point.
You’re now comparing an administration that has yet to take office to one that was partially responsible for the deaths of 50,000,000. I don’t see the logic in that either.
If you’re responding to my comment to sumwunyumaynotno, I assure you that I do not see the incoming administration as anything but a furtherance of the neo-liberal domestic policies and the neo-conservative overseas imperial adventures through which we have lived from the Reagan administration straight through each subsequent one, Republican and Democratic, until the King of Drones hands over the scepter and crown to our next Dear Leader, later this month.
Trump isn’t starting anything; he’s simply less subtle in continuing the march to a multinational feudalism. Hillary would have kept moving the country down the same road, but she would have blamed it on the Russians, as she proclaimed a new no-fly zone in the next place oil was discovered. And I sincerely hope that our world wars have ended, with two–but the trillion dollar effort to “modernize” and miniaturize a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons, pushed by Obama, will be part of the Legacy over which our new President will preside. What sane person would find any of this history to be good news?
The parallels relate to a dying empire, desperately trying everything ethical and otherwise, to maintain its power in the world. All of this is done at the direction of or, at a minimum, with the approval of the power elite. I don’t expect that you will see the logic in this, either.
The dictionary definition of asinine, “foolish, unintelligent, or silly; stupid” can apply to a person, or an argument,, a speech, an assertion, an act. It’s not a “logical fallacy”, no matter how incorrect or unjustified it may be in any given situation. It’s not “logical” or “illogical”, because it doesn’t claim to “follow from” anything. In some cases, it’s justified; in some its not. In your situation, I do believe it applies, but you don’t have to accept that. You can forget it.
However, my own opinion of what you are is confirmed by your second remark. What I said about Trump is that he openly advocates the expansion of the nuclear arsenal. I did not equate him with Hitler or Nazi Germany. That is your own contribution to the discussion. But just re-read what I put IN BOLD CHARACTERS in my previous post, hoping that the words in upper-case letters might help you in taking note of what I really intend to say – which is, (for about the third time now) that the current “crisis” about alleged Russian hacking is a propaganda campaign which is quite in tune with what Goebbels himself recommended. It doesn’t mean that any of the persons putting forth such deception are on the same moral level of Goebbels. (Some of them might, however, since they are putting into practice his favored strategy of deception, one that did in fact lead to catastrophic consequences).
Get it?
Your comments are great, sumwunyumaynotno.
Thank you for explaining some of the programming inner workings (I never got beyond Pascal :-), which confirms my suspicions about the DNC’s crude attempt at blaming their defeat on some wicked third party. Not to mention their gall, with the US both openly and covertly meddling in elections in countless foreign countries. Hear, hear, the pot is blaming the kettle !
Dear EC, the fact that someone terms some opinion of yours asinine (quite a sweet term in fact, provided you like donkeys), does not mean that he/she calls YOU asinine, while only that would be an ad hominem attack. In other matters you might be a superbly intelligent person ?
So brush up your Latin before getting offended irrationally.
Dear Adam Johnson,
Are you kidding? You make many good points in this piece, but the point you quoted by Zeynep Tufekci is also valid and draws attention to an enormous problem with your thesis: “conflation is not analysis”. Yes, there are often problems with news reporting at mainstream journalistic outlets, and this particular indicent made the Washington Post look especially bad, as have other incidents at other news outlets which you rightly criticize. But no, the buzzword “fake news” does not mean whatever you want it to mean. It is not an equally accurate description of the WaPo and clickbait websites from Macedonia or Russian troll-farms! Although that surely is EXACTLY what President-Elect Donald Trump, in his quest to erode the general public’s sensitivity to the distinction between fact and fiction, would like everyone to believe. Are you seriously not aware that you are amplifying Trump’s propaganda with your rhetoric? Is that what you want to do?
The WaPo has its faults, but look at the big picture: you will never get the kind of investigative reporting that David Fahrenthold did on the Trump Foundation from a Russian troll farm, and that is exactly why Trump would love to reduce the credibility of the former to that of the latter in the public imagination. I also disagree with the basic premise, stated in your piece without justification, that the important issue is the impact that the WaPo’s reporting has in comparison to more obscure websites. No: the important issue is that the WaPo is an actual newspaper produced by actual journalists who attempt — even if they don’t always succeed — to find the truth and report it. It has nothing to do with obscure websites that claim to present “news” but engage in no actual journalism, instead fabricating stories and putting sensationalistic headlines on other outlets’ stories for no other purpose than making money and/or spreading propaganda. You simply cannot compare that with what actual journalists (including the Washington Post) do.
I find this piece to be sadly representative of a certain “gotcha” attitude that I see in a lot of FAIR’s rhetoric: evidently FAIR finds it more important to score points with its “we outsiders are better than the mainstream” attitude than to look honestly at the big picture. I used to find this attitude mildly annoying, but in cases like this, I think it is concretely harmful.
Well said
EC and Chris, you’ve found each other! Two righteous souls fighting for the Washington Post!
You should get together for a morning of drinking coffee, reading the Sunday New York Times and Washington Post (two of our most “actual” newspapers), and swapping theories about how the Russians have elected Trump with the help of such stooges as FAIR. Afterwards, you can light a candle at your Hillary shrine, and get on line to highlight logical fallacies while straightening out the benighted fools on FAIR, with cogent comments.
The assertion that the Post and Times “attempt — even if they don’t always succeed — to find the truth and report it,” is made without a scintilla of evidence. And we are talking of two of the most quoted and respected print news institutions in the country–the primary reason that they should be held to the highest standards of journalism–and their continual failure to do so, resulting in public apathy or ignorance, while the power elite run roughshod over the people and the planet. Do you not know…or not care?
Whenever anyone accuses another of “gotcha” anything, I can’t help thinking that some guilty child has been found out and is looking to blame the family dog, a passing hobo or Vladimir Putin for the situation. And talk about Conflation! Every cited criticism of the Post is viewed as a strategy of Trump–a tactic that makes taking issue with the mainstream media of necessity an endorsement of the Trump administration. Hillary should be delighted with what she’s unleashed.
Well said, indeed!
Steve, while it would be possible to give a reasoned response to every point you’ve just raised, the tone of your comment communicates that you are not interested in that, so I will not bother.
The mainstream media and fact checkers are just liars trying to manipulate you. Congratulations, you are now a bedfellow of Trump and Limbaugh.
Other than that, I will agree with Chris and not engage with your rhetoric and the echo chamber that is this comments section.
The mission of the CIA is covert activity. That means THEY LIE! They’re responsible for destabilizing the Middle East into the mess there now. They pissed off Assad and drove him straight to the Russian’s with their American colonialism. They’ve toppled many regimes, creating worse situations in those countries and rampant hatred of America. Remember Iran-Contra and Laos?
WHY would any responsible news organization focus on the MESSENGER – when they exposed THE TRUTH OUR OWN GOVERNMENT KEPT FROM US ILLEGALLY?
Obama and company are simply out of control. They cannot accept their REJECTION BY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, so have to create a crisis to once again playin the emotions of the country. OBAMA IS A LIAR, FOLKS. How many times does it have to be shown?
Finally, do you REALLY THINK WE DON’T HACK RUSSIA AND EVERY OTHER COUNTRY THE EXACT SAME?
This isn’t about security – it’s about horrible leadership at the very top. A president who colluded in election fraud, continues to obstruct justice to prevent Hillary being tried FOR TREASON, election fraud, money laundering and other corruption – along with the people at the DNC who committed crime after crime in a conspiracy to strip a rightful candidate of the party nomination and anoint Hillary instead.
WAKE THE HELL UP AMERICA! We CANNOT believe our government on ANYTHING given the long wretched trail of lies and deceit. Fostered by Obama and company. What’s worse for me is I was a Democrat for 36 years and voted for the narcissist twice. – The second time to prevent a Palin VP, but still a vote from what history will show to be THE MOST DUPLICITOUS PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY. The saddest part of that is that it’s based on his narcissism as opposed to his office.