We are Living in the Disinformation Age

LOL at saying CNN is merely "biased"... yeah, to the point of colluding with the DNC to get Hillary elected. Fortunately, more and more of us are breaking away from the herd.
 
The DNC chair was an analyst for CNN and slipping Clinton debate questions.

That's more about DNC party politics shafting Bernie than CNN collusion or bias. One of the few actually revealing details from the email leaks.
Not coincidentally, one that cost jobs.
Nothing to do with fake news though.
 
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/.../?hootPostID=f335366474a7b13beea2001fd1f8cb97




It's so easy to plant a fake story. And if you're lucky, social media will spread it like wildfire in mere minutes.

Just as long as it's juicy enough and there are people wanting to believe it.

What's worse is even when fake news stories are caught, the correction rarely if ever gets the same level of attention as the fake story itself.

The disinformation lingers on. It can also cycle back into the news and a smaller version of itself takes effect.

CNN and MSNBC are the biggest fake news assholes there is
if you are listening to this you are literally sticking a muslim terrorist's dick in your wife
 
CNN and MSNBC are the biggest fake news assholes there is
if you are listening to this you are literally sticking a muslim terrorist's dick in your wife
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well we also live in the era where 99% all of knowledge that has been discovered by humans are on your smart phone.

But that only counts for .1% of the information available :D
 
It is a separate category because the mainstream media is held accountable for bullshitting. The NYT reporter who reported on Chalabi's statements was fired for not fact checking what she said.
They rely on reputation and advertising support.
The new media has no culpability what so ever, and relies entirely on pandering to preexisting bias in order to propagate disinformation. Not "negligent reporting", deliberately spreading disinformation.
Just look at what happened with Clinton emails and people retweeting nonsense while admitting they didn't even care to fact check it (or read it in many cases), because they didn't like Clinton.
This isn't something that is specific to America or this Election either.
The popularity of social media has given bullshit artists an audience they never could have reached before.

Comments on this trend aren't a new thing (at least, no newer than the trend itself).

http://time.com/4064698/social-media-propaganda/
http://www.internationalaffairs.org...cial-media-in-war-transparency-or-propaganda/
http://digiday.com/publishers/fake-news-site-national-report-public-service/
http://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-does-false-information-spread-online-25567
http://www.vice.com/read/only-you-can-stop-fake-news-from-spreading-on-the-internet
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/9/13/1419950/-Fake-news-is-a-plague-on-social-media
http://www.cracked.com/article_17318_7-clearly-fake-news-stories-that-fooled-mainstream-media.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-social-media-fake-news-20141202-column.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-flood-social-media-pro-Putin-propaganda.html
http://mashable.com/2014/07/22/propaganda-fake-social-media-accounts/#AA7S8frlskqD
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/russia-creates-social-media-propaganda-systems-313493

It's not really a second category.

1. Propaganda = Propaganda.

If anything the MSM holds much more clout and therefore bears much more responsibility for the ramifications of disinformation. Twitter and Facebook aren't to blame for 51% of Republicans, 32% of percent of Democrats, 46% of independents, 50% of people who watch Fox News, 41% percent of people who reported to watch CNN and 14% percent of MSNBC still believing Saddam had WMD.

2 . All of these outlets rely on advertising and reputation. I would guess that the reason we see so much alternative media is because that reputation has taken a huge, and well deserved hit.

This was not uniformly true of all media. Thus, while Fox continued to insinuate, a full year after the official end of warfare, that WMDs might still be found in Iraq, The New York Times ran the 9/11 commission report of 2004, which established that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, as front-page news. Finally, the media also had to respond to the anti-war movement whose arguments were vindicated in the aftermath of the war. The combination of three factors*/an avalanche of empirical evidence that threw war claims into question, the pressure of domestic and 64 D. Kumar international movements, and the emergence of skeptical official sources*/forced large sections of media to take a more adversarial role in order to maintain credibility. However, despite their best efforts, the public only seems to have grown more skeptical of the media. In the lead up to the war, even though close to 60 percent held mistaken views about the war, the remaining resisted the propaganda.80 A Zogby poll taken a month before the outbreak of war found that just over half of the population supported war, while a substantial 41 percent opposed it.81 The numbers against the war and occupation would increase as incidents like Abu Ghraib, as well as the various falsehoods, began to be revealed. It would appear that along with the rejection of war propaganda, there has been a growing distrust of the mainstream media. Since the start of the Iraq war, significant numbers of Americans began to rely on British media for information about the conflict.82 The audience for the BBC World News bulletins aired on PBS increased by almost 30 percent during the first weeks of the war, and the BBC’s website saw a dramatic increase in the number of Americans visiting the site. About 40 percent of The Guardian newspaper’s online readers are located in the United States. Christian Christensen concludes that this preference for British media is due to a growing gap between the public’s expectation of fair and accurate information and the American media’s failure to deliver. He adds that what seems to have disappointed Americans most of all is that the media have covered scandalous events in a ‘‘relatively timid and uncritical’’ way. This search for alternative sources of information is visible in another mediated sphere: web blogs. Over the first half of 2004, left-wing blogs experienced a significant increase in traffic.83 Matthew Klam explains that partisan blogs have seen this growth due to the public’s increased sense of crisis and the inability to tolerate the ‘‘oncesoothing voice of the nonideological press’’ (p. 45). However, as I have shown in this paper, the media are far from non-ideological. Additionally, it is important to note that it is not simply partisan blogs that are being sought after but left-wing blogs, i.e., those critical of the status quo. This trend is also visible in documentary films. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 drew millions and set a box office record for documentaries. The documentary Outfoxed, a critique of the Fox channel and an expose of its rightwing, pro-Republican bias, was originally intended to be sold as DVDs. However, after more than 50,000 copies were sold within the first ten days of its release, it began to be distributed in theatres.

Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War

If the media cared about "fake news" they would be better at their job. They shouldn't have to "rededicate" themselves to fundamental journalism, or "redouble their efforts to restore their credibility"

3. Firing Judith Miller isn't the same thing as the NYT being held accountable.

She was one reporter who was given carte blanche to spread propaganda under the umbrella of the world's most respected news publication. Not only was the damage already done, but she was just one of many shitty journalists during the buildup to the Iraq War and the NYT was one of many outlets encouraging the same. Outside of Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder (RIP), very few journalists or media outlets were even addressing the story with any journalistic integrity.In fact, not holding the MSM accountable is what allowed them to bury Bernie Sanders stories and promote Trump stories. That is why we're here, NOT "fake" news.

How about this statistic:
“From August 2002 until the war was launched in March of 2003 there were about 140 front page pieces in the Washington Post making the administration’s case for war,” says Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media critic. “But there was only a handful of stories that ran on the front page that made the opposite case. Or, if not making the opposite case, raised questions.”

Buying the War
Look at what happened to Phil Donahue. His show was cancelled for presenting a dissenting view.
 
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