SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
From Breitbart:
Another day, another very fake news story from the network President Donald Trump has identified as "very fake news."
CNN's Thomas Frank on Thursday evening published what would have been considered an explosive report if remotely true: One anonymous source told him both the Treasury Department and Senate Intelligence Committee are probing a Russian investment fund with ties to several senior finance world leaders close to President Trump. Only problem? Both Trump administration officials and those close to Senate GOP leadership say it's simply untrue.
The retraction from CNN:
On June 22, 2017, CNN.com published a story connecting Anthony Scaramucci with investigations into the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
That story did not meet CNN's editorial standards and has been retracted. Links to the story have been disabled. CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.
According to BuzzFeed News, CNN has responded by actually requiring executives to review stories:
CNN is imposing strict new publishing restrictions for online articles involving Russia after the network deleted a story and then issued a retraction late Friday, according to an internal email obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The email went out at 11:21 a.m. on Saturday from Rich Barbieri, the CNNMoney executive editor, saying "No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me and Jason," a CNN vice president.
At least now we'll know who to blame.
[Ed Note: I debated leaving this in politics or dropping it to the main page. I opted for the latter because politics or not, the prevalence of "fake news" is one that we deal with on a daily basis from our respective social media feeds to all the major broadcast and cable news networks. How are we to tell what is "fake" and what is actually (relatively) "true"? The main stream media all put their spin on everything. A right slant for some, a left slant for others. Is the truth somewhere in between, or is it a story that we aren't getting becasue the mainstream media is so intent on telling their narrative that we the people are getting the shit end of the stick regardless of where we get the so called news?]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 27 2017, @04:00PM (11 children)
Where is the line drawn?
I look at it like this. Fake news is any story in which false information is knowingly crafted by its author to convey and support bias. It can originate from a blog or a major news outlet. They purposefully start small, on blogs, or smaller alt/independent news sites and then propagate using social media in the hopes of a major news outlet picking up the story and passing it along as fact. Pizzagate is one example of fake news.
If the CNN story was not properly fact checked and the article was written in ignorance, then that's not fake news. Thats shitty reporting and almost as bad as fake news.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 27 2017, @06:00PM (4 children)
To me it seems a casualty of slashing newsrooms for a couple decades. Nobody does original reporting anymore because it is expensive. They pull "stories" off the AP Wire, from corporate press releases tailored for and fed to them, and from their Twitter feeds. They repackage that "material" for an optimal Pavlovian quotient, and call it news.
Along with it has gone the 'reporter as hero' archetype from popular entertainment. The mid-80's is the last time I think I saw such a film. The only media-related film I can recall seeing in the last decade were the Ron Burgundy spoofs, and they were more epitaph than laudatory.
Glen Greenwald and Julian Assange might have taken up Woodward's mantle, but they preferred to be divas.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Wednesday June 28 2017, @03:05PM (3 children)
Counterpoint: Supergirl and Daredevil both have this trope.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 28 2017, @04:25PM (2 children)
Supergirl debuted in 1959, Daredevil in 1964 (according to Wikipedia). They're products of a time when 'journalist as hero' was believable, so they're not really counterpoints but hold-overs in the same way that Superman's Clark Kent is or Spiderman's Peter Parker is.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Wednesday June 28 2017, @07:03PM (1 child)
Purposely ignoring the ones that are recent or still on the air or were you honestly unaware of them?
Supergirl (2015): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4016454/ [imdb.com]
Daredevil (2015): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3322312/ [imdb.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 28 2017, @08:31PM
Unaware. And ignorant of the Supergirl and Daredevil histories. My knowledge of superheros is shallow and what little I do know is more about X-men than anything else. If 'journalist as hero' are recent additions to the storylines of Supergirl and Daredevil, then I stand corrected. If they've been there from their inception, then it seems like continuity from an earlier time when journalists were much more highly regarded than they are today, in the same way Clark Kent's and Peter Parker's characters are.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 27 2017, @06:25PM (4 children)
The archetype of fake news is joe blogger who reads some sensational headline somewhere that he gut-thinks is a "good story," does no research, and proceeds to post about it without actually bothering to do any research.
And that's pretty much exactly what CNN did here. That's pretty much exactly what all the MSM have been doing for years, at least when certain topics were involved, but what's changing is that they keep getting more blatant and less ashamed about it.
So I don't know. It would be nice if this really signaled a change in their behavior. But I'm skeptical. Probably it just means they toned back the dial by 6 months or so but won't change anything else.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday June 27 2017, @09:29PM (3 children)
No. That's not fake news. That's shoddy journalism. There';s a difference.
Fake news is *deliberately false* information seeded into the information sphere to pollute public discourse. PizzaGate [wikipedia.org] was fake news, the CNN story was just crappy journalism, where those involved didn't follow their own standards. See the difference?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday June 27 2017, @10:09PM (2 children)
You can't do that, I can't do that, no one can do that.
Mine does not. When you have an organization that systematically and predictably produces 'shoddy journalism' that supports a particular political line, and only remembers those standards when it comes to stories that do not support that line, I'm going to call that a fake news organization, and I don't really care about the unknowable mental states of those involved. Whether they are doing this as a conscious tactic or as a result of self-inflicted brain damage doesn't matter much. That self-inflicted brain damage would still represent a conscious choice that ultimately led to reporting falsehoods, it's just one level removed compared to concious-in-the-moment lying anyway.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday June 27 2017, @10:35PM
Whatever.
I'm sticking with this:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=20269&page=1&cid=532147#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
What you believe is up to you. Good luck with that.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28 2017, @09:44AM
You don't need to see in someone's heart to find out his intentions. If that were necessary, courts would be in deep trouble.
But yes, it means that sometimes you do not know whether a specific story was fake news or just bad journalism. But that's not a problem with definitions, that's just a fact of life. But if you are accuse someone or some organization of fake news without clear evidence of intent, you are not the slightest bit better than those bad journalists (and by your own standards, you would have to consider yourself generating fake news).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28 2017, @03:31PM
Pizzagate is one example of fake news.
Pizzagate is is just the Jeffrey Epstein story with a twist. The politicians are pervs of the worst kind. But because of the 'fake news' narrative, they will never be seriously investigated. Which is why the narrative was invented to begin with, to protect these kinds of people.