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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 27 2017, @02:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-watches-the-retractions dept.

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That story did not meet CNN's editorial standards and has been retracted.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?]

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 27 2017, @08:22PM (4 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday June 27 2017, @08:22PM (#532107) Journal

    By "systems of control" do you mean government and corporations control over individuals?

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 27 2017, @10:29PM (3 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday June 27 2017, @10:29PM (#532171) Journal

    Yes, such that it goes beyond simple exchange to control and exploitation.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:34AM (2 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:34AM (#532252) Journal

      There are some obvious means by which societal control is exercised:
        * School
        * Employer management style
        * Media and every drone that regurgitate them
        * Bank loans
        * Inflation
        * Taxes
        * Eavesdropped infrastructure

      If you read a book or get a great idea. There's no tax code for that. Think about that! ;-)

      Anyway this is why homeschooling, economical off-grid, self employed etc. Is frowned upon. The big step is to think for yourself and ensure you are right and not letting others cloud your mind with doubt. Then you have all these people that parrots what they themselves heard but not spent any thinking on which will try to interfere with you in all kinds of ways. Too many because it's the right way (why?), because everybody else (so?), can't imagine (I can!) etc.

      Employees and school control people very tight because by controlling employees time and money they get to decide what economic standard employees get to have, where they have to live (near work), where to spend time (with crap people), and what they will do during the day. The corporate culture gets to decide what people shall think.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:01PM (1 child)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:01PM (#532436) Journal

        That's well put.

        The biggest challenge is not the physical mechanisms you listed, but the social constructs that surround them and the expectations they set. Wresting our world view away from the control of others is difficult because it goes against the deep socialization humans are hard-wired to do. "What's right?" "What's wrong?" "Well, what does everybody else think?" Isn't that how we know?

        It is possible to wean ourselves off of those deleterious memes. First and foremost is practicing critical thinking. Never accept someone's say-so. Examine what we are told and what we see. It's hard to do at first, because it takes effort, but it is a lot like a muscle that gets stronger with use. With time we begin to see subterfuge and self-dealing that was invisible to us before, and we can act with clearer understanding.

        Second is abandoning the sensation of intellectual comfort. If somebody is agreeing with us too much, it's because they want something and are manipulating us. There should always be a tension, even between people who largely agree; it's the only way to keep everyone honest.

        Third is changing how we behave and what we devote our productive time to. You ticked off three of them, homeschooling, economic off-grid, self-employment, etc. In every way we can we should strive to be masters of our own fates and not subsume the best of ourselves to others. Controlling the patterns, the rules, by which we move throughout our days is the fundamental way in which the evil people of the world control and oppress the good (through corporate policy, fiscal management, etc); Good people are generally more interested in the red meat of honest work and real accomplishment to focus on the tedium and arcana of tax law (for example), so perhaps the best way is to not play their game at trying to game those rules, but to walk away at a right-angle as you have suggested. It was never possible for the people of East Germany to fix their system by working within it to reform its ground rules, but by literally walking away. That totalitarian police state, that prison, which was so intricately engineered to oppress its people, and which had stood unchallenged for decades, fell apart in a fortnight when the people simply voted with their feet. All of us have to do something equally simple and equally dramatic. Else, nothing changes, and nothing will ever get better.

        The thing I would hope we can accomplish at SN is to extend that visceral comprehension of systems of control we know from open source vs. walled gardens, to the rest of society, because as much as systemd can subvert freedom in the OS, so do similar contructs of law and centralized control subvert freedom in the society in which we all live and work. I hope that we could take that same passion we can call upon for issues like systemd and use it to re-write the software of society, too. And who better? The entire world, every aspect of it, runs on technology and through technologists like us, so if we should resolve to change the society that runs on our systems we'd have a pretty darn good chance of seeing it happen. At least, it's a better way to spend our time than writing another talking cat app.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:45PM

          by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:45PM (#532469) Journal

          Replace "What's right?" "What's wrong?" with what are the consequences of the various choices. Most people are idiots. Following them can result in intelligent person behaving like an idiot.

          Never accept someone's say-so is part of it. Critically thinking about ones own assumptions and thinking is perhaps even more important. There's usually a lot of crud there that may limit really free thinking right there.

          If there's intellectual comfort, it usually means your are in safe space that has very little relation to realities. People can agree without wanting something or manipulating. It takes some experience and intellectual capability to get the difference. I don't think tension is a necessity. It's when deciding out of the presence of tension instead of facts the thinking goes awry.

          Re-writing society is usually not resource efficient. Feet voting is. It can be as simple as starting a club etc just to have a space that is uncluttered, provided the screening is appropriate. The problem with most societies is people so to enable those that want to be free of the limitations of their peers is to enable new social networks. Sometimes that has to be physical like moving elsewhere but not always.