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The guardian reports on a sobering event in Washington DC.
US police have arrested a man wielding an assault rifle who entered a pizza restaurant that was the target of fake news reports it was operating a child abuse ring led by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her top campaign aide.
[...] The suspect entered the restaurant and pointed a gun at a restaurant employee, who fled and notified authorities, police said. The man then discharged the weapon inside the restaurant. There were no injuries.
[...] [Police] said the suspect during an interview with investigators revealed that he came to the establishment to "self-investigate" Pizzagate, the police statement said. Pizzagate is a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:26PM
Either that, or the satirist is trolling you.
He made the mistake of offering up as "proof" an identical copy of the article, right down to the punctuation, claiming that he submitted that. The chance that a major newspaper wouldn't make at least some stylistic and syntax changes before publication is pretty small. Sure, its possible that he followed the guardian's style guide perfectly. But that's a big reach.
I think it much more likely that someone who has never had any work published in a newspaper would assume that's how it works. A guy who's some total of work has been self-published would know nothing of the role of an actual editor.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:37PM
You are making the mistake of thinking we still live in the day when newspapers had editors, fact checkers and all that. Downsized decades ago. These days even the NYT publishes horrid grammar errors, spelling mistakes, obvious factual errors, even allows 'fake journalists' to publish fiction under their banner for years and when these are pointed out they will admit they lack the resources they once had. It gets far worse as you move down the food chain. Read some copy at cnn.com sometime, you will be appalled; it is like they took the live closed caption stream, spent a couple of minutes fixing the most obvious glitches and then hit publish. Just blogs now, some have bigger budgets but also attempt to produce so much more content they amount of effort going into each post is getting really close to being the same minimum. The race to the bottom is over, everybody is there now.
Once the legacy media admits this, once everyone else admits this, we can move on to rebooting the whole industry. We do need an industry devoted to pounding the pavement and collecting "Who, What, When, Where, Why, How" information and publishing it; we need to find a way to make a profit doing this important work. The current players are good at punditing spinning and analyzing but nobody is feeding much actual raw data into the machine anymore. So we get an echo chamber where everybody is just pointing to somebody else's opinion piece or a press release.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:47PM
> You are making the mistake of thinking we still live in the day when newspapers had editors
You are making the mistake of telling yourself stories and believing them to be the truth.
Par for the course for someone so susceptible to conspiracy theories.