Biased, Incorrect, Fake and Hate News

In my opinion, nothing matters more right now than getting rationale adults to speak with more discipline about these critical concepts. Failing to make a distinction is extremely dangerous, as I tried to explain before. But this problem seems to be getting worse.

Biased news: The New York Times has a bias. The Wall Street Journal has a bias. Examples are not needed as you can clearly see their bias on a daily basis on their Editorial pages. If you want to understand different sides, read both papers. But please do not conflate bias with "incorrect" or "fake".

Incorrect news: Journalists get it wrong, even in the NYT an WSJ. That's the point of a "Corrections" section in print media and why many online articles will have italic text at the bottom or an article that explain how and when an article was corrected. When you get it wrong, you correct the error and apologise. Example: Reporting that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from Oval Office. One might argue that this was a reporter with bias also making a mistake. Not good at all, but pretty common. If one writes a lot of incorrect news, they usually don't last very long at the NYT or WSJ.

Fake news: The intentional effort to write or say something one knows is false. Recent examples include the story that a pizza restaurant was a den of child abuse run by Hillary Clinton. Another example is the story that Barack Obama was not born in the US. Another more recent example is that 3-5 million people voted illegally in the election. Chilling aspects of Fake news relate to the current White House not understanding any of these terms and dubbing anything it dislikes as "fake".

Hate news:  When a news outlet or person on social media continues to perpetuate incorrect information that by all appearances seems to promote xenophobic ideas. Recent examples, Fox tweeting that the suspect in Quebec murders of innocent people praying led to the arrest of a Moroccan man when the actual article linked to the tweet stated that the only suspect was a French Canadian who harboured right wing bias.

The tweet by @FoxNews:

The article linked to that tweet, which itself rightly identifies the "lone suspect":

What happens on social media as a result of Hate News:

And yes, several days on, this post remains available to the 132,000 followers of Cloyd Rivers.

All That We Share

Are We More Racist?

Meaningful discussion is hard to come by these days. We are invalidated before we open our mouths.

In a quest for more thoughtful tools, I've thought back to the Revisionist History podcast called The Lady Vanishes, which was broadcast long before the election. This is more about the concept of moral licensing in the context of women artists and leaders, but it is more relevant to me in thinking about Obama, race and what I consider jaw-dropping xenophobia coming out of the new President.

This blog post gives more resources on the topic: Masculinity, Inequality, And The 2016 Presidential Election.

Concise summary of moral licensing from the blog post:

...when people are presented with the opportunity to demonstrate that they are good, moral people, they are more apt to follow that opportunity by expressing support for inequalities that they might otherwise not be willing to admit to. That is, given the opportunity to demonstrate that we are “good” people, we’re more likely to engage in “bad” behavior. Social psychological research discovered that, for instance, we’re more likely to support racially prejudiced views after having been primed with an opportunity to say that we’d be willing to vote for a Black presidential candidate. When we demonstrate “good” moral qualities publicly, we feel more justified in supporting systems of inequality in public ways, too.

I think about this every time I read something on race these days.

Transparency Matters!

No, no, no! Absolutely no way in hell can she say the Trump campaign "litigated this all through the election, people didn't care". I want to see Trump's taxes! Words matter and conflicts of interest matter and if this becomes a partisan issue, we are absolutely a entering a world of no accountability. Transparency is needed to demonstrate that there are no serious conflicts of interest.

What he said many, many times is that they would be released once the audit is through. I am a patient man and, while I disagreed with his logic during the campaign, I have to accept that people voted for him without needing to see these prior to voting. But at no point did I hear anyone say that the election was meant to decide if people wanted to see them.

I am heartened to see that it has three times the signatures required in four days to get a response. Your Voice in the White House to let your opinion be heard.

What A Day!!!

Working With Trump?

The New Yorker Politics and More Podcast continues to have great discussion. This is a great exchange, particularly the discussion on whether to resist Trump in The Power of "No" (@08:24).

Jelani Cobb: One of the things that has been notable to me is that when Chuck Schumer talked about the areas that Democrats could work with Trump...

Dorothy Wickenden: And Sanders too, has indicated this to the rage of many of his followers...

JC: ...I think if was a little bit alarming because, in the kind of ethic of saying "everyone should be given a chance" -- that seems to function as if this is a normal political situation and I think it is anything but that. And finding areas in which you can work with the Trump administration, it seems almost as if you would reward bad behaviour and thereby possibly make it more entrenched.

DW: Democrats were outraged by Senator Mitch McConnell's successful plot to thwart Obama's legislative agenda from 2009 on. It just work in the House and the Senate. Should Democrats become the party of "No"? 

JC: I don't think it is so much the Party of No, because I don't think that Barak Obama and Donald Trump are analogous. I think we are look at something that is of its own kind and there is a real kind of concern -- Do you work with someone who has flouted the norms of releasing your tax returns? Someone who has politically mainstreamed white nationalism? Someone who has spoken in really troublesome and problematic ways about women and has a slate of really questionable views? I don't think that winds up being the same thing as obstructionism. 

Fox And Fake News

I just had a lengthy social media exchange that brought up a grievance of conservatives. Trying to represent one person's view as best I can, he said that I fail to understand that many conservatives have been so frustrated with "liberal bias of the mainstream media" that they now feel it is gratifying to see us "complain about fake news" -- finally feeling their pain, so to speak.

But my problem with this is that he conflates bias with fake, which is a big problem.

This exchange also touched on my concerns in a blog post I had drafted but never finished -- now is the chance.

There has been much on the idea of fake news. Most interesting is the Planet Money story on Finding the Fake New King. It became an even more surreal story when covered on Full Frontal a few days later. This is all disturbing, but I can't help worry that it has shifted attention away from Fox News and it's role in the growth of fake news.

I know, I know...this has been dragging on for years and I am sure I sound like just another liberal who can't get out of my National Public Radio, New York Times and New Yorker echo chambers. That is exactly what the person in the above-mentioned exchange told me was my problem. But Fox is and has always been different -- my most recent posting about this being just prior to the election. I don't mind media having a leaning to the left or right. The real crimes are in the demise of journalism. One of the reasons I like The Economist is that is often prefaces its editorial content with a disclaimer about ideological beliefs on free trade or open borders or other elements that affect it's content. But that is not what Fox does. Every time I watch -- and I force myself to do so -- I feel like it's an exercise in bad journalism. Leading questions, implicit assumptions and just half truths.

To be honest, in recent weeks I've really valued and enjoyed reading right wing media that I rarely consumed before. The National Review and Wall Street Journal have some great points and remind me what it felt like to actually have a debate. I feel like my assumptions are challenged. But that isn't how I feel with Fox.

It didn't take me 30 seconds to find clips on Fox that suggest the same talking point that was made to me in this social media exchange I mentioned. Listen to this nonsense on Fox. More shitty reporting! If anyone on Fox took the time to listen to Planet Money or this great interview on Fresh Air with Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed or the countless other investigations on this, they'd understand why the distinction between "fake news" and bias is critical.

What is important about the Fresh Air interview is that it shows pretty clearly why Fox wants to conflate the issue -- conservatives benefit from it! Indeed, I'd say fake news, is the logical outcome of bad journalism, for which I think Fox is the poster child. Can anyone find me a liberal media outlet that is dismissive of "fact-checking"? I only hear this from conservatives.

This was the most interesting bit of the interview with Sliverman was this comment about how Facebook is considering it's role in combatting fake news, by which I mean the shit that is made up by someone for the purpose of making advertising revenue in selling hoaxes.

When you flag something as offensive on Facebook, it's possible that it may automatically then be scanned by an algorithm and realize that that is an image, for example, maybe they've already banned. But a lot of the time it ends up in front of a person on their content review team who has to make a judgment call. And I can tell you from speaking to people in conservative media, [emphasis is mine] they are extremely concerned.

One, they view Facebook as a liberal organization. They think it's biased against conservative points of view. And two, they're extremely concerned that if Facebook starts trying to weed out fakes, they're going to have people with a liberal point of view who disagree with an article potentially suppressing it. And so there is risk now of suppression of free speech and suppression of different points of view if these things were to go in the wrong direction.

The President-elect has shown and shows on a daily basis that he has no problem lying, just like many politicians do (as pointed out by that nonsense Fox clip). The challenge to the media and to those of us who consume it is to believe in facts, or at least that the pursuit of facts is a worthy goal, not matter what Fox's "fair and balanced" news tells you.

No To Rex Tillerson, CEO ExxonMobil

Let's use this topic as a lesson of the media talking past each other. That's a nice way of me saying a lesson in conservative media (WSJ) talk past very legitimate concerns of the liberal media (NYT).

No, Suzanne Maloney, writing-in-the-WSJ, this isn't about the "chattering classes" being aghast at a just any old CEO being nominated for Secretary of State. The NYT made this point fairly emphatically (editorial link above), as do I. It is about that CEO having worked his entire professional career for one company with, allegedly, a long history of strategically working to combat science and, as if that were not enough, that CEO also having conflicts-of-interest with the head of state of a nation currently accused by the CIA of intentionally trying to destabilise the faith in the US electoral process. Your column inches given to the boy scouts is ghastly amid these extremely serious concerns.

Now, of course I can't fully prove that statement about ExxonMobil having a long history of combatting science, but it seems pretty clear, as I have been learning from Doubt is Their Product, that ExxonMobil has been one of the key examples of companies strategically working to create doubt about the negative externalities of their business model.

From Chapter 18, "The Bush Administration's Political Science":

There are thousands of scientists on our side of the debate and a mere handful on the other, but uncertainty can reign in the mass media and the public mind if that handful has a large enough megaphone--and they do because they are underwritten by ExxonMobil, by all analyses the hands-down largest funder of the warming deniers. According to the authors of the internal ExxonMobil memo titled "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan", "[v]ictory will be achieved when...average citizens 'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the conventional wisdom." 

Let's be fair. Can we link Tillman to this memo? No. Is he responsible for the whole company? No. Does having worked in Russia disqualify him? No. Does working with oil and gas disqualify him? Of course not.

But...and this is a huge, "but"...why on earth at this time and in this context would Donald Trump select such a person from such a company and with such a working relationship in Russia? Why, after promising to "drain the swamp", would he think that appointing the CEO of a company ranked No. 8 in lobbyists (2014) is a good idea?

I am against Rex Tillerson because his appointment raises doubt about the institutions of the United States in such a way that is extreme. Diversity matters of experience matters! Rex Tillerson does not have a diverse work history and even if he is the best diplomat on the planet, his CV and conflicts of interest radically undermine the very idea that we have checks and balances in our political system.

Without time to read Steve Coll's "Private Empire", you can listen to this 2012 interview on Fresh Air.

"Make America Safe Again", says President-elect Troll

"I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you, and I still may", said Donald Trump, according to Megan Kelly, when threatening her after she aired a story with Daily Beast reporter who defended articled about Trump's divorce, in which his first wife accuses Trump of rape in sworn testimony, later disavowed. Kelly also makes this clear.

I want to focus on the alleged threat by Trump. This is our future President. And I have been hearing very disturbing stories about this trend in which people (sometimes Trump) point to someone on twitter and all hell breaks out in their lives. Not all of these are linked to Trump, but if you haven't heard, get a taste...

David French, National Review.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic.

Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.

And now this, yesterday, aimed at a Union leader, Chuck Jones, who was critical of Trump's recent deal with the Carrier company in Indian. Trump then tweeted and the man's phone started ringing.

Such a "beautiful Twitter account"!

Did Trump attack all these people? No.

But Kelly's accusation basically identifies the behaviour directly (i.e., he knows exactly what he's doing!) and yesterday's tweeting confirms that the President-elect is acting like a troll, or at least using his tweets to direct trolls in very, very disturbing ways.

This must stop! And by must stop, I have no naive expectations that it means trolling will stop. I mean the fucking President-elect must stop and condemn this and work to "Make America Safe Again", which means being able to criticise people without the fear of death and rape threats flooding a person's life and making them fear for the safety of their family and children.

There is much to be said about the Kelly interview on Fresh Air (really, listen to it), but the most important take away is connecting the dots. Troll behaviour is not fun and games and it requires Trump to stop acting like a troll.

You Say Post-truth, I Say Truthiness

The year of post-truth, but I have to say that I agree with Stephen Colbert when he says he's says "'Post-Truth' Is Just A Rip-Off Of 'Truthiness'".

Almost everything that we encounter online is being presented to us by for-profit algorithms, and by us, post by post, tweet by tweet.

Ugh. I was just beginning to like twitter...

Glenn Beck?

I mean, what the hell is going on in this world?

He is "sorry about all that". What? I guess I want to trust that this is a person who has done serious damage to civil discourse is now actually recognising his mistake.

But then this interview last week with Scott Simon -- and the whole emphasis on Benghazi being a "game-changing moment" for people on the right -- seems silly. He suggests this made conservatives just as shocked after the 2012 election as liberals feel shocked today.

But why was it a game-changer? Perhaps because of the way media used it to sledge hammer away at credibility of the administration and Clinton. One can argue for years, literally, about this, but The Economist summed it up pretty well and as far as I know, that newspaper isn't a tool of any particular party. It highlights that there were mistakes, but nothing to validate the use of the tragedy as a political sledge hammer, Fox News. This gets at why I still don't believe Beck. If he can compare the post-election shocks without addressing Trump's on-going abuse of the findings around Benghazi, he still doesn't really understand my main problem with Trump (and Beck's previous life on Fox). From The Economist article:

Undaunted [by the final report findings], on June 23rd Mr Trump told NBC that Mr Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.” His interviewer, Lester Holt, pushed back, noting that there is no evidence that she was sleeping. “Excuse me, wait, it went on for a long period of time and she was asleep at the wheel, whether she was sleeping or not, who knows if she was sleeping,” Mr Trump replied. Mr Holt looked unimpressed. But Mr Trump does not care what media fact-checkers think. He has anger to stoke, and for that, crying “Benghazi” will continue to do very well.

That's the problem. Facts don't matter and Beck doesn't seem to take full responsibility for his role in that slide into a fact-free world.

That said, his voice in the NYT piece is one I tend to agree with these days, which is something I never thought I'd say.

Equal Opportunity Versus Equal Outcome?

We really need to get more disciplined with name-calling.

@09:56 in this thoughtful podcast -- What Kind of Conservative is Trump? -- there is a discussion about whether Republicans care about inequality, linked to David Remnick's essential reading from his interview with Obama in the New Yorker. The response by Matt Lewis paints a common and incorrect version two concepts. In the "menu of values", he describes a choice between equal opportunity (I assume he means his ideology) or equal outcome (I assume he means the other ideology).

I associate equal outcome with Soviet-style socialism, not the more common concept of an equal playing field.

This is relevant given a huge hang up in this election over Bernie Sanders being a "socialist" and the lingering association with Obama as something similar, as though the only concept of that word is a striving for equal outcome. I don't know any politicians who support the idea of equal outcome. No, Mr. Lewis (@11:52) I don't think a discussion of "fairness" would cause liberals to say that fairness "means everybody gets the same amount".

Yes, that's a small example, but one that really gets under my skin. And this is a New Yorker podcast! Let me not even mention what I hear come out of the mouths of other media outlets.

Here's another example from This American Life, an episode called Red State, Blue State that explored why it was so hard for opposing sides to talk to one another in the 2012 election between Obama and Romney. It feels quaint to hear it today.

The journalist, Lisa, is asking Ron about why he has a falling out with his friend, Frank, when he found out that Frank was voting for Obama.

Lisa Pollak: Frank recalls you calling him a Socialist. 

Ron Sexton: Absolutely. And I did, and I still believe it. When Frank takes umbrage at the fact that I called him a Socialist, what he doesn't understand or doesn't accept is that he is in love with a Socialist. This man that's in the White House is the most brilliant president we've ever had for Frank Mills and others like some of his friends. And Lisa, it offends me to hear that while we're going down the tubes. 

Lisa Pollak: He says his feelings were hurt. Why not just agree to disagree and put those differences aside? Why is that hard?

Ron Sexton: I would lay it on this-- the stakes are too high to consider it simply as agree to disagree. I don't agree to disagree. Frank needs to change his opinion because his view on the conduct of this society will kill it.

We have to tone it down.

Learning About Steve Bannon

I am not going to comment, but I encourage everyone to learn about Steve Bannon. Don't just read an article and don't just pick up the sound bites. Listen to and read longer pieces.

Here is the profile of Bannon from Bloomberg Politics in October.

Here is an interview with that author on Fresh Air.

For some post-election consideration, listen to the NPR weekly political podcast. Commentary with David Folkenflik on Bannon starts at 18:45.

From Russia, With Love And Conspiracy

Masha Gessen is reminding me why I was so interested in the Cold War in the first place. Two worlds believing different realities. Much to explore in her writings. For the moment, I want to capture a comment she made in this piece on The New Politics of Conspiracy.

Perhaps more than any previous election in history, this year’s contest has been dominated by charges of lying and mistruths on both sides, from the primaries to the general election. Our allegiance to a fact-based reality has been constantly challenged. But conspiracy theories work on a different level than mere lies. They lodge themselves in the mind by showing that something could be true without proving that it is true. They are therefore impossible to disprove: they cannot be fact-checked because their central tenets are conjectures rather than facts. Debates spawned by conspiracy theories become fruitless arguments about beliefs, and merely by having them, we gradually elevate these theories from assertion to assumption.

While he doesn't use the word "conspiracy", this piece, The Right Way to Resist Trump, by US-based Italian economist, Luigi Zingales, also makes very good sense to me. I wish he'd written this three months ago.

The focus on conspiracy, as Gessen argued, demands a fight with added conspiracy. I think this is where he'd like to keep our attention. Treating Trump and his allies like normal people and holding them to account for their unacceptable views are where we need to put our energies.

Resuscitating My Values

I think Tuesday was one of the worst days of my adult life. I assume many consider that a silly exaggeration. All I can say is that the negative wave of emotion overwhelmed me in a way that I never expected. Justified or not, it was anxiety about the future and the world that my children will inhabit.

I've been thinking a lot about how much the world would have been different had it never come to pass, but it's here and somehow, we have to keep going. All the values linked to the top 11 reasons I didn't vote for him are now in question. The question I have to ask myself is how I work to maintain my values when it seems the US electorate doesn't have the same priorities.

I want to re-start by going back to the quote I used to start this blog. It seems even more appropriate today than ever.

The main reason for the terrible cruelty between men today, apart from the absence of religion, is still the refined complexity of life which shields people from the consequences of their action. However cruel Attila, Genghis Khan and their followers may have been, the act of killing people personally, face to face, must have been unpleasant to them, and the consequences of the murder still more unpleasant: the wailing relatives and the presence of the corpses. And thus their cruelty was restrained. Nowadays we kill people through such a complex process of communication, and the consequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the action. The cruelty of some people towards others will continue to increase until it has reached unprecedented dimensions.

Now, let's get serious about the US President being advised by www.breitbart.com. 

Gwen Ifill

The passing of Gwen Ifill is blow and unexpected at a time when I think journalism is under attack. Her words on journalism in this 2014 commencement speech are worthy of reflection amid the current chaos.

"A flat spot on her head from trying to break down walls... "

She will be a very missed voice of calm in my life. Here is a beautiful tribute from her colleagues at PBS. I hope we can use her example and dedication to hearing others as a reminder in the days and months ahead.

Thneedville Lives!

Look! Shell remade Thneedville from The Lorax. They call it Best Day of My Life .

(PS -- They made a sequel called On Top of the World. 5 artists. 5 energy ideas.)

Post-Truth Anxiety

I still clearly remember that civics lesson where we debated the idea of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, and how that was linked to other aspects of free speech. I've been thinking about that a lot recently.

No matter what we vote in the US election, or in any other country for that matter, I hope people can agree with This American Life (essential listening here) and The Economist in their framing of "post-truth" as a factor in global politics. As Ira Glass explained in relation to some of Trump's lies:

[Trump's] lies are perplexing in their nakedness. Like, he knows lots of us know these are lies, but we're in some kind of new kind of universe where that is normal and that is OK and we will just accept that.

I won't accept that and hope everyone considers the weight of what comes next after Tuesday's election. The lack of trust in each other and in the media is the issue of this election. It is also what I blame for the fundamental lack of any discussion on policy or issues. Saying this election is about immigration (a wall versus open borders?) or the second amendment ("she's going to take away your second amendment rights", as if that has anything to do with reasonable gun regulation) or any other dumbed down issue from the debates -- it's silly. Nobody actually discusses data, they discuss feelings and instincts. That's alarming for anyone who cares about rationale debate.

It's pretty clear I blame one side more than the other for this, but both sides share guilt. And this fire will burn the whole house down. This was also in my mind when I thanked journalists a few days ago, so I was somewhat heartened to see this story come up yesterday on Fox's Bret Baier for his use of inflammatory language related to the "inditement" of Clinton. Maybe there is a sobering among the more activist news reporting? But then I looked more closely and watched his actual efforts to "clarify" what he said. In that clip you realise how far we have to go. His word soup epitomises what's wrong -- how on earth can any normal person weed through his "clarification" to see his point? He used irresponsible language that was false and unjustified. And his apology does nothing to douse the flames, only to admit he shouldn't have yelled "Fire!"...yet, but he's going to sit there waiting to yell it again any second. And so should everyone who watches him.

"America’s Best Hope"

The Economist votes (hypothetically).

I just thought this cover was a lot better and more fitting than today's.

Thank you, Journalists!

Let's pause for a moment.

I want to thank all responsible and hard-working journalists, especially those who have felt so attacked in this last year. You are not "disgusting people"! I know the majority of journalists work hard to understand complex problems and relay that information to people. It is a public service, a check and balance in our political systems and a profession that needs to be vigorously defended.

I do not like all the news you have reported, but I never want a journalist to tell me what I want to hear. I want you to stretch my brain and make me think. I want you to increase my empathy by showing me an angle that I wouldn't see otherwise.

The point of journalism is not meant to provide people with "truth", but rather to tell as story. We, the news consumers, make your job impossible when we think you have to be "objective" above all else. What I expect of you is to be as transparent as you can be and to listen for other ideas that you consider relevant to that story. Then it is my job to take what you give me ask myself questions or to look of other reporting on the same story.

Finally, a request to those who have felt attacked. Do not let this profession become a political weapon. We need your questions and we need your integrity, even with many question yours. Good journalism is like oxygen to the brain and we need a lot more of it.

Thank you for your work!