Fake News – Ratburger

Champion Barr

I have great hope for Attorney General William P. Barr. He has staked out a position and seems to be marshaling the needed forces to hold that position. He clearly must be making them sweat, because the Resistance attacks on him are getting longer and more unhinged. The latest example is a very long hit piece that is the main feature in the New Yorker.

This latest hatchet job is by David Rohde. I do not recommend that you read it. I will supply a link in a comment.

Instead, read the take-down by Mollie. She rips it to pieces, not by defending Barr, whose defense she leaves to others. No, Mollie goes to work on turf that she owns. Her counterattack on Barr’s behalf is based on journalistic malpractice.

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NASA Fake News

At the Newport News airport, NASA is trying to convince travelers that astronauts have landed on Mars. Langley is celebrating its hundredth anniversary and thought this would be a good idea. The Christmas tree is not part of the mural so they’re not trying to convince us there’s a Christmas tree on Mars. Is it any wonder some people think the moon landing was faked?

... [Read More]

Iconoclast protesters loot Catholic churches

This is a story from Chile. Or, perhaps it is a non-story from Chile.

Street protests turned violent in Santiago last week, and have persisted into this week. Anti-government protesters have been wearing masks, looking like AntiFa anarchists, and attacking government buildings.

Of course, once Leftist mobs turn violent, it is unlikely that their energy will maintain focus. They soon attacked another target. Catholic churches became prey for the mob. Several were looted for materials to add to street barricades. Statues of Jesus and Mary were destroyed.

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Make Your Own Fake News

Computer-generated articles aren’t new but now there’s a tool named Grover that you can use to make your own. Grover can also identify machine-generated articles. I love that their sample is a fake Paul Krugman article. Then again, I’m not so sure there are any real Krugman articles. It’s not entirely clear that Krugman could pass the Turing test.

I used Grover to generate a Krugman column for next October. It’s not too hard to detect that this column is fake but it would be a good starting point that could be touched up a human. I chose the headline, the author, the publication, and the date. Grover did the rest. Have fun.... [Read More]

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Trump v. CNN

“In a demand letter sent to CNN on Wednesday, an attorney working for the president outlined his intention to sue CNN for its willful misrepresentation of itself. For years, CNN has told viewers, advertisers, and sources that it is an unbiased, straight news outfit. That’s a lie, and the president’s lawyers believe it actually violates the federal Lanham Act’s prohibitions on false and misleading advertising.”

That is from Daily Caller. Here is more from the Washington Examiner:... [Read More]

Caper

A caper? A caper is a crime. In particular, a caper is a crime story that is so interesting that they made a movie or TV show about it. “Caper” in common parlance over the past four decades or so is only used to describe a crime that is somehow flamboyant.

So, here is a headline from Politico. It is currently featured at the default page on Google News:

“Giuliani and associate give conflicting accounts on origins of Ukrainian caper”

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Mollie on the Warpath

Mollie described in detail the slimy attacks on Brett Kavanaugh during his Confirmation hearings. She wrote the book, along with coauthor Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network. She predicted that more slimy attacks should be expected.

Mollie learned of the upcoming book release of a book about Justice Kavanaugh, by two New York Times reporters. She anticipated more slime to be ginned up by the Talking Snake Media. She started monitoring their pre-launch media appearances. (She probably had to fight a little urge to jealousy, too, since they got the sort of media appearances that were never available to her and Ms. Severino.)... [Read More]

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Media v Evangelicals 2019 midyear update

Last year I wrote a dozen posts to report on the assaults by mass media on Evangelical Christians. I cited the many hatchet-job articles and a representative handful (out of many dozens) of editorials from mass media to document their collective attempt to suppress Trump voters and boost Democrat prospects in the 2018 midterm elections. Things quieted down after Christmas, but then heated up over abortion when a number of red states were working on bills to restrict abortion. The focus stayed on Culture of Death issues all spring, with a few occasional bursts of Catholic-bashing thrown in.

But now I see signs of a renewed energy in media attacks on Evangelicals. This looks like the ramp-up to 2020 campaigning. I am not alleging any conspiracy. All I am pointing out is that journalists as a group hate President Trump and hate the voters who put him in office. Since they are overwhelmingly irreligious, they neither understand nor wish to understand the concerns of Christians. ... [Read More]

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Terrorist van Spronsen

I suppose everyone saw that a terrorist had tried to bomb an ICE facility in Tacoma using Molotov cocktails and a propane tank bomb, and was killed in a shootout.

I doubt if any of you learned anything of the details, because journalists seemed really un-curious and unwilling to follow up. The details got left out; there was no reporting on several aspects of the attacker and his motives, which were vaguely reported as “unclear” by media outlets hostile to ICE.... [Read More]

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Ramadan Bombathon report 2019

Ramadan ended last week. Here is the tally.

No casualties in America this year. A pretty big number overall. 911 killed and 1006 wounded. Do you recall seeing any of this in the news? Didn’t think so.

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Enemy of the People –Antifa connections

RedState has an interesting post up about recent work by Dr. Eoin Lenihan to establish that a scattered collection of journalists have multiple ties to Antifa.

Antifa, yeah, those guys. The violent mask-wearing thugs who roughed up Trump fans and shut down some free speech rallies. Real terrorists.... [Read More]

evil Google — curator of your information flow

I put up a couple of recent posts to observe on a surge of obituaries on the news business. But all y’all internet denizens are still reading news. You just don’t take daily newspapers anymore, and only a very tiny share of y’all subscribe to any kind of news provider. That is the way most of us operate any more. But information flow, especially the flow of recent events information, aka ‘news,’ is now screened for most receivers of news by evil Google.

Yeah, I know; some Ratburghers are boycotting Google by using DuckDuckGo and a couple of other search engine alternatives. But the problem remains. Over half of all news articles that are accessed on the internet were landed on through an evil-Google search, which means that evil Google gets a shot at screening the news for over half of all internet news consumption. This finding comes from a Northwestern University study that was recently presented at the “2019 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems” that was held in Glasgow.

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Drag Queen Story Story

I posted a few months ago with a story that was broken by LifeSiteNews.com. That is a small Catholic pro-life news aggregator and blog based in Toronto. They are very well-known in pro-life activist circles, and were otherwise unknown until they published the famous letter from Archbishop Viganò. Archbishop Viganò said that the Vatican had known about Cardinal McCarrick for several years, but that Pope Francis had rehabilitated him anyhow. The reason the letter was published by LifeSiteNews is that they are the only English-language journalists that Archbishop Viganò trusted with his letter. I bring this up as an introduction to a new story from LifeSiteNews that you do not see in mass media journalism, this time from Houston:

Now, it turns out that a second Houston Public Library Drag Queen was convicted of multiple sexual assaults against young children, according to records uncovered by Houston MassResistance activists. The man has also written a lurid article describing his work as a transgender prostitute. And he was photographed at a Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) event carrying a rubber chicken — a symbol used by homosexuals to indicate a sexual preference for young boys. …... [Read More]

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Saving Journalism

Fake News, you say? Indeed, this is to discuss the turmoil in the field of journalism, which is both a cause and a consequence of the Leftist tilt of the entire field. Journalism is in crisis, you see, and Leftist media watchers are looking for scapegoats. President Trump figures high on their enemies list, with his “fake news!,” “Enemy of the People,” and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. See my previous post on this topic. In that post I reacted to a journalist who blamed the end of professionalism in journalism on President Trump. In this post I will discuss the reasons for the collapse of journalism as we knew it.

I am happy to see the recent obituaries for Big Journalism. But before we discuss the real problems with journalism, please consider what the crisis looks like to the journalists. There have been a rash of articles and editorials from journalists that have expressed fear and frustration. This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the New Yorker back in January:... [Read More]

Killing Journalism

“It’s almost as if the effort to undo Trump has had an unexpected effect — that Trump has somehow broken the news media.”

That is a quote from a long essay at Esquire last month by Peter Boyer. Boyer wrote about changes to news coverage of the President of the United States because of Donald J. Trump. He, of course, blames Trump. But he is clearly distressed at the current state of affairs. His essay concentrates on the New York Times, with a long section about the Washington Post and a couple of asides about CNN. I bookmarked the link to Boyer’s essay. It is an interesting read. I think it will make a helpful addition to the obituary for the national press.... [Read More]