Washington Post reports that they publish fake news.

OpportunityCost said:

That link does not back your previous statements. Care to try again?

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RAMOSS said:

THat was half of my statement.. here is the other half

https://books.google.com/books?id=w...=onepage&q=newsroom resources slashed&f=false

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OpportunityCost said:

You made very exacting number claims. You have yet to back those numbers up, even in a general way, with those resources. Care to try yet again?

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Taylor said:

Did you not read the article? The WP themselves finally admitted they got the facts wrong.

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RAMOSS said:

I note your denial of the evidence presented. Fair enough. I will say I thought it was the fact checking departments, but the article I read was a number of years ago, and the ones I can find now say "resources' rather than department.

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roughdraft274 said:

I asked you what they should have done that they didn't do to make sure they didn't report something incorrectly.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

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NonoBadDog said:

WaPo published a story that mostly incorrect. The only thing they got right was there was malware and a computer. The Rolling Stone's reporter didn't follow up or do proper corroboration. She just ran with a story that struck at a cause that hit her personally and abandoned everything she learned about journalistic ethics in school. She tried to destroy a guys life because the story struck her emotionally. Everything in the article was a fabrication. That is fake news.

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NonoBadDog said:

They didn't talk to Burlington Electric before they published the article. They had a "gotcha" moment and wet themselves without verifying their information "cuz Russians". WaPo is as bad as CNN.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...6f69a399dd5_story.html?utm_term=.cc075a4e40c0

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Taylor said:

Which I answered. They should have verified the claims made by administration officials using people that actually know what they're talking about.

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roughdraft274 said:

They reportedly got the info from officials working the case. They thought it was verified. What else should they have done?

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Mustachio said:

What guy's life? There was no guy, that was the whole point. She did a horrible job and won an award for worst journalist of the year or something to that effect. But it wasn't "fake news," it was terrible reporting. Fake news isn't news where the facts are wrong. Fake news is news that has no basis in reality and is fabricated to:
1. Manipulate public opinion with lies
2. Make money / click bait
3. Profit in some other way (Infowars does it to create fear and build a readership base of people who believe anything you tell them)

That's the difference. It's really, really simple.

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Captain America said:

Well, say what you will about CNN but it appears they're the best we got. And that ain't saying much. Guess who lies the most? C'mon. Take a guess.

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The “study” from PunditFact (a subdivision of PolitiFact), which is not really a study, says no such thing. You do not have to rely on my word for that: PunditFact itself warns against using its figures “to draw broad conclusions,” e.g. that Fox News lies “like all the time.” (Like, is this like a 1980s Valley-girl movie, or are you just, like, functionally illiterate?) That is because the study is an exercise in drawing nonsensical conclusions from arbitrary data. The most obvious problem — though certainly not the only problem, not even close — is selection bias: PolitiFact is a readership-driven online publication, and thus it exercises a great deal of discretion about which statements it chooses to evaluate and why. The most obvious factor is that it evaluates only statements that are disputed. Specifically, it evaluates only statements that are disputed and that its editors believe will be of some interest or benefit to its readers.

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As the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has consistently reported, the fact checking business often – too often for anyone's good – turns on matters of opinion rather than matters of "fact." One recent example that drives the point home is the Washington Post's recent fact check that gave President Barack Obama "four Pinocchios" for asserting that he had, in fact, called what happened in Benghazi an act of "terrorism."
According to the Post's Glenn Kessler, Obama did in fact refer to it the next day in a Rose Garden address as an "act of terror," but did not call it "terrorism." Is this a distinction without a difference? Hardly, at least as far as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney might be concerned. It will be a long time before anyone forgets how the second presidential debate turned into a tag team match with Obama and CNN's Candy Crowley both explaining to the mystified Republican that Romney was, in fact, wrong when he accused the president of not having called the Benghazi attack a terrorist incident.
The fact that, as the Lichter study shows, "A majority of Democratic statements (54 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18 percent of Republican statements," probably has more to do with how the statements were picked and the subjective bias of the fact checker involved than anything remotely empirical. Likewise, the fact that "a majority of Republican statements (52 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to only 24 percent of Democratic statements" probably has more to do with spinning stories than it does with evaluating statements.

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Writing in these pages some months ago, Mark Hemingway made the case for being -skeptical of media “fact checking” operations (“Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking,’ ” December 19, 2011). They routinely get the most basic facts wrong; they laughably claim that Republicans lie more than Democrats at a rate of three-to-one; and they niggle over obviously rhetorical statements—but only when Republicans utter them. Hemingway ended his piece by warning that media fact checking organizations were about to launch a blitzkrieg in an attempt to leverage their undeserved status as impartial arbiters to reelect Barack Obama.

Indeed, with the election drawing near, the disingenuous deluge from fact checkers has been something to behold. Since Paul Ryan was -nominated, there have been scores of misleading and outright false “fact checks” relating to his Medicare reform plan. An Associated Press “fact check” actually upbraided Ryan for quoting Obama’s “You didn’t build that” comment. Supposedly, Ryan didn’t understand the rhetorical context. What that has to do with facts went unexplained.Then on August 17, a nonpartisan watchdog, Media Trackers, revealed that PolitiFact Ohio writer Tom Feran had a Twitter feed where he referred to conservatives as “wingnuts” and “yahoos,” and sent out links to blog postings on such topics as “the Cancer of Conservatism.” On the other hand, Feran is an enthusiastic Obama supporter—“Go-bama!”—and supporter of Occupy Wall Street. Over the summer, Feran wrote three PolitiFact articles slapping Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel with the organization’s “pants on fire” label, and capped it off by writing an article in the ClevelandPlain Dealer headlined “Campaign attacks give Josh Mandel Pants on Fire crown.”

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joG said:

Maybe it was a bad apple?

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Thoreau72 said:

Maybe it was a sign of institutional, system-wide compromise? MSM is into fear-mongering and sensationalism more than it is into seeking the truth in any given story or case.

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joG said:

I guess it depends on the articles one reads.

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Thoreau72 said:

Yes, articles about new recipes for baked beans are fascinating and informative. Others not so much. :lol:

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NonoBadDog said:

Fake news is either lies or fabricated news. To allow an excuse for bad reporting is allowing the rationalization of fake news. A fabrication or publishing of a lie is fake news.

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Mustachio said:

You contradicted yourself. If you say "my father was an NBA player" when he wasn't because this is what you've always been told, it's not a lie. You probably should have figured it out, but that just makes you a chump, not a liar. Also, I don't think I was too kind to the idiot at Rolling Stone who wrote that article. It's really besides the point. I don't think you've been reading the fake news if you don't get the distinction. People, primarily out of Russia and surrounding countries, have been making millions of dollars targeting Trump supporters because - for whatever reason - they are far more likely to believe lies. The same was true for people who hated Obama. I wrote an article about this in 2010 and the same people writing that Obama was from Kenya were writing that Justin Bieber was dead every single day. It's not one story, it's an entire racket. If you aren't up to speed, cherish the brain cells you've saved.

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In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.
The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

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After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.
Baron himself, editorial leader of the Post, is a perfect case study in this irresponsible tactic. It was Baron who went to Twitter on the evening of November 24 to announce the Post’s exposé of the enormous reach of Russia’s fake news operation, based on what he heralded as the findings of “independent researchers.” Baron’s tweet went all over the place; to date, it has been re-tweeted more than 3,000 times, including by many journalists with their own large followings:

Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent researchers https://t.co/3ETVXWw16Q
— Marty Baron (@PostBaron) November 25, 2016

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