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december 13, 2018
“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
–Chomsky
Media lo-lites
(source: politicus usa, raw story, alternet, newshounds)
*Fox News host Laura Ingraham rips Barack Obama for being “obsessed” with Donald Trump
*‘No such place’: Twitter goes berserk on NBC reporter for normalizing Mar-a-Lago as the ‘Winter White House’ NBC’s Kristen Welker felt the wrath of the Twitter on Wednesday after she referred to Mar-a-Lago as the “Winter White House.”
*Fox News fans melt down after their favorite network supports CNN’s Acosta: ‘You are dead to me’
Fox News fans are not happy that their favorite network is filing an amicus brief on behalf of CNN’s Jim Acosta, who had his White House press pass revoked by the Trump administration last week.
*Fox News panel: There’s no reason to vote against Republicans because Trump has ‘no scandals’
*Sean Hannity and Judge Jeanine Pirro speak at Trump rally in Missouri after Fox News claims they’re just ‘reporting’ from it
Over the weekend it was reported that Sean Hannity was listed as a headliner for the Missouri Trump rally despite being a media personality on Fox News. Fox contacted Raw Story to clarify that Hannity would be there for exclusive reporting not to speak at the rally. Clearly, they didn't get the memo.
*NBC waited until a record number of people saw this Trump ad before realizing it’s super racist
*FBN's Stu Varney And Herman Cain Celebrate Trump Telling Troops To Shoot Migrants
*Fox Business yanks Lou Dobbs episode for neo-Nazi rhetoric against George Soros after synagogue shooting: report
*Fox guest accuses wealthy Jew of ‘highly elaborate’ plot to help migrants just hours after synagogue massacre
*Fox News host: ‘Anti-Semitism from the left’ is the real cause of hateful attacks on Jews
'They don't care': Facebook fact-checking in disarray as journalists push to cut ties
Journalists paid to help fix Facebook’s fake news problem say they have lost trust in the platform
Sam Levin in San Francisco
the guardian
Thu 13 Dec 2018 03.00 EST
Journalists working as fact-checkers for Facebook have pushed to end a controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company has ignored their concerns and failed to use their expertise to combat misinformation.
Current and former Facebook fact-checkers told the Guardian that the tech platform’s collaboration with outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they’ve lost trust in Facebook, which has repeatedly refused to release meaningful data about the impacts of their work. Some said Facebook’s hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit critics – fueling the same kind of propaganda fact-checkers regularly debunk – should be a deal-breaker.
“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a fact-checking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years. “They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”
Facebook began building its partnerships with news outlets after the 2016 presidential election, during which fake stories and political propaganda reached hundreds of millions of users on the platform. The goal was to rely on journalists to flag false news and limit its spread, but research and anecdotal evidence have repeatedly suggested that the debunking work has struggled to make a difference.
Facebook now has more than 40 media partners across the globe, including the Associated Press, PolitiFact and the Weekly Standard, and has said false news on the platform is “trending downward”.
While some newsroom leaders said the relationship was positive, other partners said the results were unclear and that they had grown increasingly resentful of Facebook, especially following revelations that the company had paid a consulting firm to go after opponents by publicizing their association with billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros. The attacks fed into a well-known conspiracy theory about Soros being the hidden hand behind all manner of liberal causes and global events. It was later revealed that Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, had directed her staff to research Soros’ financial interests after he publicly criticized the company.
“Why should we trust Facebook when it’s pushing the same rumors that its own fact checkers are calling fake news?” said a current Facebook fact-checker who was not authorized to speak publicly about their news outlet’s partnership. “It’s worth asking how do they treat stories about George Soros on the platform knowing they specifically pay people to try to link political enemies to him?”
“Working with Facebook makes us look bad,” added the journalist, who has advocated for an end to the partnership.
Another fact-checker who has long worked on the Facebook partnership said they were demoralized: “They are a terrible company and, on a personal level, I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
Binkowski, who left Snopes earlier this year and now runs her own fact-checking site, which does not partner with Facebook, said the Facebook-Snopes partnership quickly became counterproductive. During early conversations with Facebook, Binkowski said she tried to raise concerns about misuse of the platform abroad, such as the explosion of hate speech and misinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and other violent propaganda.
“I was bringing up Myanmar over and over and over,” she said. “They were absolutely resistant.”
Binkowski, who previously reported on immigration and refugees, said Facebook largely ignored her: “I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model.”
Kim LaCapria recently left Snopes as a content manager and fact-checker partly due to her frustrations with the Facebook arrangement. She said it quickly seemed clear that Facebook wanted the “appearance of trying to prevent damage without actually doing anything” and that she was particularly upset to learn that Facebook was paying Snopes: “That felt really gross … Facebook has one mission and fact-checking websites should have a completely different mission.”
Binkowski said that on at least one occasion, it appeared that Facebook was pushing reporters to prioritize debunking misinformation that affected Facebook advertisers, which she thought crossed a line: “You’re not doing journalism anymore. You’re doing propaganda.”
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on whether advertisers influenced fact-checking, saying in an email, “The primary way we surface potentially false news to third-party fact-checkers is via machine learning.”
Other times, Snopes ended up fact-checking satirical articles for Facebook, which felt like a waste of time and in certain instances, sparked intense backlash against Snopes, the former staffers said. Once Snopes became an official partner, there was also a noticeable increase in online harassment, death threats and attacks from far-right users and prominent conservatives who accused the fact checkers and Facebook of having a leftwing bias and agenda, Binkowski said.
When reporters got caught in these kinds of firestorms, Facebook let individual journalists shoulder the blame, she said: “They threw us under the bus at every opportunity.”
Added LaCapria: “We were just collateral damage.”
A Facebook spokesperson said it has begun incorporating journalist safety training for new partners.
LaCapria, who is now working with Binkowski on her new site, said it became difficult to report on Facebook at Snopes due to the financial arrangement: “We knew that if anything involved Facebook it was at risk of being compromised.”
“Most of us feel it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” said one current fact-checker.
Facebook has said that third-party fact-checking is one part of its strategy to fight misinformation, and has claimed that a “false” rating leads an article to be ranked lower in news feed, reducing future views by 80% on average. The company has refused, however, to publicly release any data to support these claims.
One current fact-checker said the process overall was too slow and that often their fact-checks came too late: “By the time it gets to us, how many people have already seen it?”
In contrast, Angie Drobnic Holan, editor of PolitiFact, said the partnership was a “public service”, and that “Facebook is helping us identify questionable material”. The revenue from Facebook “added to our overall sustainability”, she said.
Asked of the impacts of her site’s work, she said, “Is it reducing fake content on Facebook? I don’t know, I can’t tell. Can Facebook tell? You would assume they could. I don’t have any way of knowing.”
Facebook said in a statement that it has “heard feedback from our partners that they’d like more data on the impact of their efforts”, adding that it has started sending “quarterly reports” with “customized statistics” to partners and would be “looking for more statistics to share externally in early 2019”. Facebook declined to share the reports with the Guardian.
PolitiFact has not yet received any reports, according to Holan, who said Facebook stated the documents must remain private once they are produced.
Snopes founder and CEO David Mikkelson said he was unaware of any quarterly reports. In an interview, he also said he did not share Binkowski’s concerns about the Facebook partnership and said he felt it has had a minimal impact on how Snopes operates.
“Our work remains the same,” he said, adding that he doesn’t expect Facebook to share data on how Snopes’ work is impacting other publishers. “It’s up to Facebook to decide the relative success of it.”
Current and former Facebook fact-checkers told the Guardian that the tech platform’s collaboration with outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they’ve lost trust in Facebook, which has repeatedly refused to release meaningful data about the impacts of their work. Some said Facebook’s hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit critics – fueling the same kind of propaganda fact-checkers regularly debunk – should be a deal-breaker.
“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a fact-checking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years. “They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”
Facebook began building its partnerships with news outlets after the 2016 presidential election, during which fake stories and political propaganda reached hundreds of millions of users on the platform. The goal was to rely on journalists to flag false news and limit its spread, but research and anecdotal evidence have repeatedly suggested that the debunking work has struggled to make a difference.
Facebook now has more than 40 media partners across the globe, including the Associated Press, PolitiFact and the Weekly Standard, and has said false news on the platform is “trending downward”.
While some newsroom leaders said the relationship was positive, other partners said the results were unclear and that they had grown increasingly resentful of Facebook, especially following revelations that the company had paid a consulting firm to go after opponents by publicizing their association with billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros. The attacks fed into a well-known conspiracy theory about Soros being the hidden hand behind all manner of liberal causes and global events. It was later revealed that Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, had directed her staff to research Soros’ financial interests after he publicly criticized the company.
“Why should we trust Facebook when it’s pushing the same rumors that its own fact checkers are calling fake news?” said a current Facebook fact-checker who was not authorized to speak publicly about their news outlet’s partnership. “It’s worth asking how do they treat stories about George Soros on the platform knowing they specifically pay people to try to link political enemies to him?”
“Working with Facebook makes us look bad,” added the journalist, who has advocated for an end to the partnership.
Another fact-checker who has long worked on the Facebook partnership said they were demoralized: “They are a terrible company and, on a personal level, I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
Binkowski, who left Snopes earlier this year and now runs her own fact-checking site, which does not partner with Facebook, said the Facebook-Snopes partnership quickly became counterproductive. During early conversations with Facebook, Binkowski said she tried to raise concerns about misuse of the platform abroad, such as the explosion of hate speech and misinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and other violent propaganda.
“I was bringing up Myanmar over and over and over,” she said. “They were absolutely resistant.”
Binkowski, who previously reported on immigration and refugees, said Facebook largely ignored her: “I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model.”
Kim LaCapria recently left Snopes as a content manager and fact-checker partly due to her frustrations with the Facebook arrangement. She said it quickly seemed clear that Facebook wanted the “appearance of trying to prevent damage without actually doing anything” and that she was particularly upset to learn that Facebook was paying Snopes: “That felt really gross … Facebook has one mission and fact-checking websites should have a completely different mission.”
Binkowski said that on at least one occasion, it appeared that Facebook was pushing reporters to prioritize debunking misinformation that affected Facebook advertisers, which she thought crossed a line: “You’re not doing journalism anymore. You’re doing propaganda.”
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on whether advertisers influenced fact-checking, saying in an email, “The primary way we surface potentially false news to third-party fact-checkers is via machine learning.”
Other times, Snopes ended up fact-checking satirical articles for Facebook, which felt like a waste of time and in certain instances, sparked intense backlash against Snopes, the former staffers said. Once Snopes became an official partner, there was also a noticeable increase in online harassment, death threats and attacks from far-right users and prominent conservatives who accused the fact checkers and Facebook of having a leftwing bias and agenda, Binkowski said.
When reporters got caught in these kinds of firestorms, Facebook let individual journalists shoulder the blame, she said: “They threw us under the bus at every opportunity.”
Added LaCapria: “We were just collateral damage.”
A Facebook spokesperson said it has begun incorporating journalist safety training for new partners.
LaCapria, who is now working with Binkowski on her new site, said it became difficult to report on Facebook at Snopes due to the financial arrangement: “We knew that if anything involved Facebook it was at risk of being compromised.”
“Most of us feel it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” said one current fact-checker.
Facebook has said that third-party fact-checking is one part of its strategy to fight misinformation, and has claimed that a “false” rating leads an article to be ranked lower in news feed, reducing future views by 80% on average. The company has refused, however, to publicly release any data to support these claims.
One current fact-checker said the process overall was too slow and that often their fact-checks came too late: “By the time it gets to us, how many people have already seen it?”
In contrast, Angie Drobnic Holan, editor of PolitiFact, said the partnership was a “public service”, and that “Facebook is helping us identify questionable material”. The revenue from Facebook “added to our overall sustainability”, she said.
Asked of the impacts of her site’s work, she said, “Is it reducing fake content on Facebook? I don’t know, I can’t tell. Can Facebook tell? You would assume they could. I don’t have any way of knowing.”
Facebook said in a statement that it has “heard feedback from our partners that they’d like more data on the impact of their efforts”, adding that it has started sending “quarterly reports” with “customized statistics” to partners and would be “looking for more statistics to share externally in early 2019”. Facebook declined to share the reports with the Guardian.
PolitiFact has not yet received any reports, according to Holan, who said Facebook stated the documents must remain private once they are produced.
Snopes founder and CEO David Mikkelson said he was unaware of any quarterly reports. In an interview, he also said he did not share Binkowski’s concerns about the Facebook partnership and said he felt it has had a minimal impact on how Snopes operates.
“Our work remains the same,” he said, adding that he doesn’t expect Facebook to share data on how Snopes’ work is impacting other publishers. “It’s up to Facebook to decide the relative success of it.”
Chuck Todd Normalizes Republicans Stealing Democracy From Voters
Nope, Chuck, this is not a "both sides" issue.
By Nicole Belle - crooks & liars
12/09/18 10:20am
Chuck Todd is terrible at his job.
On his best day, he's a hapless, unchallenging, status quo talking head, obsessed with horseraces and stats absent any context.
But today, he is actually Exhibit A of how our mainstream media is destroying democracy.
In introducing a segment with Wisconsin Governor-Elect Tony Evers, Todd pointed out that the lame duck Republican majority, with the endorsement of exiting Governor Scott Walker, are passing a flurry of legislation to essentially take away much of the power of the governorship.
Now, someone who has the ability to think beyond approval ratings and horse race speculations would look at that and be concerned that the Wisconsin Republicans are thumbing their nose at Wisconsin voters and outright stealing democracy because they can't win on a level playing field of ideas.
It would be a scandal, at least on par with using a private server for emails, right?
Not so for Chuck Todd. Nah, this is just politics as usual. In fact, this is something both sides do: "Democrats have done this in the past to Republican governors in lame duck sessions in other states."
Um, what? Name when this happened, Chuck. Are we talking Tammany Hall, one hundred years ago? Do you really have to reach back that far to find a way to normalize Republicans?
What the hell is wrong with you?
On his best day, he's a hapless, unchallenging, status quo talking head, obsessed with horseraces and stats absent any context.
But today, he is actually Exhibit A of how our mainstream media is destroying democracy.
In introducing a segment with Wisconsin Governor-Elect Tony Evers, Todd pointed out that the lame duck Republican majority, with the endorsement of exiting Governor Scott Walker, are passing a flurry of legislation to essentially take away much of the power of the governorship.
Now, someone who has the ability to think beyond approval ratings and horse race speculations would look at that and be concerned that the Wisconsin Republicans are thumbing their nose at Wisconsin voters and outright stealing democracy because they can't win on a level playing field of ideas.
It would be a scandal, at least on par with using a private server for emails, right?
Not so for Chuck Todd. Nah, this is just politics as usual. In fact, this is something both sides do: "Democrats have done this in the past to Republican governors in lame duck sessions in other states."
Um, what? Name when this happened, Chuck. Are we talking Tammany Hall, one hundred years ago? Do you really have to reach back that far to find a way to normalize Republicans?
What the hell is wrong with you?
Fox News is very mad that a church is pointing out the inhumanity of Trump family separation policy
Fox News' coverage of the "War on Christmas" now includes defending Trump.
FRANK DALE - thinkprogress
DEC 6, 2018, 10:39 AM
It’s a tough time for Fox News.
Republicans just got routed by Democrats in last month’s midterms.
President Donald Trump appears to be increasingly panicked about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election after recent developments regarding the president’s former colleagues.
So in these trying times, the conservative network has gone back to its basics: the supposed “War on Christmas.”
Fox News has made warning about the dangers of acknowledging December holidays other than Christmas an annual tradition.
However, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham cautioned of a new threat to Christmas during their programs on Wednesday.
The Fox News hosts — who didn’t seem too concerned about putting real humans in cages — are outraged that a Massachusetts church put a doll in a cage as part of its Christmas nativity scene in protest against Trump’s family separation policy.
After promoting the segment with a tweet warning “CHRISTMAS IS UNDER SIEGE,” Hannity cautioned viewers that “you probably don’t want your kids to watch this” before showing footage of the doll of baby Jesus — which again, we must emphasize was a doll and not an actual human being — behind bars.
In the following hour, Ingraham was even more outraged. After she criticized the Boston-area priest from the church in question for not wearing his clerical collar in an interview, Ingraham brought on Dan Bongino, the right-wing pundit who has admitted “owning the libs” is the only thing that provides meaning to his life.
In a span of three minutes, the conservative talking heads provided a striking example of how Fox News’ outrage machine operates, as they used this one church to whine about liberals being “a blowtorch on everything” and having “destroyed Halloween” because “every parent has to worry if it’s cultural appropriation” and “you couldn’t wear the Black Panther costume, apparently, if your kid wasn’t Black.”
“Friends don’t let friends mess with baby Jesus!” exclaimed Bongino at the end of the bizarre segment.
Hannity and Ingraham have already shown much more concern about a doll being put in a cage than the same treatment of actual people.
In June, Ingraham referred to the president’s policy — which medical professions have called abusive — as “essentially summer camp.”
Though Hannity hasn’t reached that level of depravity regarding locking children in cages, he has defended Trump’s policy by falsely claiming Congress is really responsible for it.
Previous “highlights” of Fox News’ coverage of the “War on Christmas” include Bill O’Reilly blaming gay people for it, Megyn Kelly freaking out about a Black Santa Claus, outrage over Starbucks’ cups, outrage over upside-down Christmas trees, and an exclusive interview with Santa.
Republicans just got routed by Democrats in last month’s midterms.
President Donald Trump appears to be increasingly panicked about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election after recent developments regarding the president’s former colleagues.
So in these trying times, the conservative network has gone back to its basics: the supposed “War on Christmas.”
Fox News has made warning about the dangers of acknowledging December holidays other than Christmas an annual tradition.
However, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham cautioned of a new threat to Christmas during their programs on Wednesday.
The Fox News hosts — who didn’t seem too concerned about putting real humans in cages — are outraged that a Massachusetts church put a doll in a cage as part of its Christmas nativity scene in protest against Trump’s family separation policy.
After promoting the segment with a tweet warning “CHRISTMAS IS UNDER SIEGE,” Hannity cautioned viewers that “you probably don’t want your kids to watch this” before showing footage of the doll of baby Jesus — which again, we must emphasize was a doll and not an actual human being — behind bars.
In the following hour, Ingraham was even more outraged. After she criticized the Boston-area priest from the church in question for not wearing his clerical collar in an interview, Ingraham brought on Dan Bongino, the right-wing pundit who has admitted “owning the libs” is the only thing that provides meaning to his life.
In a span of three minutes, the conservative talking heads provided a striking example of how Fox News’ outrage machine operates, as they used this one church to whine about liberals being “a blowtorch on everything” and having “destroyed Halloween” because “every parent has to worry if it’s cultural appropriation” and “you couldn’t wear the Black Panther costume, apparently, if your kid wasn’t Black.”
“Friends don’t let friends mess with baby Jesus!” exclaimed Bongino at the end of the bizarre segment.
Hannity and Ingraham have already shown much more concern about a doll being put in a cage than the same treatment of actual people.
In June, Ingraham referred to the president’s policy — which medical professions have called abusive — as “essentially summer camp.”
Though Hannity hasn’t reached that level of depravity regarding locking children in cages, he has defended Trump’s policy by falsely claiming Congress is really responsible for it.
Previous “highlights” of Fox News’ coverage of the “War on Christmas” include Bill O’Reilly blaming gay people for it, Megyn Kelly freaking out about a Black Santa Claus, outrage over Starbucks’ cups, outrage over upside-down Christmas trees, and an exclusive interview with Santa.
Fox News Goes Into Full Denial Over Flynn Memo
The Fox News Spin Cycle is in full force as the news gets worse and worse for Trump World.
By Frances Langum - crooks & liars
12/05/18 8:22am
If only Fox News could go back to those simpler days when having a bunch of talking heads insist that "Mitt Romney is going to win the 2012 election in a landslide." would get them through.
Thing is, Fox lost viewers, at least temporarily, over that massive and obvious real-time lie. There's a similar reckoning coming as reality has a way of seeping through the State-TV cracks, every time. Greg Gutfeld in 2016 admitted it on the air:
The release of Mueller's heavily redacted sentencing memo shouted one obvious message: Michael Flynn sang like a canary in 19 meetings with the special prosecutor and as a result, will serve zero jail time for lying to investigators early in Trump's term of office.
Fox News had little time to piece together pro-Trump lies, but then again they've had so much practice. Hannity made it seem that "zero jail time" means Flynn did "nothing" and that Mueller "ruined" Flynn's life for a year for nothing.
"This is how America's gonna treat a military hero? This is a sad and pathetic moment for not only the Special Counsel but for the country."
Laura Ingraham, too, used the redactions to indicate there was nothing big behind them.
And rather than devote their hours to coverage of Flynn's cooperation, Hannity moved on to the War on Christmas (Really? Bill O'Reilly should sue, Sean.) And Laura compared Confederate monuments to ancient antiquities and protestors to ISIS. So she's got that going for her.
Mueller has plenty of evidence against the Trump White House. Fox News is doing their viewers no favors keeping them on a lie drip until the drug runs out.
Thing is, Fox lost viewers, at least temporarily, over that massive and obvious real-time lie. There's a similar reckoning coming as reality has a way of seeping through the State-TV cracks, every time. Greg Gutfeld in 2016 admitted it on the air:
The release of Mueller's heavily redacted sentencing memo shouted one obvious message: Michael Flynn sang like a canary in 19 meetings with the special prosecutor and as a result, will serve zero jail time for lying to investigators early in Trump's term of office.
Fox News had little time to piece together pro-Trump lies, but then again they've had so much practice. Hannity made it seem that "zero jail time" means Flynn did "nothing" and that Mueller "ruined" Flynn's life for a year for nothing.
"This is how America's gonna treat a military hero? This is a sad and pathetic moment for not only the Special Counsel but for the country."
Laura Ingraham, too, used the redactions to indicate there was nothing big behind them.
And rather than devote their hours to coverage of Flynn's cooperation, Hannity moved on to the War on Christmas (Really? Bill O'Reilly should sue, Sean.) And Laura compared Confederate monuments to ancient antiquities and protestors to ISIS. So she's got that going for her.
Mueller has plenty of evidence against the Trump White House. Fox News is doing their viewers no favors keeping them on a lie drip until the drug runs out.
Jim Hightower: Free the free press from Wall Street plunder
Our right to a free press is meaningless if hedge funds can gobble up and gut the community newspapers that exercise it.
By Jim Hightower / AlterNet
December 2, 2018, 4:52 AM GMT
A two-panel cartoon I recently saw showed a character with a sign saying: “First they came for the reporters.” In the next panel, his sign says: “We don’t know what happened after that.”
It was, of course, a retort to Donald Trump’s campaign to demonize the news media as “the enemy of the people.” But when it comes to America’s once-proud newspapers, their worst enemy isn’t Trump — nor is it the rising cost of newsprint or the “free” digital news on websites.
Rather, the demise of the real news reporting by our city and regional papers is a product of their profiteering owners.
Not the families and companies that built and nurtured true journalism, but the new breed of fast-buck hucksters who’ve scooped up hundreds of America’s newspapers from the bargain bins of media sell-offs.
These hedge-fund scavengers know nothing about journalism and care less. They’re ruthless Wall Street profiteers out to grab big bucks fast.
They slash journalistic and production staff, void employee benefits, shrivel the paper’s size and news content, sell the presses and other assets, and triple the price of their inferior product — and then declare bankruptcy, shut down the paper, and auction off the bones before moving on to plunder another town’s paper.
By 2014, America’s two largest media chains — GateHouse and Digital First — weren’t venerable publishers with any commitment to truth or civic responsibility. Instead, their managers believe that good journalism is measured by the personal profit they can squeeze from it.
As revealed last year in an American Prospect article, GateHouse executives demanded that its papers cut $27 million from their operating expenses. Thousands of newspaper employees suffered in large part because one employee — the hedge fund’s CEO — had extracted $54 million in personal pay from the conglomerate, including an $11 million bonus.
The core idea of the “civic commons” is that we are a self-governing people, capable of creating and sustaining a society based on common good. A noble aspiration!
But achieving it requires a basic level of community-wide communication — a reliable resource that digs out and shares truths so people know enough about what’s going on to be self-governing. This is the role Americans have long expected their local and regional newspapers to play — papers that are not merely in our communities, but of, by, and for them.
Of course, being profit-seeking entities, papers have commonly (and often infamously) fallen far short of their noble democratic purpose. Overall, though, a town’s daily (or, better yet, two or more dailies) makes for a more robust civic life by devoting journalistic resources to truth telling.
Local ownership matters, as some 1,500 of our towns have learned after Wall Street demigods have swept in without warning to seize their paper, gut its journalistic mission, and devour its assets.
For example, Digital First, a huge private-equity profiteer, snatched the St. Paul Pioneer Press and, demanding a ridiculous 25 percent profit margin from its purchase, stripped the newsroom staff from a high of 225 journalists to 25!
As the Prospect’s Robert Kuttner reported, these tyrannical private equity firms produce nothing but profits for faraway speculators.
He notes that the blandly named entities only exist “thanks to three loopholes in the law.” The first lets them operate in the dark; the second provides an unlimited tax deduction for the massive amounts of money they borrow to buy up newspapers; and the third allows them to profit by intentionally bankrupting the paper they take over.
Our right to a free press is meaningless if Wall Street thieves destroy our communities’ presses. The good news is that many enterprising people are devising ways to rescue their newspapers. For more information, go to dfmworkers.org.
It was, of course, a retort to Donald Trump’s campaign to demonize the news media as “the enemy of the people.” But when it comes to America’s once-proud newspapers, their worst enemy isn’t Trump — nor is it the rising cost of newsprint or the “free” digital news on websites.
Rather, the demise of the real news reporting by our city and regional papers is a product of their profiteering owners.
Not the families and companies that built and nurtured true journalism, but the new breed of fast-buck hucksters who’ve scooped up hundreds of America’s newspapers from the bargain bins of media sell-offs.
These hedge-fund scavengers know nothing about journalism and care less. They’re ruthless Wall Street profiteers out to grab big bucks fast.
They slash journalistic and production staff, void employee benefits, shrivel the paper’s size and news content, sell the presses and other assets, and triple the price of their inferior product — and then declare bankruptcy, shut down the paper, and auction off the bones before moving on to plunder another town’s paper.
By 2014, America’s two largest media chains — GateHouse and Digital First — weren’t venerable publishers with any commitment to truth or civic responsibility. Instead, their managers believe that good journalism is measured by the personal profit they can squeeze from it.
As revealed last year in an American Prospect article, GateHouse executives demanded that its papers cut $27 million from their operating expenses. Thousands of newspaper employees suffered in large part because one employee — the hedge fund’s CEO — had extracted $54 million in personal pay from the conglomerate, including an $11 million bonus.
The core idea of the “civic commons” is that we are a self-governing people, capable of creating and sustaining a society based on common good. A noble aspiration!
But achieving it requires a basic level of community-wide communication — a reliable resource that digs out and shares truths so people know enough about what’s going on to be self-governing. This is the role Americans have long expected their local and regional newspapers to play — papers that are not merely in our communities, but of, by, and for them.
Of course, being profit-seeking entities, papers have commonly (and often infamously) fallen far short of their noble democratic purpose. Overall, though, a town’s daily (or, better yet, two or more dailies) makes for a more robust civic life by devoting journalistic resources to truth telling.
Local ownership matters, as some 1,500 of our towns have learned after Wall Street demigods have swept in without warning to seize their paper, gut its journalistic mission, and devour its assets.
For example, Digital First, a huge private-equity profiteer, snatched the St. Paul Pioneer Press and, demanding a ridiculous 25 percent profit margin from its purchase, stripped the newsroom staff from a high of 225 journalists to 25!
As the Prospect’s Robert Kuttner reported, these tyrannical private equity firms produce nothing but profits for faraway speculators.
He notes that the blandly named entities only exist “thanks to three loopholes in the law.” The first lets them operate in the dark; the second provides an unlimited tax deduction for the massive amounts of money they borrow to buy up newspapers; and the third allows them to profit by intentionally bankrupting the paper they take over.
Our right to a free press is meaningless if Wall Street thieves destroy our communities’ presses. The good news is that many enterprising people are devising ways to rescue their newspapers. For more information, go to dfmworkers.org.
The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
11/29/2018
Note to News Networks: Stop Having Climate Change Denialists on the Air
Let me quote something from the fuckin' epic climate change report put out last week by the (checks notes) federal goddamn government. It comes from Chapter 16, under Key Message 3: "Climate change is already affecting U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) assets by, among other impacts, damaging roads, runways, and waterfront infrastructure. DoD is working to both fully understand these threats and incorporate projected climate changes into long-term planning to reduce risks and minimize impacts. There are many examples of DoD’s planning and action for risks to its assets from climate change. DoD has performed a comprehensive scenario-driven examination of climate risks from sea level rise to all of its coastal military sites, including atollsin the Pacific Ocean. In the Arctic, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy are pursuing strategies to respond to the changing geopolitical significance resulting from the projected absence of summer sea ice in the next few decades."
You got that? The Department of Defense is preparing for climate change not because it's a fantasy, but because it's real and it's happening now. By the way, the paragraph before this one says, in essence, when shit is all fucked up, people freak the fuck out and that's gonna require some military action. You think that if climate refugees or even terrorists inspired by water scarcity and searing heat in some regions, not to mention wars over shrinking access to food and water, were a possibility, we might want the Department of Defense to be ready to deal with it.
The Key Message should be "Stop being such arrogant pricks and fuckin' do something already before we're all up to our tits in ocean water while our faces burn off." Repeat after ever section.
At this point, to deny climate change is to demonstrate either ignorance or greed or both. You may wanna argue about how to solve it, but saying that this is all part of some natural cycle or "what about when they said there was gonna be an Ice Age" or assorted other bullshit should simply exclude you from the conversation. Denying climate change and denying that human activity has caused it is akin to denying there is a sun or paper or that dog you're looking at right now.
I'm reminded of a moment in my political philosophy class where a smartass douchefuck thought he was gonna get one over on the prof. She was making a point about how we need to agree on basic reality to move forward in the world and had just said, "If we all see a frog, we agree that it is a frog."
Douchefuck responded, "Well, you may say it's a frog, But I may say it's a banana."
Her response was elegant and final. She said, "You'd be wrong or ill, and either way, we shouldn't trust you." That shut Douchefuck up for a few days. And it's what we should say to so many insane, anti-science beliefs.
Still, though, the news networks insist on bringing on some godforsaken gooch scratcher to provide an illusion of balance on climate issues. For instance, on CNN, Erin Burnett had on Robert Reich and creepy-ass Stephen Moore, who said, no shit, "Can the two of you tell me one apocalyptic claim made by the environmental movement that has been true?" This is an article of faith on the right, that because no one is Nostra-fuckin'-damus and pinpointing exactly when some terrible shit will happen, climate change is a big joke.
The correct response to this is "Get the fuck off my show and get the fuck away from anywhere rational humans gather." 'Cause, see, among the shit that's been predicted that's happened is severe heat waves (talk to people in India, Canada, Egypt, Australia, and Portugal, for a start), stronger hurricanes (ya think?), and rising seas (it fucking floods during high tide regularly in a bunch of places now). Anyone denying that this is happening, that people did this, and that people need to solve that shit now needs to be whipped into the hinterlands. And if you say that we need to put jobs ahead of saving the entire planet, you should be locked in a madhouse.
This pariah status needs to extend to Republicans elected officials, too. Here's noted pig ball fondler, Senator Joni Ernst, on CNN this past Sunday: "Well, we know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes. And we see those ebb and flows through time." Let's not even get into Donald Trump's pathetic response where he declared himself intelligent and then mouth-farted something utterly dumb, saying that his own employees are full of shit on this and he knows better because his big fuckin' gut or whatever.
Alluding to another talking point on the right, that climate scientists are making coin on the crisis, Stephen Moore gurgled something about "The climate change industrial complex." Fuck you, man. Scientists are often faculty members at universities or staff members at labs. They get a decent salary, maybe even a hundred grand, perhaps two, if they're really important. They might get a book published that makes a few bucks. The grants they get aren't for themselves. They're for studying and experimenting and traveling and paying for staff. No one's getting rich on the NSF's dime.
On the other side, though? In 2013, Charif Souki, then the CEO of Cheniere Energy, an oil and gas company made $142 million. Who's in it for the money?
Essentially, what Stephen Moore and all the climate denialists are doing is jacking off the dick of the fossil fuel industry until it spooges cash into their faces that they voraciously lap up.
It's a goddamn embarrassment that they are still treated as anything more than the lying shills or deranged morons that they are.
You got that? The Department of Defense is preparing for climate change not because it's a fantasy, but because it's real and it's happening now. By the way, the paragraph before this one says, in essence, when shit is all fucked up, people freak the fuck out and that's gonna require some military action. You think that if climate refugees or even terrorists inspired by water scarcity and searing heat in some regions, not to mention wars over shrinking access to food and water, were a possibility, we might want the Department of Defense to be ready to deal with it.
The Key Message should be "Stop being such arrogant pricks and fuckin' do something already before we're all up to our tits in ocean water while our faces burn off." Repeat after ever section.
At this point, to deny climate change is to demonstrate either ignorance or greed or both. You may wanna argue about how to solve it, but saying that this is all part of some natural cycle or "what about when they said there was gonna be an Ice Age" or assorted other bullshit should simply exclude you from the conversation. Denying climate change and denying that human activity has caused it is akin to denying there is a sun or paper or that dog you're looking at right now.
I'm reminded of a moment in my political philosophy class where a smartass douchefuck thought he was gonna get one over on the prof. She was making a point about how we need to agree on basic reality to move forward in the world and had just said, "If we all see a frog, we agree that it is a frog."
Douchefuck responded, "Well, you may say it's a frog, But I may say it's a banana."
Her response was elegant and final. She said, "You'd be wrong or ill, and either way, we shouldn't trust you." That shut Douchefuck up for a few days. And it's what we should say to so many insane, anti-science beliefs.
Still, though, the news networks insist on bringing on some godforsaken gooch scratcher to provide an illusion of balance on climate issues. For instance, on CNN, Erin Burnett had on Robert Reich and creepy-ass Stephen Moore, who said, no shit, "Can the two of you tell me one apocalyptic claim made by the environmental movement that has been true?" This is an article of faith on the right, that because no one is Nostra-fuckin'-damus and pinpointing exactly when some terrible shit will happen, climate change is a big joke.
The correct response to this is "Get the fuck off my show and get the fuck away from anywhere rational humans gather." 'Cause, see, among the shit that's been predicted that's happened is severe heat waves (talk to people in India, Canada, Egypt, Australia, and Portugal, for a start), stronger hurricanes (ya think?), and rising seas (it fucking floods during high tide regularly in a bunch of places now). Anyone denying that this is happening, that people did this, and that people need to solve that shit now needs to be whipped into the hinterlands. And if you say that we need to put jobs ahead of saving the entire planet, you should be locked in a madhouse.
This pariah status needs to extend to Republicans elected officials, too. Here's noted pig ball fondler, Senator Joni Ernst, on CNN this past Sunday: "Well, we know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes. And we see those ebb and flows through time." Let's not even get into Donald Trump's pathetic response where he declared himself intelligent and then mouth-farted something utterly dumb, saying that his own employees are full of shit on this and he knows better because his big fuckin' gut or whatever.
Alluding to another talking point on the right, that climate scientists are making coin on the crisis, Stephen Moore gurgled something about "The climate change industrial complex." Fuck you, man. Scientists are often faculty members at universities or staff members at labs. They get a decent salary, maybe even a hundred grand, perhaps two, if they're really important. They might get a book published that makes a few bucks. The grants they get aren't for themselves. They're for studying and experimenting and traveling and paying for staff. No one's getting rich on the NSF's dime.
On the other side, though? In 2013, Charif Souki, then the CEO of Cheniere Energy, an oil and gas company made $142 million. Who's in it for the money?
Essentially, what Stephen Moore and all the climate denialists are doing is jacking off the dick of the fossil fuel industry until it spooges cash into their faces that they voraciously lap up.
It's a goddamn embarrassment that they are still treated as anything more than the lying shills or deranged morons that they are.
‘Put it on your nachos and eat it’: Fox News defends pepper spray and migrant caravan fear-mongering
"Fox & Friends" wants you to be very afraid.
FRANK DALE - thinkprogress
NOV 26, 2018, 2:10 PM
The remaining members of the migrant caravan traveling north from Central America, the focus of Republicans’ midterm election strategy before this month’s rout, have finally reached the U.S.-Mexico border.
And even though the migrants are unarmed and unable to cross the border, Fox News wants you to be very afraid.
Fox & Friends, President Donald Trump’s favorite morning “news” source, devoted the majority of its three hours of Monday programming to fear-mongering over the migrant caravan and undocumented immigrants.
As Trump threatened to “close the Border permanently if need be” on Twitter, the well-established feedback loop between Fox News and the president of the United States was in full effect.
Any unfortunate soul who happened to be watching Monday’s edition of Fox & Friends at 6 a.m. ET started their day with a clip of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) advocating for closing the U.S. border due to the migrant caravan.
After Pete Hegseth, whom Trump reportedly considered for secretary of Veterans Affairs, praised Jason Derulo’s “Trumpets” as a “great song,” Fox and its friends awkwardly reverted to scaring its elderly audience.
Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins, who took credit for being the first person to report that the migrant caravan was “coming,” bizarrely said the migrants could only claim asylum “because of a judge’s ruling,” even though claiming asylum at a port of entry is legal under both U.S. and international law. After a few minutes of fear-mongering about the brown people at the border, Jenkins admitted he was “not aware of any of these migrants” actually crossing the border.
Then Fox & Friends defended the U.S. military’s decision to deploy tear gas, which caused migrant mothers to frantically flee the scene with their young children, in response to rocks as “the way the world works,” even though it’s not not actuallythe way the world works.
At this point, it was likely that someone at the conservative network realized five minutes had passed without mentioning former President Barack Obama or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so Steve Doocy pointed out that tear gas was also used against migrants at the border in 2013.
However, that incident, involving hundreds of migrants who had reached the border at once, was not expected and hyped by members of the media for weeks before it occurred. Also, conservatives weren’t urging the president for such an unnecessary escalation in 2013.
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt then proclaimed, “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military will fight back!”
With hyperbolic “STORMING THE BORDER” text appearing on the screen, Hegseth then propagandized about Trump’s proposed border wall and said the real victims here were not the migrants escaping violence, natural disasters, and brutal authoritarian crackdowns, but Americans who live near the border.
Once the Friends felt as though sufficient fear of brown people had been established, Fox transitioned to owning the libs and media members who correctly pointed out that the migrant caravan was not a serious threat to Americans.
Earhardt declared the migrant caravan was “not an invented threat” as “MEDIA JABBED CARAVAN AS ‘INVENTED THREAT'” was displayed on-screen below her.
All of this was just in the first 10 minutes of Monday’s Fox & Friends, but the two hours of programming that followed brought more of the same.
Hegseth later compared the migrant caravan to a home invasion before praising Trump.
After claiming the caravan was “supported by outside sources,” had a “sense of entitlement,” and shouldn’t be considered “true refugees,” former U.S. Border Patrol deputy chief Ron Colburn said it was pepper spray being used against unarmed migrants and it was actually part of a balanced diet. “You could actually put it on your nachos and eat it.”
In addition to being an absurd statement, using tear gas on unarmed migrants on Mexican soil was possibly a violation of international law.
Also, the baseless claim that the migrant caravan is being funded or directed by shadowy outside sources is similar to conspiracy theories embraced by both the accused murderer of 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue and the suspect in the attempted bombings of around a dozen Democrats who are frequent targets of the president’s incendiary rhetoric.
These caravan conspiracy theories were promoted by Fox News and prominent conservatives like Trump, Vice President Mike Pence (R), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX), and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) before Republicans lost around 40 House seats in this month’s midterm elections.
After a FOX NEWS ALERT, which was about Trump being on Twitter instead of doing his actual job, infamous smedium shirt-wearer Dan Bongino joined the show.
Bongino, who was actually an appropriate guest to discuss the president’s tweets since he has admitted “owning the libs” is the only thing that provides meaning to his life, is notoriously sensitive, and has blocked almost everyone on Twitter, claimed he didn’t “mean to be hyperbolic” about the migrant caravan before hyperbolically saying people were “trying to invade our border.”
Then former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) stopped by to echo white supremacist rhetoric and baselessly blame “leftists” for the migrant caravan, which isn’t a unique development, and “war on the border.”
Fox & Friends also devoted time to fear-mongering about other undocumented immigrants on Monday.
After Fox & Friends interviewed the parents of a teacher who was reportedly killed while crossing a street early on Thanksgiving morning by an undocumented immigrant, Earhardt grossly urged viewers to “think about how it could effect your family” and “think about the first time you hold your child.”
Study after study after study has shown U.S. immigrants, including the undocumented, are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born American citizens.
And even though the migrants are unarmed and unable to cross the border, Fox News wants you to be very afraid.
Fox & Friends, President Donald Trump’s favorite morning “news” source, devoted the majority of its three hours of Monday programming to fear-mongering over the migrant caravan and undocumented immigrants.
As Trump threatened to “close the Border permanently if need be” on Twitter, the well-established feedback loop between Fox News and the president of the United States was in full effect.
Any unfortunate soul who happened to be watching Monday’s edition of Fox & Friends at 6 a.m. ET started their day with a clip of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) advocating for closing the U.S. border due to the migrant caravan.
After Pete Hegseth, whom Trump reportedly considered for secretary of Veterans Affairs, praised Jason Derulo’s “Trumpets” as a “great song,” Fox and its friends awkwardly reverted to scaring its elderly audience.
Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins, who took credit for being the first person to report that the migrant caravan was “coming,” bizarrely said the migrants could only claim asylum “because of a judge’s ruling,” even though claiming asylum at a port of entry is legal under both U.S. and international law. After a few minutes of fear-mongering about the brown people at the border, Jenkins admitted he was “not aware of any of these migrants” actually crossing the border.
Then Fox & Friends defended the U.S. military’s decision to deploy tear gas, which caused migrant mothers to frantically flee the scene with their young children, in response to rocks as “the way the world works,” even though it’s not not actuallythe way the world works.
At this point, it was likely that someone at the conservative network realized five minutes had passed without mentioning former President Barack Obama or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so Steve Doocy pointed out that tear gas was also used against migrants at the border in 2013.
However, that incident, involving hundreds of migrants who had reached the border at once, was not expected and hyped by members of the media for weeks before it occurred. Also, conservatives weren’t urging the president for such an unnecessary escalation in 2013.
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt then proclaimed, “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military will fight back!”
With hyperbolic “STORMING THE BORDER” text appearing on the screen, Hegseth then propagandized about Trump’s proposed border wall and said the real victims here were not the migrants escaping violence, natural disasters, and brutal authoritarian crackdowns, but Americans who live near the border.
Once the Friends felt as though sufficient fear of brown people had been established, Fox transitioned to owning the libs and media members who correctly pointed out that the migrant caravan was not a serious threat to Americans.
Earhardt declared the migrant caravan was “not an invented threat” as “MEDIA JABBED CARAVAN AS ‘INVENTED THREAT'” was displayed on-screen below her.
All of this was just in the first 10 minutes of Monday’s Fox & Friends, but the two hours of programming that followed brought more of the same.
Hegseth later compared the migrant caravan to a home invasion before praising Trump.
After claiming the caravan was “supported by outside sources,” had a “sense of entitlement,” and shouldn’t be considered “true refugees,” former U.S. Border Patrol deputy chief Ron Colburn said it was pepper spray being used against unarmed migrants and it was actually part of a balanced diet. “You could actually put it on your nachos and eat it.”
In addition to being an absurd statement, using tear gas on unarmed migrants on Mexican soil was possibly a violation of international law.
Also, the baseless claim that the migrant caravan is being funded or directed by shadowy outside sources is similar to conspiracy theories embraced by both the accused murderer of 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue and the suspect in the attempted bombings of around a dozen Democrats who are frequent targets of the president’s incendiary rhetoric.
These caravan conspiracy theories were promoted by Fox News and prominent conservatives like Trump, Vice President Mike Pence (R), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX), and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) before Republicans lost around 40 House seats in this month’s midterm elections.
After a FOX NEWS ALERT, which was about Trump being on Twitter instead of doing his actual job, infamous smedium shirt-wearer Dan Bongino joined the show.
Bongino, who was actually an appropriate guest to discuss the president’s tweets since he has admitted “owning the libs” is the only thing that provides meaning to his life, is notoriously sensitive, and has blocked almost everyone on Twitter, claimed he didn’t “mean to be hyperbolic” about the migrant caravan before hyperbolically saying people were “trying to invade our border.”
Then former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) stopped by to echo white supremacist rhetoric and baselessly blame “leftists” for the migrant caravan, which isn’t a unique development, and “war on the border.”
Fox & Friends also devoted time to fear-mongering about other undocumented immigrants on Monday.
After Fox & Friends interviewed the parents of a teacher who was reportedly killed while crossing a street early on Thanksgiving morning by an undocumented immigrant, Earhardt grossly urged viewers to “think about how it could effect your family” and “think about the first time you hold your child.”
Study after study after study has shown U.S. immigrants, including the undocumented, are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born American citizens.
Laura Ingraham lashes out over New York billboard condemning anti-gay group
The discussion was prompted by new billboard in Times Square that says "No gays allowed."
ADDY BAIRD - thinkprogress
NOV 17, 2018, 2:00 PM
This sign was put up in New York and people don't see the small print and think @AllianceDefends put up a no gays allowed sign. It was actually put up by a pro LGBT org that uses the domain name nogays dot org. They should take it down
“No gays allowed,” proclaims a new billboard in Times Square.
“STOP Alliance Defending Freedom,” smaller letters below the shocking message read. “Learn more at NoGays.org.”
The billboard is an attempt by the group Citizens for Transparency to highlight the anti-LGBTQ work done by conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has, for more than two decades now, worked on cases that attempt to criminalize gay sex, restrict transgender rights, and allow businesses to deny service to LGBTQ people.
It was ADF that was behind the recent Supreme Court case, Masterpiece Cakeshop, and they have been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
On Friday night, Laura Ingraham welcomed ADF’s vice president Jeremy Tedesco on her Fox show to discuss the billboard, which ultimately turned into both Ingraham and Tedesco attacking the SPLC, because of course it did!
“They played a role in 54 victories in front of the Supreme Court and defended families and marriages, but now they’re being targeted by this forces on the left in an effort to blunt their effectiveness,” Ingraham said, by way of introducing her guest.
“They were targeted by this disgusting billboard campaign in New York City’s Times Square… Here now to respond, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom. Jeremy, I have a gay brother. I love him very much. I didn’t like that sign at all. I thought it was hideous.”
The ADF, Tedeso argued, is not an anti-LGBTQ organization but rather just dedicated to supporting everyone’s First Amendment rights, one of the right’s favorite euphemisms for supporting hateful policies.
“We do a lot of great work. We protect everybody’s freedom,” he said. “Their ad completely misrepresents everything our case is about.”
Ingraham asked Tedeso if the group would represent a “gay group” if they had a First Amendment case, and Tedeso said they “absolutely” would.
“STOP Alliance Defending Freedom,” smaller letters below the shocking message read. “Learn more at NoGays.org.”
The billboard is an attempt by the group Citizens for Transparency to highlight the anti-LGBTQ work done by conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has, for more than two decades now, worked on cases that attempt to criminalize gay sex, restrict transgender rights, and allow businesses to deny service to LGBTQ people.
It was ADF that was behind the recent Supreme Court case, Masterpiece Cakeshop, and they have been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
On Friday night, Laura Ingraham welcomed ADF’s vice president Jeremy Tedesco on her Fox show to discuss the billboard, which ultimately turned into both Ingraham and Tedesco attacking the SPLC, because of course it did!
“They played a role in 54 victories in front of the Supreme Court and defended families and marriages, but now they’re being targeted by this forces on the left in an effort to blunt their effectiveness,” Ingraham said, by way of introducing her guest.
“They were targeted by this disgusting billboard campaign in New York City’s Times Square… Here now to respond, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom. Jeremy, I have a gay brother. I love him very much. I didn’t like that sign at all. I thought it was hideous.”
The ADF, Tedeso argued, is not an anti-LGBTQ organization but rather just dedicated to supporting everyone’s First Amendment rights, one of the right’s favorite euphemisms for supporting hateful policies.
“We do a lot of great work. We protect everybody’s freedom,” he said. “Their ad completely misrepresents everything our case is about.”
Ingraham asked Tedeso if the group would represent a “gay group” if they had a First Amendment case, and Tedeso said they “absolutely” would.
Facebook used opposition-research firm to link critics to George Soros, report says
New York Times report details missteps, questionable response to yearslong series of crises at Facebook
marketwatch - Published: Nov 14, 2018 10:34 p.m. ET
Facebook Inc. used a political opposition-research group in an attempt to tie a group critical of the social network to liberal billionaire George Soros last summer, according to a bombshell report released Wednesday afternoon.
The New York Times published a lengthy and detailed account of how FacebookFB, -0.56% reacted to a series of crises during the past three years, including Russian misinformation during the 2016 election, inflammatory posts by President Donald Trump and the Cambridge Analytica data-privacy scandal.
According to the report, Facebook executives including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg were behind the curve in finding out about Russia’s misinformation campaign, and over the next two years passed off crucial decisions to subordinates and sought to deflect blame and conceal the true extent of problems.
After two years of bad publicity, Facebook decided to go on the offensive in 2018, hiring Definers, a Republican-linked public relations company known for political opposition research and attack ads, to fight back against criticism, the Times said.
“While Mr. Zuckerberg conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation,” the Times reported. “Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.”
At the same time, the Times said conservative news site NTK Network, which is affiliated with Definers, posted numerous articles ripping rival tech giants Apple Inc. AAPL, +1.03% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL, +0.14% GOOG, +0.16% Google for their business practices.
Zuckerberg was reportedly incensed by comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who earlier this year took jabs at Facebook’s privacy woes, and ordered his management team to only use Android phones rather than iPhones.
The report also said Facebook executives, including public policy chief Joel Kaplan, were overly cautious about public reaction to the scope of Russian-backed fake pages.
“If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats,” the Times report said. “And if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.”
Executives were also torn by how to respond to inflammatory speech.
A 2015 Facebook post by then-candidate Donald Trump calling for a ban on Muslim immigrants raised red flags, the Times said, with Zuckerberg reportedly asking if it violated Facebook’s terms of service. While some inside the company believed they had been given an opportunity to make a stand against hate speech, Kaplan argued that blocking Trump would be seen as restricting free speech, and could provoke backlash from conservatives.
“Don’t poke the bear,” Kaplan reportedly warned.
Facebook shares are down more than 18% year to date, compared with the S&P 500’s SPX, -0.43% 1% gain. The stock was trading about 0.6% lower in after-hours trading Wednesday following the report’s release just after the market closed.
The New York Times published a lengthy and detailed account of how FacebookFB, -0.56% reacted to a series of crises during the past three years, including Russian misinformation during the 2016 election, inflammatory posts by President Donald Trump and the Cambridge Analytica data-privacy scandal.
According to the report, Facebook executives including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg were behind the curve in finding out about Russia’s misinformation campaign, and over the next two years passed off crucial decisions to subordinates and sought to deflect blame and conceal the true extent of problems.
After two years of bad publicity, Facebook decided to go on the offensive in 2018, hiring Definers, a Republican-linked public relations company known for political opposition research and attack ads, to fight back against criticism, the Times said.
“While Mr. Zuckerberg conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation,” the Times reported. “Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.”
At the same time, the Times said conservative news site NTK Network, which is affiliated with Definers, posted numerous articles ripping rival tech giants Apple Inc. AAPL, +1.03% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL, +0.14% GOOG, +0.16% Google for their business practices.
Zuckerberg was reportedly incensed by comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who earlier this year took jabs at Facebook’s privacy woes, and ordered his management team to only use Android phones rather than iPhones.
The report also said Facebook executives, including public policy chief Joel Kaplan, were overly cautious about public reaction to the scope of Russian-backed fake pages.
“If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats,” the Times report said. “And if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.”
Executives were also torn by how to respond to inflammatory speech.
A 2015 Facebook post by then-candidate Donald Trump calling for a ban on Muslim immigrants raised red flags, the Times said, with Zuckerberg reportedly asking if it violated Facebook’s terms of service. While some inside the company believed they had been given an opportunity to make a stand against hate speech, Kaplan argued that blocking Trump would be seen as restricting free speech, and could provoke backlash from conservatives.
“Don’t poke the bear,” Kaplan reportedly warned.
Facebook shares are down more than 18% year to date, compared with the S&P 500’s SPX, -0.43% 1% gain. The stock was trading about 0.6% lower in after-hours trading Wednesday following the report’s release just after the market closed.
Here's what the media really means when they talk about the 'working class'
Mainstream media’s fetish for the “working class” seems to refer entirely to culturally conservative white folks
By John McCullough / FAIR - alternet
November 14, 2018, 5:52 AM GMT
Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders. Piece after piece has been published in establishment outlets attempting to decipher the motivations of this racialized socioeconomic group, depicted as fighting from the Heartland against “cultural elites” on both coasts.
Numerous articles on the 2018 midterm elections furthered this narrative. The New York Times spoke of white workers’ place in the Democratic electoral strategy:
Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters spanned much of the Midwest, powering victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio… . Here in Iowa and elsewhere, [Democrats] are also making appeals to small-town voters who went for Mr. Trump.
The Washington Post reported that Kentucky congressional candidate Amy McGrath hoped that the endorsement of Joe Biden would bolster her chances with this demographic:
Biden is the Democrat who worries the president and his team the most because they fear he could cut into Trump’s working-class white support in several swing states.
The Atlantic explored Democratic candidates’ “burgeoning chances” with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt:
But the biggest explanation for the shifting numbers … is that the portions of the white working class hostile to Trump appear somewhat more likely to vote next month than those who support him.
If you’ve seen a piece on the impact of the working class on the midterm elections, it has most likely dealt specifically with working whites. But the media focus distorts the composition of this class, racially and otherwise. As Sarah Jaffe points out in the New Republic, “Only around 11 percent of the working class are white men in industrial jobs.” Americans who make their living by selling their labor (mostly in the service industry) are in fact disproportionately people of color, who are projected by the Economic Policy Institute to constitute an outright majority of the working class by 2032.
This misrepresentation of working-class whiteness extends to discussion of the voting habits of organized labor, as in a Washington Post piece speculating that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s pro-union rhetoric in Ohio might help Democrats “reverse the flight of the white working class to President Trump.” Though the typical union worker is often depicted as a gruff white man nearing his 50s, union membership is more common among African-American workers than whites, at 13.0 percent vs. 10.5 percent.
Despite the significant number of people of color in the working class, nonwhite members of this class are rarely talked about as such.
While use of the phrase “white working class” has been ubiquitous in political journalism in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “black working class” is discussed much less often. While the New York Times will occasionally put out a piece with explicit analysis of working people of color — including one op-ed by Tamara Winfrey-Harris and another by Alexis Okeowo — they are few and far between compared to the multitude of pieces published on their white counterparts.
This promotes a homogeneous image of the working class as sweaty, middle-aged white men in hard hats, with MAGA bumper stickers on their pickup trucks and a fear of social change in their hearts. This depiction erases the multitude of working people who do not meet this stereotype, and ignores the fact that the working class has far more people of color and more women than the professional and ownership classes.
Aside from misrepresenting workers as predominantly white, media outlets often use the term “white working class” to refer to white voters who aren’t even working class by any common-sense definition. A recurrent media proxy for this demographic group is Americans who haven’t attended college, which the New York Times has treated as synonymous:
Because Mr. Trump drew support from white voters with less formal education — the “white working class” — many attributed his victory to Americans’ economic anxiety.
While there is undeniably a relation between class and access to education, defining class only along this line replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. By this definition, a suburban millionaire could be counted as “working class” as a result of joining Dad’s company at 18 instead of going off to school. This fuzziness helps cast the “white working class” as the president’s reliable base: Many of them are not workers in any recognizable sense.
(It also helps explain why exit polls diverge on education and income: Fifty-five percent of respondents with college degrees – and 65 percent with advanced degrees – voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018, whereas 51 percent of people making $100,000-$200,000 a year, and 52 percent making over $200,000, voted for Republicans.)
This flawed conception of the “white working class” (not necessarily working, but definitely white) is brought to spurious life in the reporting of New York Post and Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito. In a November 2017 piece for the Washington Examiner on the midterm implications of the narrow re-election of Kathy Dahlkemper, county executive of Erie County, Pennsylvania, Zito writes of the difficulty of Democratic candidates winning “in working-class regions” (read: white working-class regions) where, she says, such workers are moderate, pro-gun, pro-life voters in counties across the Great Lakes Rust Belt … [who] turned out to vote for Barack Obama twice and then later voted Donald J. Trump.
She explains that despite an incumbency advantage and a large number of registered Democrats, the sitting executive came very close to being voted out. Zito’s solution is to elect more conservative Democrats — “Democrats need the Kathy Dahlkempers of their party to win all kinds of races up and down the ballot” — despite starting her piece by pointing out that the incumbent just barely won.
This depiction of the working class as synonymous with small-town whites in the Rust Belt is politically convenient for Zito, who writes primarily for right-wing publications and has been a featured speaker at CPAC, the annual convention of the American Conservative Union. In addition to being downright inaccurate, her misleading depiction of “working-class” voters bears the implication that the only way for Democrats to win them is to lurch right on social issues, rather than to move left on economics and address their material concerns.
Media narratives of the political landscape leading to the 2018 midterm elections constructed an image of the “working class” in popular culture that actually depicts the white, comfortable, culturally conservative small-business class. This stands in the way of building a politics which simultaneously addresses issues of race, class and gender — which, as has previously been argued by FAIR, will be essential in building a progressive alternative.
In the current environment, it is imperative to remain wary of themes in media which whitewash the working class, render working people of color invisible and encourage the perception that racial and economic justice are at odds.
Numerous articles on the 2018 midterm elections furthered this narrative. The New York Times spoke of white workers’ place in the Democratic electoral strategy:
Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters spanned much of the Midwest, powering victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio… . Here in Iowa and elsewhere, [Democrats] are also making appeals to small-town voters who went for Mr. Trump.
The Washington Post reported that Kentucky congressional candidate Amy McGrath hoped that the endorsement of Joe Biden would bolster her chances with this demographic:
Biden is the Democrat who worries the president and his team the most because they fear he could cut into Trump’s working-class white support in several swing states.
The Atlantic explored Democratic candidates’ “burgeoning chances” with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt:
But the biggest explanation for the shifting numbers … is that the portions of the white working class hostile to Trump appear somewhat more likely to vote next month than those who support him.
If you’ve seen a piece on the impact of the working class on the midterm elections, it has most likely dealt specifically with working whites. But the media focus distorts the composition of this class, racially and otherwise. As Sarah Jaffe points out in the New Republic, “Only around 11 percent of the working class are white men in industrial jobs.” Americans who make their living by selling their labor (mostly in the service industry) are in fact disproportionately people of color, who are projected by the Economic Policy Institute to constitute an outright majority of the working class by 2032.
This misrepresentation of working-class whiteness extends to discussion of the voting habits of organized labor, as in a Washington Post piece speculating that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s pro-union rhetoric in Ohio might help Democrats “reverse the flight of the white working class to President Trump.” Though the typical union worker is often depicted as a gruff white man nearing his 50s, union membership is more common among African-American workers than whites, at 13.0 percent vs. 10.5 percent.
Despite the significant number of people of color in the working class, nonwhite members of this class are rarely talked about as such.
While use of the phrase “white working class” has been ubiquitous in political journalism in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “black working class” is discussed much less often. While the New York Times will occasionally put out a piece with explicit analysis of working people of color — including one op-ed by Tamara Winfrey-Harris and another by Alexis Okeowo — they are few and far between compared to the multitude of pieces published on their white counterparts.
This promotes a homogeneous image of the working class as sweaty, middle-aged white men in hard hats, with MAGA bumper stickers on their pickup trucks and a fear of social change in their hearts. This depiction erases the multitude of working people who do not meet this stereotype, and ignores the fact that the working class has far more people of color and more women than the professional and ownership classes.
Aside from misrepresenting workers as predominantly white, media outlets often use the term “white working class” to refer to white voters who aren’t even working class by any common-sense definition. A recurrent media proxy for this demographic group is Americans who haven’t attended college, which the New York Times has treated as synonymous:
Because Mr. Trump drew support from white voters with less formal education — the “white working class” — many attributed his victory to Americans’ economic anxiety.
While there is undeniably a relation between class and access to education, defining class only along this line replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. By this definition, a suburban millionaire could be counted as “working class” as a result of joining Dad’s company at 18 instead of going off to school. This fuzziness helps cast the “white working class” as the president’s reliable base: Many of them are not workers in any recognizable sense.
(It also helps explain why exit polls diverge on education and income: Fifty-five percent of respondents with college degrees – and 65 percent with advanced degrees – voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018, whereas 51 percent of people making $100,000-$200,000 a year, and 52 percent making over $200,000, voted for Republicans.)
This flawed conception of the “white working class” (not necessarily working, but definitely white) is brought to spurious life in the reporting of New York Post and Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito. In a November 2017 piece for the Washington Examiner on the midterm implications of the narrow re-election of Kathy Dahlkemper, county executive of Erie County, Pennsylvania, Zito writes of the difficulty of Democratic candidates winning “in working-class regions” (read: white working-class regions) where, she says, such workers are moderate, pro-gun, pro-life voters in counties across the Great Lakes Rust Belt … [who] turned out to vote for Barack Obama twice and then later voted Donald J. Trump.
She explains that despite an incumbency advantage and a large number of registered Democrats, the sitting executive came very close to being voted out. Zito’s solution is to elect more conservative Democrats — “Democrats need the Kathy Dahlkempers of their party to win all kinds of races up and down the ballot” — despite starting her piece by pointing out that the incumbent just barely won.
This depiction of the working class as synonymous with small-town whites in the Rust Belt is politically convenient for Zito, who writes primarily for right-wing publications and has been a featured speaker at CPAC, the annual convention of the American Conservative Union. In addition to being downright inaccurate, her misleading depiction of “working-class” voters bears the implication that the only way for Democrats to win them is to lurch right on social issues, rather than to move left on economics and address their material concerns.
Media narratives of the political landscape leading to the 2018 midterm elections constructed an image of the “working class” in popular culture that actually depicts the white, comfortable, culturally conservative small-business class. This stands in the way of building a politics which simultaneously addresses issues of race, class and gender — which, as has previously been argued by FAIR, will be essential in building a progressive alternative.
In the current environment, it is imperative to remain wary of themes in media which whitewash the working class, render working people of color invisible and encourage the perception that racial and economic justice are at odds.
FACEBOOK ALLOWED ADVERTISERS TO TARGET USERS INTERESTED IN “WHITE GENOCIDE” — EVEN IN WAKE OF PITTSBURGH MASSACRE
Sam Biddle - the intercept
November 2 2018, 11:16 a.m.
APPARENTLY FUELED BY anti-Semitism and the bogus narrative that outside forces are scheming to exterminate the white race, Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish congregants as they gathered inside their Pittsburgh synagogue, federal prosecutors allege. But despite long-running international efforts to debunk the idea of a “white genocide,” Facebook was still selling advertisers the ability to market to those with an interest in that myth just days after the bloodshed.
Earlier this week, The Intercept was able to select “white genocide conspiracy theory” as a pre-defined “detailed targeting” criterion on the social network to promote two articles to an interest group that Facebook pegged at 168,000 users large and defined as “people who have expressed an interest or like pages related to White genocide conspiracy theory.” The paid promotion was approved by Facebook’s advertising wing. After we contacted the company for comment, Facebook promptly deleted the targeting category, apologized, and said it should have never existed in the first place.
Our reporting technique was the same as one used by the investigative news outlet ProPublica to report, just over one year ago, that in addition to soccer dads and Arianna Grande fans, “the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of ‘Jew hater,’ ‘How to burn jews,’ or, ‘History of “why jews ruin the world.”’” The report exposed how little Facebook was doing to vet marketers, who pay the company to leverage personal information and inclinations in order to gain users’ attention — and who provide the foundation for its entire business model. At the time, ProPublica noted that Facebook “said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.” Rob Leathern, a Facebook product manager, assured the public, “We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”
Leathern’s “new guardrails” don’t seem to have prevented Facebook from manually approving our ad buy the same day it was submitted, despite its explicit labeling as “White Supremacy – Test.”
From the outside, it’s impossible to tell exactly how Facebook decides who among its 2 billion users might fit into the “white genocide” interest group or any other cohort available for “detailed targeting.” The company’s own documentation is very light on details, saying only that these groups are based on indicators like “Pages [users] engage with” or “Activities people engage in on and off Facebook related to things like their device usage, purchase behaviors or intents and travel preferences.” It remains entirely possible that some people lumped into the “white genocide conspiracy theory” fandom are not, in fact, true believers, but may have interacted with content critical of this myth, such as a news report, a fact check, or academic research on the topic.
But there are some clues as to who exactly is counted among the 168,000. After selecting “white genocide conspiracy theory” as an ad target, Facebook provided “suggestions” of other, similar criteria, including interest in the far-right-wing news outlets RedState and the Daily Caller — the latter of which, co-founded by right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, has repeatedly been criticized for cozy connections to white nationalists and those sympathetic to them. Other suggested ad targets included mentions of South Africa; a common trope among advocates of the “white genocide” myth is the so-called plight of white South African farmers, who they falsely claim are being systematically murdered and pushed off their land. The South African hoax is often used as a cautionary tale for American racists — like, by all evidence, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter — who fear a similar fate is in store for them, whether from an imagined global Jewish conspiracy or a migrant “caravan.” But the “white genocide” myth appears to have a global appeal, as well: About 157,000 of the accounts with the interest are outside of the U.S., concentrated in Africa and Asia, although it’s not clear how many of these might be bots.
A simple search of Facebook pages also makes plain that there are tens of thousands of users with a very earnest interest in “white genocide,” shown through the long list of groups with names like “Stop White South African Genocide,” “White Genocide Watch,” and “The last days of the white man.” Images with captions like “Don’t Be A Race Traitor” and “STOP WHITE GENOCIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA” are freely shared in such groups, providing a natural target for anyone who might want to pay to promote deliberately divisive and incendiary hate-based content.
A day after Facebook confirmed The Intercept’s “white genocide” ad buy, the company deleted the category and canceled the ads. Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne provided The Intercept with the following statement, similar to the one he gave ProPublica over a year ago: “This targeting option has been removed, and we’ve taken down these ads. It’s against our advertising principles and never should have been in our system to begin with. We deeply apologize for this error.” Osborne added that the “white genocide conspiracy theory” category had been “generated through a mix of automated and human reviews, but any newly added interests are ultimately approved by people. We are ultimately responsible for the segments we make available in our systems.” Osborne also confirmed that the ad category had been used by marketers, but cited only “reasonable” ad buys targeting “white genocide” enthusiasts, such as news coverage.
Facebook draws a distinction between the hate-based categories ProPublica discovered, which were based on terms users entered into their own profiles, versus the “white genocide conspiracy theory” category, which Facebook itself created via algorithm. The company says that it’s taken steps to make sure the former is no longer possible, although this clearly did nothing to deter the latter. Interestingly, Facebook said that technically the white genocide ad buy didn’t violate its ad policies, because it was based on a category Facebook itself created. However, this doesn’t square with the automated email The Intercept received a day after the ad buy was approved, informing us that “We have reviewed some of your ads more closely and have determined they don’t comply with our Advertising Policies.”
Still, the company conceded that such ad buys should have never been possible in the first place. Vice News and Business Insider also bought Facebook ads this week to make a different point about a related problem: that Facebook does not properly verify the identities of people who take out political ads. It’s unclear whether the “guardrails” Leathern spoke of a year ago will simply take more time to construct, or whether Facebook’s heavy reliance on algorithmic judgment simply careened through them.
Earlier this week, The Intercept was able to select “white genocide conspiracy theory” as a pre-defined “detailed targeting” criterion on the social network to promote two articles to an interest group that Facebook pegged at 168,000 users large and defined as “people who have expressed an interest or like pages related to White genocide conspiracy theory.” The paid promotion was approved by Facebook’s advertising wing. After we contacted the company for comment, Facebook promptly deleted the targeting category, apologized, and said it should have never existed in the first place.
Our reporting technique was the same as one used by the investigative news outlet ProPublica to report, just over one year ago, that in addition to soccer dads and Arianna Grande fans, “the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of ‘Jew hater,’ ‘How to burn jews,’ or, ‘History of “why jews ruin the world.”’” The report exposed how little Facebook was doing to vet marketers, who pay the company to leverage personal information and inclinations in order to gain users’ attention — and who provide the foundation for its entire business model. At the time, ProPublica noted that Facebook “said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.” Rob Leathern, a Facebook product manager, assured the public, “We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”
Leathern’s “new guardrails” don’t seem to have prevented Facebook from manually approving our ad buy the same day it was submitted, despite its explicit labeling as “White Supremacy – Test.”
From the outside, it’s impossible to tell exactly how Facebook decides who among its 2 billion users might fit into the “white genocide” interest group or any other cohort available for “detailed targeting.” The company’s own documentation is very light on details, saying only that these groups are based on indicators like “Pages [users] engage with” or “Activities people engage in on and off Facebook related to things like their device usage, purchase behaviors or intents and travel preferences.” It remains entirely possible that some people lumped into the “white genocide conspiracy theory” fandom are not, in fact, true believers, but may have interacted with content critical of this myth, such as a news report, a fact check, or academic research on the topic.
But there are some clues as to who exactly is counted among the 168,000. After selecting “white genocide conspiracy theory” as an ad target, Facebook provided “suggestions” of other, similar criteria, including interest in the far-right-wing news outlets RedState and the Daily Caller — the latter of which, co-founded by right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, has repeatedly been criticized for cozy connections to white nationalists and those sympathetic to them. Other suggested ad targets included mentions of South Africa; a common trope among advocates of the “white genocide” myth is the so-called plight of white South African farmers, who they falsely claim are being systematically murdered and pushed off their land. The South African hoax is often used as a cautionary tale for American racists — like, by all evidence, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter — who fear a similar fate is in store for them, whether from an imagined global Jewish conspiracy or a migrant “caravan.” But the “white genocide” myth appears to have a global appeal, as well: About 157,000 of the accounts with the interest are outside of the U.S., concentrated in Africa and Asia, although it’s not clear how many of these might be bots.
A simple search of Facebook pages also makes plain that there are tens of thousands of users with a very earnest interest in “white genocide,” shown through the long list of groups with names like “Stop White South African Genocide,” “White Genocide Watch,” and “The last days of the white man.” Images with captions like “Don’t Be A Race Traitor” and “STOP WHITE GENOCIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA” are freely shared in such groups, providing a natural target for anyone who might want to pay to promote deliberately divisive and incendiary hate-based content.
A day after Facebook confirmed The Intercept’s “white genocide” ad buy, the company deleted the category and canceled the ads. Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne provided The Intercept with the following statement, similar to the one he gave ProPublica over a year ago: “This targeting option has been removed, and we’ve taken down these ads. It’s against our advertising principles and never should have been in our system to begin with. We deeply apologize for this error.” Osborne added that the “white genocide conspiracy theory” category had been “generated through a mix of automated and human reviews, but any newly added interests are ultimately approved by people. We are ultimately responsible for the segments we make available in our systems.” Osborne also confirmed that the ad category had been used by marketers, but cited only “reasonable” ad buys targeting “white genocide” enthusiasts, such as news coverage.
Facebook draws a distinction between the hate-based categories ProPublica discovered, which were based on terms users entered into their own profiles, versus the “white genocide conspiracy theory” category, which Facebook itself created via algorithm. The company says that it’s taken steps to make sure the former is no longer possible, although this clearly did nothing to deter the latter. Interestingly, Facebook said that technically the white genocide ad buy didn’t violate its ad policies, because it was based on a category Facebook itself created. However, this doesn’t square with the automated email The Intercept received a day after the ad buy was approved, informing us that “We have reviewed some of your ads more closely and have determined they don’t comply with our Advertising Policies.”
Still, the company conceded that such ad buys should have never been possible in the first place. Vice News and Business Insider also bought Facebook ads this week to make a different point about a related problem: that Facebook does not properly verify the identities of people who take out political ads. It’s unclear whether the “guardrails” Leathern spoke of a year ago will simply take more time to construct, or whether Facebook’s heavy reliance on algorithmic judgment simply careened through them.
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The Empty Piety of the American Press
Chris Hedges - truthdig
3/12/18
The press, giddy with its newfound sense of mission and purpose, is carrying out a moral crusade against Donald Trump. The airwaves and print have shed their traditional claims of “impartiality” and “objectivity.” They fulminate against Trump, charging—falsely—that he was elected because of Russian interference and calling him a liar, ignorant and incompetent. They give airtime to his bitterest critics and bizarre associates, such as Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a onetime star of “The Apprentice” and now a fired White House aide, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who says she had a sexual relationship with Trump. It is great entertainment. It is great for ratings. It is great for profits. But it is not moral, and it is not journalism.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
worthless media funnies
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