Does the mainstream media need Competition? Ren LaForme/Poynter)
Views: 9
Does the mainstream media need to bring back the ombudsman to restore credibility and trust? Liberal journalists should acknowledge it’s natural that people wronged by the Bidens would be welcomed by the conservative media, just as Trump-haters (like angry niece Mary Trump) would be celebrated by the liberal media.
In case you didn’t know, the MSM tends to leave out stories and articles that point out the wrong doings of the Biden Administration and their far left allies.
But they don’t pass up an opportunity to report negatively on Conservatives even when they don’t have verification on the articles that they print. How do we correct that?
Here’s parts of an interesting article from The Poynter.
Despite a slight increase since 2016, the public’s low level of trust in the mainstream media is of deep concern for the future of journalism.
Nearly half of people surveyed listed inaccuracies, bias and “fake news” as factors in their low confidence. A general lack of credibility and the perception that reporting is based on opinions was also cited for the loss of trust. But the Gallup poll did offer a glimmer of hope. Nearly 70% of all respondents said they felt trust could be restored somehow.
Would the return of ombudsmen improve public trust in the mainstream media? If so, what changes in the traditional ombudsman role would make its use even more effective? Eight former ombudsmen weigh in with their thoughts on the current state of journalism and the role of ombudsmen in the era of online journalism.
“The ombudsman was thought to be an independent, autonomous person, on a level with the editor-in-chief of the paper’s organizational level, but not reporting to anyone in the newspaper,” said Mark Prendergast, who from 2009 to 2012 was the ombudsman at Stars and Stripes.
Doughty bitch slapping the Biden administration. Again.
Views: 12
DOJ files an appeal. Wishes to continue having Social Media block Conservatives. It looks as if the DOJ is upset that the federal judge put a clamp on their ability to spread false information using Social Media. Well the judge had good reason to do this.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lashed out at the Trump judge for granting a preliminary injunction, blocking the federal government from censoring conservatives online.
The State Department canceled its future meetings with Facebook just one day after US District Court Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee who still honors the US Constitution, accused the Biden Regime of violating the First Amendment by censoring unfavorable views in a blistering 155-page opinion.
So let’s see if it comes out that the government had other secret meetings with other Social Media Venues.
“I did the calculation,” testified Steve Kirsch in front of the Pennsylvania State Senate.
Given that five Amish people died in Lancaster County, PA, “the Amish died at a rate 90 times lower than the infection fatality rate of the United States of America.”
“Now, how is that possible?” Steve Kirsch asked. “It’s possible because the Amish aren’t vaccinated. And because the Amish didn’t follow a single guideline of the CDC,” he answered.
“They did not lock down. They did not mask. They did not social distance. They did not vaccinate, and there were no mandates in the Amish community to get vaccinated. They basically ignored every single guideline that the CDC gave us. Ignoring those guidelines meant a death rate 90 times lower than the rest of America.”
The Amish Died of COVID at a Rate 90 Times LOWER Than the Rest of America
“I did the calculation,” testified @stkirsch in front of the Pennsylvania State Senate.
Given five Amish people died in Lancaster Country, PA, “the Amish died at a rate 90 times lower than the infection… pic.twitter.com/qa0EhPfssH
Here’s the video transcript for those who want to read more:
Let’s talk about the Amish. Yesterday, I drove to Lancaster County (Pennsylvania). I drove to Amish country. I drove from house to house to house. I actually went to the house of a relative of Gideon King. He’s the one person, the only known person in the Amish community who supposedly died from COVID — that I’m aware of.
Now, they say there may be up to five people in Lancaster County who died from COVID, but I was unable to get the names of five people. I offered a $2,500 reward on Twitter. Hey, give me the names of more than five people in Lancaster County who died from COVID. Not a single person was able to name more than one person. They all named Gideon King. One guy.
So, I actually went to the house of Sam King, who’s a relative of Gideon King. And I talked to Sam. He doesn’t know if Gideon actually died from COVID or not. He died in the hospital. They think it was COVID, but maybe he died from the COVID hospital protocols. Okay.
So, you look at the Amish. I did the calculation. Let’s say there were five Amish people — because people say, I think there were maybe a few, or maybe there were five Amish people. And then I asked them, okay, can you name them? And nobody can name them.
But let’s say that we could name them — and there were five Amish people who died. That means the Amish died at a rate 90 times lower than the infection fatality rate of the United States of America. The Amish died at 90 times lower rate from COVID than America — than the rest of America.
Now, how is that possible? It’s possible because the Amish aren’t vaccinated. And because the Amish didn’t follow a single guideline of the CDC. They did not lock down. They did not mask. They did not social distance, They did not vaccinate, and there were no mandates in the Amish community to get vaccinated. They basically ignored every single guideline that the CDC gave us. Ignoring those guidelines meant a death rate 90 times lower than the rest of America.
So you talk about taking guidance from the WHO? Why don’t we copy what works? In fact, wouldn’t it be great to say in the next pandemic that Pennsylvania will take guidance from the Amish instead of the WHO? And you will be much, much better off.
Steve Kirsch breaks down the numbers in more detail on his Substack page:
Steve Kirsch’s newsletter
BREAKING: The US COVID mitigation measures resulted in 90X higher COVID deaths
Executive summary On May 22, 2023, I offered a $2,500 reward for anyone to give me the names of more than 5 Amish people in Lancaster, PA (which is the world’s largest single community of Amish people with over 45,000 people) who died from COVID. Nobody could do that. I got a few names. And nobody could name anyone under 50 years old who was suspected of…
You should ask questions before believing that enraging story and posting it on social media.
With stories, as with hot dogs, you may want to ask what’s inside and where it comes from. (Nati Harnik/AP)
[Note: the original article is from Margaret Sullivan, a former columnist for WAPO, so of course, all the “bad actors” she cites are “Republican” or “conservative.” Naturally, the left never does any of this, do they Media Matters for America?]
Vetting news sources has never been more difficult than in today’s most complex information environment.
With no shortage of websites and social media accounts claiming to be credible—often propagated by bad-faith actors—how can you tell what’s legit from what’s not? The crisis of local news outlets shutting down across the country has only exacerbated this problem, making it easier for nefarious forces to fill the void with “pink slime” sites with misleading names.
[“Pink slime” refers to processed lean beef trimmings, and is a cheap filler used to “beef up” many meat products. It is made by salvaging the meat that gets trimmed off cuts of beef along with fat. The the salvaged meat is squeezed through a pipe and sprayed with ammonia to kill bacteria, after which it is dyed pink, packaged into bricks, frozen and shipped to meat packing plants. — TPR]
In 2020, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School identified at least 1,200 such sites.
It’s always tempting to share the news that comes across our social media feeds when it not only seems outrageous but also confirms our biases, fears, or suspicions.
“See?!” we seem to say as we retweet or post; this latest exciting development is just what we knew could happen all along!
But there’s a question we need to ask these days before sharing one of these scintillating stories with friends and followers: Is it true?
Increasingly, “articles” that look like news may be something entirely different — false or misleading information grounded not in evidence but in partisan politics, produced not by reporters for a local newspaper but by inexperienced writers who are paid, in essence, to spread propaganda.
Last [year] provided a case in point when what looked like a legitimate news story went viral.
Published in the “West Cook News,” the story purported to reveal that a suburban Chicago school would soon be giving students different grades depending on their race. It started like this:
“Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. … In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.”
There was a big problem, though: It wasn’t true.
It found a ready audience. “But of course,” tweeted the conservative author Andrew Sullivan, as he shared the story to his hundreds of thousands of followers.
He was far from alone in promoting the story. There was a big problem, though: It wasn’t true.
The school issued an unequivocal statement denying the story. While school board members have considered all sorts of research about grading practices — the bogus story relied on out-of-context material presented in a meeting for discussion — the school “does not, nor has it ever had a plan to, grade any students differently based on race.” Georgetown professor Donald Moynihan debunked the story point by point: “The piece has failed the most basic journalistic standard: it has not provided evidence either for the sensationalistic headline or its core claims.”
Some of those who shared it later expressed regret or deleted their original posts, as Sullivan did, but, of course, it’s impossible to put the viral genie back in the bottle.
This single incident was bad enough; what’s worse is what it shows us about our poisoned news environment. While fact-based, accountable local newspapers are struggling to survive — many of them facing budget cuts or closure — what’s known as “pink slime” sites are sneakily trying to fill the void. They traffic in falsehood and exaggeration, paid for by political groups.
“These sites are insidious,” said Alan Miller, founder, and CEO of the News Literacy Project, the D.C.-based nonprofit organization that works to make students and the public smarter news consumers and better citizens.
Named after a meat-processing byproduct used as filler — in other words, it looks like meat but isn’t — pink slime news sites are often funded through secret and politically motivated “dark money” contributions. And they are growing fast. In 2020, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School identified at least 1,200 such sites.
With names such as the Des Moines Sun and Illinois Valley Times, they leverage the trust that people have for local newspapers, built up over many decades, to boost their own dubious credibility. Their content is “rooted in deception, eschewing hallmarks of news reporting like fairness and transparency,” according to a New York Times investigation that referred to them as “Pay-for-Play” outlets. Most of them, for example, don’t disclose the funding they get from advocacy groups. Davey Alba, one of the reporters who co-wrote the Times investigation, noted that the “West Cook News” is part of a network of local sites run by Republican operatives.
Meanwhile, of course, local newspapers are shrinking or dying. Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers were closed, as I detailed in my book, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” And although many legitimate and admirable news sites have sprung up to help fill the gap, it isn’t always easy for news consumers to know the difference.
I asked Miller for his advice to news consumers.
First, he said, take a pause when you see a story that gets your blood pressure jumping: “Don’t let your emotions take over. If something makes us angry, anxious or excited, that’s when we are most vulnerable to being manipulated.”
Then, he suggested, spend a minute doing your own research. Glance at the comments to see whether anyone has done a fact-check or has credibly challenged the findings. Use a search engine to see whether any other news outlets have covered this story. Try to find the original source of the story or ask the person who shared the post for evidence supporting the claim. Ask yourself whether it seems too good to be true.
You don’t need to take all of these steps, he noted, acknowledging that this is more work than most people will probably undertake. But “doing any of them will be beneficial.”
The News Literacy Project has managed to reach tens of thousands of educators and, through them, potentially millions of students. Because older people are most likely to share false information, according to research published in 2019 in the journal Science Advances, the News Literacy Project is working with an affiliate of AARP and hopes to expand the partnership. [Meaning they can think for themselves — well, some of them, anyway. Ageism by the left: how shocking! — TPR]
There’s really only one solution, after all: skeptical awareness.
News consumers must cultivate their own ability to know the difference between journalistic meat and fraudulent filler.
And, whatever their politics may be, those who care about truth need to slow down — way down — before sharing content that appeals to their emotions or preconceived ideas. It’s increasingly likely that it may be nothing but slime.
[Although trying to pin all these “pink slime” sites on the political opposition, Sullivan does make valid points about how to view “news” items that might not be as objective — or even truthful (#RIPJeremy Renner was a hoax, yet trended on Twitter just the other day) — as we want our news to be. —TPR]
Looking. Clean your own house ProPublica before you go after the Supreme Court Justices. Recently Pro Publica has gone after several Supreme Justices. Claimed they weren’t revealing trips and gifts. But Pro Publica has dirty laundry of their own.
The organization, a self-described “independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” is bankrolled by charitable contributions. And while the group is transparent about the source of some of that money, it won’t say where millions of dollars of its funding comes from, according to the New York Post.
In the years 2020 and 2021, ProPublica accepted $6.3 million from anonymous donors, and a quarter of the group’s revenues in 2022 came from two unnamed donors.
Pro Publica is not an independent news organization. They are a far left media outlet that favors leftist groups.
On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.
Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.
Now, however, we’ve unfortunately found cause to reconsider Eisenhower’s warning.
While the civilian population only in recent years began haggling over “de-platforming” incidents involving figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, government agencies had already long been advancing a new theory of international conflict, in which the informational landscape is more importantly understood as a battlefield than a forum for exchanging ideas. In this view, “spammy” ads, “junk” news, and the sharing of work from “disinformation agents” like Jones aren’t inevitable features of a free Internet, but sorties in a new form of conflict called “hybrid warfare.”
In 1996, just as the Internet was becoming part of daily life in America, the U.S. Army published “Field Manual 100-6,” which spoke of “an expanding information domain termed the Global Information Environment” that contains “information processes and systems that are beyond the direct influence of the military.” Military commanders needed to understand that “information dominance” in the “GIE” would henceforth be a crucial element for “operating effectively.”
You’ll often see it implied that “information operations” are only practiced by America’s enemies, because only America’s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to “overcome military limitations.” We rarely hear about America’s own lengthy history with “active measures” and “information operations,” but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat.
Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding “hybrid warfare” is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of “war” or “peace,” the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America’s “open” information landscape is little more than military weakness.
In March of 2017, in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on hybrid war, chairman Mac Thornberry opened the session with ominous remarks, suggesting that in the wider context of history, an America built on constitutional principles of decentralized power might have been badly designed:
Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives…
Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests…
The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.
Around that same time, i.e. shortly after the election of Donald Trump, it was becoming gospel among the future leaders of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” that interference by “malign foreign threat actors” and the vicissitudes of Western domestic politics must be linked. Everything, from John Podesta’s emails to Trump’s Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events.
This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions.
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.
They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”
Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”
Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned “Sphere of Influence” review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to “get it right”:
In place of competition, the groups we’ve been tracking favor the concept of the “shared endeavor” (one British group has even started a “Shared Endeavour” program), in which key “stakeholders” hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.
Who are the leaders of these messaging campaigns? If you care to ask, the groups below are a good place to start.
“The Top 50 List” is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons. There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same “hairball” graphs.
Where they compete, often, is in the area of gibberish verbiage describing their respective analytical methods. My favorite came from the Public Good Projects, which in a display of predictive skills reminiscent of the “unsinkable Titanic” described itself as the “Buzzfeed of public health.”
Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of “balance” between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary,” which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.”
Without further ado, an introduction to the main players in this “CIC”:
1. Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University (formerly, First Draft):
Type: A university institute, housed within the School of Public Health, to combat “misinformation” and “outdated communications practices.” The successor to First Draft, one of the earliest and more prominent “anti-disinformation” outfits.
You may have read about them when: You first heard the terms Mis-, dis-, and malinformation. The term was coined by FD Director Claire Wardle. IFL/FD are also the only academic/non-profit organization involved in the Trusted News Initiative, a large-scale legacy media consortium established to control debate around the pandemic response. Wardle was Twitter executives’ first pick for a signal group of anti-misinformation advisors it put together. She also participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden laptop tabletop in August 2020 (before the laptop story broke). IFL’s co-founder Stefanie Friedhoff serves on the White House Covid-19 Response Team. First Draft staffers were also revealed in the #TwitterFiles to be frequent and trusted partners to a leading public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, now of Stanford University.
What we know about funding: First Draft was funded by a huge number of entities including Craig Newmark, Rockefeller, the National Science Foundation, Facebook, the Ford Foundation, Google, the Knight Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, Open Society Foundations, and more. Funding for the IFL includes the Rockefeller Foundation for a “building vaccine demand” initiative.
What they do/What they are selling: IFL/First Draft position themselves as the vanguard of disinformation studies, acting as key advisors to media, technology, and public health consortiums, bringing together a wide range of academic skill sets.
Characteristic/worldview quotes: High use of terms like coordinated inauthentic behavior, information pollution, the future Homeland Security catchwords mis-, dis-, and malinformation, and information disorder.
In the #TwitterFiles: First Draft is featured extensively in the files. They were the first proposed name when Twitter decided to assemble a small group of “trusted people to come together to talk about what they’re seeing,” were part of the Aspen Institute’s Burisma tabletop, and appeared in multiple emails with Pentagon officials.
Goofy graphage:
Closely connected to: Almost all the leading lights of the CIC, including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Trusted News Initiative, Shorenstein Center, DFRLabs, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Institute, Meedan, and Bellingcat.
In sum: With a strong ability to both know and direct emerging trends, and with a large array of elite networks in tow, the IFL will continue to serve as one of the key tastemakers in the “anti-disinformation” field.
Type: Medium-sized non-profit specializing in technology and countering “disinformation.”
You may have read about them when: Meedan ran a range of Covid-19 misinformation initiatives “to support pandemic fact-checking efforts” with funding from BigTech, the Omidyar Foundation, the National Science Foundation and more. Partners included Britain’s now-disgraced Behavioural Insights Team, or “nudge unit,” known for scaring the pants off Brits about a range of medical manias. Among Meedan’s “anti-disinformation” projects is an effort to peer into private, encrypted messages. The Meedan board includes Tim Hwang (former Substack General Counsel), free speech skeptic Zeynep Tufecki, and Maria Ressa, a Nobel Prize winner with very close ties to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and the National Endowment for Democracy. Ressa believes Wikileaks “isn’t journalism.” Meedan co-founder Muna AbuSulayman was the founding Secretary General of the Saudi Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation. Alwaleed bin Talal is one of the largest shareholders in Twitter, both pre-Elon Musk and now, with Musk.
What we know about funding: Widespread public and private funding including from Omidyar, Twitter, Facebook, Google, the National Science Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and more.
What they do/What they are selling: Meedan positions itself as an NGO leader in the “anti-disinformation” field; convening networks, developing technology, and establishing new initiatives. Strong support and development are given to “fact-checking” organizations and building the technology to support them.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “Detection of controversial and hateful content.”
Gibberish verbiage: “Our work shows that there are far more matches between tipline content and public group messages on WhatsApp than between public group messages and either published fact checks or open social media content.”
Connected to: Twitter, Factcheck.org, AuCoDe, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Behavioral Insights Team, the Oxford Internet Institute, Stanford Internet Observatory, and First Draft.
In sum: Meedan exemplifies the NGO-to-Stasi stylistic shift, where spying and snitching on private messages in the name of “anti-disinformation” is now considered a public good.
3. Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (Technology and Social Change Project)
Type: An elite academic project once regarded as one of the leading centers in the “anti-disinformation” field.
You may have read about them when: It was announced that the center would be closed in 2024 on the spurious grounds that project lead Joan Donovan lacked sufficient academic credentials to run the initiative (what was spurious is that it took that long for this realization to come about). Donovan was already widely known for partisanship and getting things wrong, in particular repeatedly claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was not genuine. The Shorenstein Center birthed two other key “anti-disinformation” initiatives, the aforementioned First Draft and the Algorithmic Transparency Initiative. Cameron Hickey, ATI’s lead, is now CEO of the much larger National Congress on Citizenship. In this video, Joan Donavan sits alongside Richard Stengel, the first head of the Global Engagement Center, an agency housed in the State Department with a remit to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” The closing of the Technology and Social Change Project is a minor victory in an otherwise exploding field.
What we know about funding: Money from: the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook Journalism Project, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
What they do/What they are selling: Academic research into “disinformation,” a fellows program, field convening, and frequent media commentary. The Shorenstein Center also produces a leading “misinformation studies” journal.
Characteristic/worldview quote: Donovan’s infamous tweet, posed with an Atlantic staffer: “Me and @cwarzel Looking at the content on the Hunter Biden Laptop, the most popular straw man question at #Disinfo2022.”
Closely connected to: First Draft, Algorithmic Transparency Initiative/NCoC, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Data and Society, and the Aspen Institute.
In sum: An “anti-disinformation” project that got it wrong so often, even the center that housed it cut ties.
Type: Non-profit consultancy, specializing in health communications, marketing, technology and “disinformation.”
You may have read about them when: Whilst PGP seem to do some front-facing work, they are also guns for hire for a large range of corporate and government programs. Twitter files show PGP had contracts with biotech lobby group BIO (whose members include Pfizer and Moderna) to run the Stronger campaign, which according to Lee Fang “worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid ‘misinformation.’” Jennifer McDonald of Twitter’s Public Policy team noted in an email that PGP was also among Twitter’s four “strongest information sharing partnerships” for Covid “misinformation”. PGP partnered with UNICEF on the Vaccine Demand Observatory which aims to “decrease the impact of misinformation and increase vaccine demand around the world.” The board includes the former CEO of Pepsi and Levi’s, a Morgan Stanley Vice-President, and Merck Pharmaceuticals’ Director of Public Health Partnerships.
What we know about funding: $1.25 million from BIO as well as partnerships with Google, Rockefeller, and UNICEF.
What they do/What they are selling: A suite of communications activities including marketing, research, media production, social media monitoring, vaccine promotion, and campaigns. They also use AI and natural language processing to “identify, track, and respond to narratives, trends, and urgent issues” in order to “perform fact-checking” and “power behavior change strategies.”
Type: For-profit firm with defense connections specializing in “digital marketing and disinformation & analysis.”
You may have read about them when: Graphika was one of two outside groups hired in 2017 by the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess the Russian cyber menace. Graphika was also a “core four” partner to Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership and its Virality Project, both subjects of #TwitterFiles reports. Made headlines for claiming a leak of US-UK trade discussions, publicized by Jeremy Corbyn, was part of an operation called “secondary Infektion” traceable to Russia.
Former Director of Investigations Ben Nimmo was previously a NATO press officer and DFRLabs fellow, and is now Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead. Head of Innovation Camille Francois was previously Google Jigsaw’s principal researcher.
What we know about funding: $3 million from the Department of Defense for 2020-2022, “to support and stimulate basic and applied research and technology at educational institutions”; boasts of partnerships with the Defense Advanced Partnerships Research Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force. According to USAspending.gov, defense agencies have provided almost $7 million.
What they do/What they are selling: Long-form reports and subscription services for corporate and governmental clients, often focused on identifying “leading influencers” and “misinformation and disinformation risks,” along with highly sophisticated AI for surveilling social media.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true.”
Gibberish verbiage: Tendency to impressively horrific puns (“More-troll Kombat,” “Lights, Camera, Coordinated Action!” “Step into my Parler”).
In the #TwitterFiles: In 2017-2018, Twitter was unaware the Senate Intelligence Committee would be sharing their data on supposed Russia-linked accounts with commercial entities.
In sum: With deep Pentagon ties and a patina of public-facing commercial legitimacy, Graphika is set up to be the Rand Corporation of the Anti-Disinformation age.
Connected to: Stanford Internet Observatory, DFRLabs, Department of Defense, DARPA, Knight Foundation, Bellingcat
Type: Public-facing disinformation research arm of highly influential, extravagantly funded, NATO-aligned think tank, the Atlantic Council.
You may have read about them when: In May of 2018, Facebook announced a “New Election Partnership With the Atlantic Council,” to “prevent our service from being abused during elections.” The announcement was made by former National Republican Senatorial Committee Chief Digital Strategist Katie Harbath, weeks after a contentious hearing in the Senate in which Mark Zuckerberg answered questions about the “abuse of data” on Facebook. The Atlantic Council’s DFRLabs at the time included such figures as Eliot Higgins (from Bellingcat) and Ben Nimmo, future Director of Investigations at Graphika. This became a watershed moment, as Facebook soon after announced a series of purges of accountsaccused of “coordinated inauthentic activity,” including small indie sites like Anti-Media, End The War on Drugs, ‘Murica Today, Reverb, and Anonymous News, beginning an era of mass deletions.
DFRLab was a core partner for Stanford’s “Election Integrity Partnership,” and the “Virality Project.” The Atlantic Council also organizes the elite 360/Open Summit whose 2018 disinformation edition included the private Vanguard-25 forum that brought together Madeleine Albright, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the head of the Munich Security Conference, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, Edelman (the world’s biggest PR company), Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Bellingcat, Graphika, and more.
What we know about funding: “DFRLab has received grants from the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center that support programming with an exclusively international focus,” Graham Brookie of DFRLabs told Racket. The Atlantic Council receives funding from the U.S. Army and Navy, Blackstone, Raytheon, Lockheed, the NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence and a long list of other financial, military, and diplomatic entities.
Characteristic/worldview quote: On “rumors about Covid-19s origins,” particularly the “disinformation” that the virus may have originated in a laboratory: “The cumulative effect of this was to distract the U.S. public’s attention away from the federal government’s disjointed approach to mitigating the virus and point the blame at China.”
Gibberish verbiage: Awesome quantities; site seethes at public’s unwillingness to popularize nom d’équipe “Digital Sherlocks”; insists so often it is relying only on “open-source information” that one doubts it; relies heavily on schlock military (“Narrative Arms Race”) and medical (“Infodemic”) metaphors to describe disinformation threat.
In sum: DFRLabs is not only funded by the Global Engagement Center, and had initial GEC chief Richard Stengel as a fellow, but uses substantial state and corporate resources to evangelize GEC’s “ecosystem” theory of disinformation, which holds that views that overlap with foreign threat actors are themselves part of the threat.
Connected to: the Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, Bellingcat, and the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics
Byron Donalds interrupted by Anderson Cooper in heated argument after Trump town hall: Voters 'tired of y'all'
GOP Rep. Byron Donalds was interrupted multiple times on CNN after he defended former President Donald Trump's appearance on the network's town hall special.CNN Photo.
Views: 25
Byron Donalds has heated argument with CNN host after Trump town hall: Voters ‘tired of y’all’ ‘Town halls are for the voters, not for the press or the person who is the moderator,’ Donalds told the CNN panel.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., battled with CNN commentators and hosts Anderson Cooper, Van Jones and Alyssa Farah Griffin after the network aired a live town hall with former President Donald Trump.
“Town halls are for the voters, not for the press or the person who is the moderator,” Donalds said, slamming CNN host Kaitlan Collins for imposing her own views on the public during Wednesday night’s town hall featuring Trump.
“Kaitlan spent more time interjecting her own viewpoints or her own views on the situation,” Donalds said before Cooper interrupted him.
“Those are actually facts, though,” the CNN veteran told Donalds.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., battled with CNN commentators and host Anderson Cooper after the network aired a live town hall with former President Donald Trump. (Screenshot / CNN)
“Hold on,” Donalds shot back. “Are you guys now going to interject your views on me, or do I get a chance to speak?” Donalds said as Cooper continued to speak in the background.
“If you’re speaking falsely, those are facts,” Cooper told Donalds.
Donalds also criticized Collins’ focus on the Jan. 6 protests at the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
“Voters want to talk about the border, inflation, foreign policy,” Donalds said as multiple CNN panelists asked if he believed the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. (Screenshot / CNN)
“Voters want to talk about the border, inflation, foreign policy,” Donalds said as multiple CNN panelists asked if he believed the 2020 presidential election was legitimate.
“This is what’s frustrating to a lot of people. You want me to state it the way you want me to state it,” Donalds said.
“You do acknowledge Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, correct?” Farah Griffin, a former top Trump White House aide, asked.
“Hold on… let me tell you why most voters are frankly kind of tired of y’all bringing this up,” Donalds replied, arguing that American voters were more interested in inflation and crime than on the 2020 election.
Donalds’ wife, Erika Donalds, defended him on Twitter after his appearance Wednesday on CNN.
“So proud of my husband on CNN tonight, interjecting large doses of TRUTH in the middle of their ridiculous biases and rude interruptions,” she wrote.
Trump’s town hall appearance has inflamed his opponents online, with anti-Trump Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson saying that the event was “unf—ing believable” and a “disaster of the highest f—ing degree.” Wilson also said that Trump has cemented himself as the clear frontrunner and Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race.
The clip of Donalds arguing with the CNN panel after Trump’s town hall special has gone viral online, picking up over 1.1 million views and 18,400 likes on Twitter alone.
“The American people aren’t speaking about the 2020 election, a liable case after 25+ years, or January 6th. They are talking about the price of gas/groceries, fentanyl killing Americans 18-45, crime in the streets, & the fear of WWIII. CNN’s top issues aren’t America’s,” Donalds tweeted after his CNN appearance.
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
Winning. Twitter goes after misinformation from the extreme left. Can you hear the howling coming from the fanatics on the left? State affiliated, Misinformation, Fake News, just some of the labels being put on some of the old dinosaurs on the extreme left.
Fact checking the Pinocchio guy at the WP. Taking NY Times blue check away .Labeling NPR State Affiliated. Anthe future.d I’m sure we will see more in
Olbermann is delusional. In February he demanded Fox News be deplatformed and Shut down For 'National Security' Now he's accusing Trump of Threatening to kill Manhatttan DA Bragg, and never let out on bail.
Views: 40
Former MSNBC and ESPN and the defunct Al Gore-owned Current TV anchor, Keith Olbermann called for Fox News to be shut down and de-platformed back in February.
The belligerent fascist, who is known for losing high-profile jobs and for his unhinged Twitter rants, referred to the network as a “threat” to the country’s security in a Twitter video he used to advertise his podcast.
In a screed in Late February against the Fox network, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia,the deranged leftist portrayed releasing all available footage from the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion as a bad thing.
McCarthy offered thousands of hours of videos to Carlson in a show of transparency. According to Olbermann, the act is one that will assist the “next insurrectionists.”
Olbermann also referred to Greene as a “traitor” in the short clip.
“She was raised on a diet of Fox News,” he claimed of the Georgia lawmaker, who was well into her twenties when Fox News was founded.
Olbermann went on to call for the country’s most-watched cable news network to be muzzled. “Now that Fox’s true evil has been revealed in the Dominion lawsuit, and Fox’s true evil has been revealed while Kevin McCarthy has turned over 41,000 hours of Jan. 6 surveillance video to Tucker Carlson — exclusively — so he can show the next insurrectionists how to avoid all those cameras and reach all those panic rooms,” he said.
“The time has now come,” Olbermann concluded. “We must de-platform Fox news, and we must close down Fox News.”
And if you watched formerly relevant sportscaster and cable news anchor Keith Olbermann’s unhinged Twitter rant on Friday (3/24/23) morning, you might be under the impression that former President Donald Trump made “terroristic threats.” [See video clip posted on Twitter HERE. ]
Naturally, that is not true.
The perennially unemployed host at networks such as ESPN, MSNBC, and the defunct Al Gore-owned Current TV relies on hyperbole to get his messages across on social media these days.
Actually, it is generous to say he is engaging in mere hyperbole, as he could just as well be completely insane.
Olbermann was begging people to listen to his podcast on Friday and took a few creative liberties in a Twitter video, calling for Trump to be jailed immediately and held without bail.
He claimed the former president threatened to kill Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office might or might not indict Trump in the coming days or weeks.
“Donald Trump must be arrested for his terroristic threats against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg,” Olbermann said. “In social media posts yesterday, Trump called him [an] ‘animal.’”
Olbermann also said Trump posted a photo of himself threatening Bragg with a baseball bat.
Note that the picture Olbermann uses clearly shows that the thing is a link to Nationalfile.com.
“It is a call to murder by stochastic terrorism, a murder by remote control as disgusting as Charles Manson,” Olbermann blathered. “Arrest Trump now.”
Olbermann said Trump is an “active, mortal threat” to those investigating him — and any “witnesses.”
“Trump cannot be granted bail,” he concluded.
Where did Olbermann cook up his wild theories? He cruised the former president’s very public Truth Social account and cherry-picked the following posts as proof that Trump is now a terrorist:
As for that “threatening” photo Trump supposedly posted of himself with a baseball bat — it was a link Trump shared from the site National File, which had reported that Bragg was elected in a race with low turnout.
Quite obviously, the person who should be locked up is not Trump but Olbermann as a danger to himself and others. Olbermann’s star has fallen dramatically. The man is so detached from reality that even MSNBC recently rebuffed his advances.
So it is quite alarming that he was given such a large platform by the establishment media just a few years ago.
Lock them up. Hillary and Barack were never charged. Supposedly Trump will be charged with using campaign money to make a bribe to a former hooker. Yes the same person who was ordered to pay $300 K to Trump in a defamation lawsuit.
But Obama and Clinton both paid six figure fines and no charges were brought against them for admitting to illegally using campaign money. In the Trump case, he wasn’t the one who paid the Hooker.
This will end up going nowhere, but for the left it makes good theater. What else do they have to do?
This will likely backfire for the far-left Manhattan DA and result in skyrocketing fundraising and poll numbers for Trump. In August, when the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) conducted a raid on Mar-A-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida, contributions to Trump’s political action committee skyrocketed over one million dollars in two days.
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“I did the calculation,” testified Steve Kirsch in front of the Pennsylvania State Senate.
As for that “threatening” photo Trump supposedly posted of himself with a baseball bat — it was a link Trump shared from the site National File, which had reported that Bragg was elected in a race with low turnout.
