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http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/
December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Woellert published a shocking essay
claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin,
had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-
cent payment error.” According to Woellert: “After confusion over
insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423
.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents.
Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank
foreclosed.”
The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on
Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300
retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David
Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.
The problem? The central scandalous claims of Woellert’s article were
simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed
out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home.
Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”
Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the
damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets
including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York
Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.
January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball
On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not
happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance
would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy
Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without
explaining the mistake they had made.
January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’
Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport
published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the
Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from
the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the
“purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not
unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority
between administrations.
To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual
dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-
burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that
was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only
thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many
readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe
something that simply wasn’t true.
January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy
On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther
King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of
controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it
, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust
had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for
it and had not seen it.”
January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter
During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was
asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC
News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to
decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it
to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that
there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”
This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply
pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and
attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every
American school is imprudent.
How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos
Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot
Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears
” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states
should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in
schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (
ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools …
because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she
supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s
Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In
Schools” (BuzzFeed).
The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never
said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them
might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the
necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education
system.
Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a
fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.
January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department
On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be
a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior
management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was
“part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don
’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “
suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of
administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of
the Trump administration.
The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times
on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a
staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it
retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The
Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other
publications tweeted the story out in shock.
There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox
pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘
management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were
resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “
management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it
left the “management” language intact in the article itself).
More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department,
put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition,
the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one,
requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.
” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump
administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few
months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.
As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news
itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on
Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin
’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.
January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair
On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of
Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands
bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral,
being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator
Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.
The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been
shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that
she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her
correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.
January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax
Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story
that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime.
The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter.
Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any
appreciable degree.
January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake
Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN
Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House
was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.”
He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a
theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest
nominees for the court vacancy.
Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in
an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on
Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts
…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the
admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny
’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.
January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie
On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A
local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the
US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under
President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately
Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home,
she died from an illness.”
Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it
was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article
itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the
Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media
personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and
thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel
Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta,
Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and
Farhad Manjoo.
The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal
media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist
Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.
There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his
mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research
to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly
corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale
hysteria.
February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico
On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone
call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The
report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S
. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it
acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation.
The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “
invade Mexico.”
Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared
this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700
times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the
story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade
Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.
Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on
Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000
times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times.
On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was
serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the
BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher,
comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.
February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions
Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the
following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to
allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.
” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump
administration was cozying up to Russia.
A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with
] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid
unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’
s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has
fewer than 250.
At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration
modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes
it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix
that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the
Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did
the New York Daily News.
In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the
Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune
put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the
hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major
change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”
February 2: Renaming Black History Month
At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States,
Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.”
Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “
senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black”
to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February
as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.
The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared
February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly
updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.
February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures
On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media
firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on
background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,
000 times.
The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun
background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap
Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background
check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background
check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background
checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).
Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less
misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental
illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background
checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the
Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).
The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all
of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly
tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of
certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and
Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage
these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National
Instant Criminal Background Check System.
If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives
SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of
mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from
purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the
rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)
As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed
by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc
of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of
Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery
; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.
The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly
misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that
nobody understood—was a public disservice.
As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the
ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a
question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least
prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to
cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”
Maybe It’s Time to Stop Reading Fake News
Surely more incidents have happened since Trump was elected; doubtlessly
there are many more to come. To be sure, some of these incidents are larger
and more shameful than others, and some are smaller and more mundane.
But all of them, taken as a group, raise a pressing and important question:
why is this happening? Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly
debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our
national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this
point?
Perhaps the answer is: “We’ve let it.” The media will not stop behaving
in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.
That being said, there are two possible outcomes to this fake news crisis:
our media can get better, or they can get worse. If they get better, we
might actually see our press begin to hold the Trump administration (and
government in general) genuinely accountable for its many admitted faults.
If they refuse to fix these serial problems of gullibility, credulity,
outrage, and outright lying, then we will be in for a rough four years, if
not more.
No one single person can fix this problem. It has to be a cultural change, a
kind of shifting of priorities industry-wide. Journalists, media types,
reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can
watch your profession go down in flames.
Most of us are hoping devoutly for the former. But not even a month into the
presidency of Donald J. Trump, the outlook is dim. | f**a
发帖数: 2498 | 2 赞一个，版务们给马克一下吧。
since-trump-won/
423
【在 S*******h 的大作中提到】
: 请大家去各大社交网路转发辟谣。
: http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/
: December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
: At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Woellert published a shocking essay
: claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin,
: had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-
: cent payment error.” According to Woellert: “After confusion over
: insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423
: .30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents.
: Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank
| u****4
发帖数: 762 | 3 左左造谣无底线!!!!!
: 赞一个，版务们给马克一下吧。
: since-trump-won/
: 423
【在 f**a 的大作中提到】
: 赞一个，版务们给马克一下吧。
:
: since-trump-won/
: 423
| d***p
发帖数: 937 | 4 一帮职业造假者指责披露别人造假。
按照这个极右翼网站的标准，这个Federalist.com, national review 还有FoxNews天
天造假。 |
|
