Source; https://wethepeopleusa.ning.com/forum/topics/fact-checkers-spread-political-disinformation
Source;
Sent: 3/3/2023 9:40:30 AM Eastern Standard Time
Subject: Believe them
Author: A Friend Named Roger
Fact-Checkers Spread Political Disinformation
Hunter Biden’s Laptop. Days before the 2020 presidential election, social media outlets infamously censored embarrassing details of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which indicated that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his son’s lucrative foreign business deals. Twitter forbade users from sharing Miranda Devine’s NY Post story and prevented the nation’s oldest newspaper from posting anything for days. Facebook censors admitted they did not feel they needed to prove the story false before suppressing it. “While I will intentionally not link to the NYPost, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform,” wrote Meta Policy Communications Director andy stone, a former employee of the democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and ex-Senator Boxer (D-Calif.).
Within hours of Devine’s original story, the FBI and Justice Department confirmed the veracity of the laptop and its contents to Fox News. In time, The ny times, CBS News, and other outlets would verify some or all of the laptop story. Even Hunter Biden tacitly admitted ownership of his abandoned computer by suing those who reported on its contents. It later emerged that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security had been grooming social media companies for months to see the hunter biden laptop story as an act of Russian disinformation carried out by the Kremlin’s intelligence unit APT28.
BObamacare. PolitiFact rated BObama’s whopper that, under BObamacare, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” true 6 times. After the Affordable Care act became law, millions of Americans (including this author) saw their private health insurance plans canceled due to its terms. PF later crowned BObama’s statement its 2013 lie of the year.
Abortion. YouTube currently tags every video about abortion with this message: “An abortion is a procedure to end a pregnancy. It uses medicine or surgery to remove the embryo or fetus and placenta from the uterus. The procedure is done by a licensed healthcare professional.” But this is itself misinformation. In the most common form of abortion in America, chemical abortion, the mother self-administers her own abortion by taking two pills without the supervision of any health care professional — often completely alone. In many cases, the woman never met any medical professional. planned parenthood opposes the “unnecessary in-person dispensing requirement,” which it calls “particularly dangerous.”
Planned Parenthood. For years, elected officials and planned parenthood employees claimed that the nation’s largest abortion provider performs mammograms. Casey Mattox, a constitutional attorney then with the Alliance Defending Freedom, offered a bona fide fact check to these claims by pointing out, “Zero Planned Parenthood facilities are licensed to do mammograms.” He then directed PolitiFact to the FDA’s list of facilities licensed to provide mammograms. A Planned Parenthood spokesperson “confirmed [that the] organization does not provide mammograms at any of its health centers,” PolitiFact reported. Yet PolitiFact rated Mattox’s incontrovertible statement “Half True,” deeming it “partially accurate but misleading without additional details.” The “context” he allegedly left out is that some planned parenthood facilities refer patients to medical professionals who actually perform mammograms (for which they charge the patient, or taxpayers). Some planned parenthoods also carry out an ever-decreasing number of breast exams. (Planned Parenthood completed 173,653 acts of “breast care” in 2020-2021, down sharply from 830,312 in 2009.) The washington post, to its credit, has admitted the abortion industry does not perform this life-saving procedure.
Tim Scott’s Family History. In 2021, Republicans tapped Senator Scott (R-S.C.) to offer the rebuttal to President biden’s joint address to Congress. Senator Scott used the opportunity to push back against critical race theory, presenting America as the land of opportunity. “My grandfather in his 94 years saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” Scott said. The washington post’s glenn kessler ran a “fact check”claiming that Scott’s story was “missing some nuance” about his own family’s history, including the fact that his great-grandfather was “a substantial landowner.” kessler later confessed the records he used for his account “may not entirely show what life was like for black farmers in South Carolina” during Jim Crow. What accounts for these wildly inaccurate “corrections,” all of which favor the lib/dem spectrum? The answer lies in a combination of government coercion, political maneuverings, and anti-conservative bias.
Government Pressure Meets Left-Wing Bias
Being struck with an online fact check carries serious consequences for the story, its outlet, and America’s political landscape. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, revealed in 2018 that flagging news stories as false “means they lose around 80% of any future views. We also demote pages and domains that repeatedly share false news.” Throttling or banning the free flow of information greatly impacts the functioning of a democratic republic. Had voters in just six swing states known about the hunter biden laptop story, it would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election, according to a survey from the Media Research Center.
Given these results, it makes sense that political campaigns and incumbent governments would encourage social media to fact-check their enemies as frequently as possible — and that is precisely what the biden regime and campaign (to the extent they can be distinguished) have done. At least “two dozen staffers” of the White House’s (taxpayer-funded) Office of Digital Strategy — in addition to members of the Democratic National Committee’s Counter Disinformation Program and the Biden-aligned group Building Back Together (BBT) — “have assumed different roles in monitoring and determining what content is consumed on social media,” according to Politico. Their jobs include “encouraging different sites to fact-check false content.” Although BBT launched a campaign against conservative disinformation, its leaders have a history of spreading partisan fiction, including producing the steele Dossier and falsely blaming then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for a cancer-stricken woman’s death.
Much of the government’s coercion of social media emerged only after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and commissioned journalists to make its private records public. Batches of The Twitter Files have revealed a backdoor portal that government officials used to mark posts — and users’ accounts — for moderation, stealth censorship, or removal, in a possible violation of the law. Government employees submitted so many content moderation requests that the FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million just for processing them.
They could have saved the taxpayers’ money: Evidence suggests Silicon Valley’s social media employees would have skewed the results for free — and frequently did. Numerous facebook news curators admitted they deliberately prevented conservative stories from appearing in the website’s “trending” news section. They also refused to post links to right-leaning websites, waiting until stories they could not ignore had been verified by legacy media outlets. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” one former facebook contractor told Gizmodo in 2016.
Similarly, former PolitiFact employees admit fact-checkers began with a predetermined conclusion and made a prosecutor’s case on its behalf. “They were employing double standards. They were using straw men. They were presetting the rating before they talked to people,” Brian Riedl, a Manhattan Institute fellow who worked at PolitiFact in the late 2000s, told The Daily Wire. “A lot of the same people are still there — and their ratings are a joke,” Riedl added. “Conservatives have a right to be suspicious of PolitiFact.”
Even if media gatekeepers wanted to play it straight, most lack the specialized knowledge necessary to evaluate the complex issues at hand. “We examined the educational credentials, including the highest degree listed, for 28 publicly identified staff members on NewsGuard’s website. The company’s staff page reveals shockingly little expertise in either the hard sciences such as medicine or social sciences such as public policy, economics, and related fields. 12 of the 28 listed staffers have primary degrees in journalism or media,” revealed Phillip W. Magness of AIER. “The 2nd-most represented subject area is English literature, with 4 degrees.”
liberal media critics and social media fact-checkers seem to admit that truth is not necessarily their only, or perhaps primary, criterion for classifying a story as true or false. In a taxpayer-funded attack on The Daily Wire in July 2021 NPR quoted Jaime Settle of the College of William & Mary saying that The Daily Wire’s stories “tend to not provide very much context for the information that they are providing. If you’ve stripped enough context away, any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation.” (Emphasis added.) By the fact-checkers’ criteria, facts are misinformation if they lack the fact-checkers’ “context,” which is to say, their secular-progressive worldview.
Further reading:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/23/how-the-media-successfully-programs-democrats/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-the-media-...
https://patriotpost.us/articles/95224-americans-dont-trust-the-media-except-dot-dot-dot-2023-02-24
If you want to see media bias, look at how the press covered this crazy Biden handout
https://apple.news/AZesWWvWPQeqkwdnqO2mx6A
Dominion CEO John Poulos told Staple Street partner and co-founder in December 2020, amid media coverage of Trump’s allegations about the election, that “no customer cares about the media. It’s just more words from their perspective.”
Dominion has advanced “novel defamation theories” and is seeking a “staggering” damage figure aimed at generating headlines, chilling protected speech and enriching Dominion’s private equity owner, Staple Street Capital Partners, and its investors.
“Dominion brought this lawsuit to punish FNN for reporting on one of the biggest stories of the day-allegations by the sitting President of the United States and his surrogates that the 2020 election was affected by fraud,” the counterclaim states. “The very fact of those allegations was newsworthy.”
Fox attorneys argue that when voting-technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials, while some Fox News hosts offered protected opinion commentary about Trump’s allegations.
Fox’s counterclaim is based on New York’s “anti-SLAAP” law. Such laws are aimed at protecting people trying to exercise their First Amendment rights from being intimidated by “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or SLAP
“According to Dominion, FNN had a duty not to truthfully report the President’s allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false,” Fox attorneys wrote. “Dominion is fundamentally mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be illusory if the prevailing side in a public controversy could sue the press for giving a forum to the losing side.”
Fox attorneys say Dominion’s own public relations consultant, Michael Steele of Hamilton Place Strategies, described Trump’s allegation about the election as “the biggest topic in the country at that time.” They also argue that threatening the company with a $1.6 billion judgment will cause other media outlets to think twice about what they report.
“Dominion could not possibly suffer damages in that amount, let alone suffer such damages because of a single press outlet’s coverage of a story that was reported by media throughout the world,” Fox attorneys wrote. Documents produced in the lawsuit show that Dominion has not suffered any economic harm and do not indicate that it lost any customers as the result of Fox’s election coverage.
Americans who don’t trust “the other side” somehow trust their own. There’s a great case to be made about how “they lie,” but where’s your objective evidence that “we tell the truth”? Too many of us determine — correctly, in many cases — that those talking heads on the cable channels we never watch are liars and that the politicians they support are cheats, yet have no problem concluding that those on the channels we do watch are telling us the truth, and the candidates we support are too.
Further reading:
Maher: NYT Is 'Very Woke' and Their Newsroom Is 'Not a Balanced Place'
https://apple.news/AqHghJU7oNSacGYnVNItJ6w
Media censorship of hunter biden laptop story was horrible and then it got even worse
https://apple.news/AtuhwTYG8SGiNefayXrexLA
https://www.clayandbuck.com/why-nobody-trusts-the-media-truth-is-not-the-point/
Dominion has advanced “novel defamation theories” and is seeking a “staggering” damage figure aimed at generating headlines, chilling protected speech and enriching Dominion’s private equity owner, Staple Street Capital Partners, and its investors.
“Dominion brought this lawsuit to punish FNN for reporting on one of the biggest stories of the day-allegations by the sitting President of the United States and his surrogates that the 2020 election was affected by fraud,” the counterclaim states. “The very fact of those allegations was newsworthy.”
Fox attorneys argue that when voting-technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials, while some Fox News hosts offered protected opinion commentary about Trump’s allegations.
Fox’s counterclaim is based on New York’s “anti-SLAAP” law. Such laws are aimed at protecting people trying to exercise their First Amendment rights from being intimidated by “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or SLAP
“According to Dominion, FNN had a duty not to truthfully report the President’s allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false,” Fox attorneys wrote. “Dominion is fundamentally mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be illusory if the prevailing side in a public controversy could sue the press for giving a forum to the losing side.”
Fox attorneys say Dominion’s own public relations consultant, Michael Steele of Hamilton Place Strategies, described Trump’s allegation about the election as “the biggest topic in the country at that time.” They also argue that threatening the company with a $1.6 billion judgment will cause other media outlets to think twice about what they report.
“Dominion could not possibly suffer damages in that amount, let alone suffer such damages because of a single press outlet’s coverage of a story that was reported by media throughout the world,” Fox attorneys wrote. Documents produced in the lawsuit show that Dominion has not suffered any economic harm and do not indicate that it lost any customers as the result of Fox’s election coverage.
Americans who don’t trust “the other side” somehow trust their own. There’s a great case to be made about how “they lie,” but where’s your objective evidence that “we tell the truth”? Too many of us determine — correctly, in many cases — that those talking heads on the cable channels we never watch are liars and that the politicians they support are cheats, yet have no problem concluding that those on the channels we do watch are telling us the truth, and the candidates we support are too.
Further reading:
Defectors from Left Media Deserve 3 Cheers
https://apple.news/AtWc7MoNEM7Sb-kxhCT2FJw
https://apple.news/AtWc7MoNEM7Sb-kxhCT2FJw
Maher: NYT Is 'Very Woke' and Their Newsroom Is 'Not a Balanced Place'
https://apple.news/AqHghJU7oNSacGYnVNItJ6w
Media censorship of hunter biden laptop story was horrible and then it got even worse
https://apple.news/AtuhwTYG8SGiNefayXrexLA
https://www.clayandbuck.com/why-nobody-trusts-the-media-truth-is-not-the-point/
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