Friday, September 14, 2018
Headlines for Sept. 14, 2018
Click here to listen to this week's segment on Loud & Clear Radio.
Headlines with an * are the ones we managed to fit in in our allotted 11 minutes.
Worst, Most Misleading & Funniest Headlines (WMMFH) -- Sept. 14, 2018
CANDIDATES FOR “WORST”/”MOST DISGUSTING”:
This week’s “Fake News By Omission”:
YouTube shuts down pro-Syrian government channels
A real, easily-verifiable story carried by NO “mainstream” news outlets
Contrast to:
U.S. Says Syria Plans Gas Attack in Rebel Stronghold
A completely unverifiable story which appeared in all major media, based on “new intelligence”, “officials said”. The very definition of propaganda (and also of stenography).
*Another hurricane is about to batter our coast. Trump is complicit.
We hate Trump probably a lot more than the WaPo editorial board, but really? Trump is a climate change denier and doing his best to undo regulations, but I’m pretty sure that between Jan. 2017 and now there is no action he or Al Gore himself could have taken or not taken that would have changed the severity of Hurricane Florence. This is just a manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
*Opioid billionaire granted patent for addiction treatment
Capitalism in one headline. “Richard Sackler, whose family owns Purdue Pharma, the company behind the notorious painkiller OxyContin, was granted a patent earlier this year for a reformulation of a drug used to wean addicts off opioids.”
Government erred in claiming accused Russian spy Maria Butina offered to trade sex for political access
Butina is charged with being an unregistered foreign agent, not a “spy”.
MOST ASTONISHING!
As U.S.-backed forces renew Yemen offensive, U.N. warns of ‘incalculable human cost’
Probably the first time that “US-backed” has been used in a headline to describe the Saudi/US offensive in Yemen.
CANDIDATES FOR “MOST MISLEADING”:
*Iran Develops a $5 Billion Weapon to Fight Sanctions
The “weapon”? An investment fund that is buying things around the world, like a bankrupt French pharmaceutical company.
Hurricane Florence raises questions about link between climate change, severe storms
From the headline you would think this was a climate change denial story. It isn’t. The person interviewed says quite clearly “It is clear that the most extreme rainfall events have increased in frequency, and this is consistent with our understanding of how global warming will change the weather”, before adding that “there's no evidence that climate change is making hurricanes more frequent” (because there isn’t enough data).
*Facebook’s idea of ‘fact-checking’: Censoring ThinkProgress because conservative site told them to
The Weekly Standard, one of FB's new "fact-checkers", claims that ThinkProgress' headline "Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed", is "false" because he never "said" that. ThinkProgress's piece argues that two different things he said, one at the confirmation hearing and another in 2017, taken together clearly suggest that he would.
There are serious consequences for publishing an article that one of Facebook’s third-party fact checkers decrees to be false.
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote in the Washington Post, “we demote posts rated as false, which means they lose 80 percent of future traffic.”
When an article is labeled false under Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system, groups that share that article on Facebook receives a notification informing them that the article received a “False Rating” and that “pages and websites” that share that piece “will see their overall distribution and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.”
US F-22 fighter jets intercept Russian bombers near Alaska
How close? Well, somewhere between 12 miles (U.S. territorial waters) and 200 miles (the US Air Defense Identification Zone). Also known as “international air space”, i.e., a place where Russian planes are flying perfectly legally. If it was 200 miles, the Russian planes could have literally been over Russian territory (though I'm sure they weren't).
CANDIDATES FOR “FUNNIEST”:
NOT A NEW STORY, UNFORTUNATELY, JUST ONE THAT RESURFACED ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Trump gets 2 scoops of ice cream, everyone else gets 1
Hard-hitting investigative reporting from CNN (kidding, it's actually an article about an interview he did in Time. Interestingly enough, in Time’s own 2500-word article summarizing the interview, the subject of ice cream does not appear; it appears in a separate “Inside the White House” article that resulted from Trump giving 3 Time reporters a tour of the White House and a 4-course dinner).
An interesting display of how media can see the same news in two different ways, from the front page of Google News:
