FAKE NEWS EXPOSED: A Service of PoliticalChat.org
 

For all of you concerned about the proliferation of so-called "fake news" sites, I'm here to help. I know you're all so very concerned that "gullible people" might not be able to discern between internet news stories that are parodies versus those that are "real" and put out by "reputable" journalists. As patriotic Americans, we just can't let such misinformation go unchallenged.

So, I'll post here - for the world to see - news that is obviously fake, or certainly of questionable origin. We'll look at individual stories, and we'll look at sites that put out dubious information specifically designed to fool folks who might believe just about anything they read on the web.

Let's start with a trip down memory lane, and have a look at a couple of our old, whacky friends: those tricksters and politicsusa.com and the Huffington Post. I fear that these two "digital rags" have contributed mightily to the cases of "post-election stress syndrome" (PESS) that is so pervasive these days among folks who lean left in their views.

Here are a couple key examples of why PESS abounds:

The folks at politicsusa.com were merciless in fooling poor lefties, using dubious polling data (pollsters being another fertile source of fake news), polling that suggested Clinton was going to win last month's election.

Huffington Post is even more aggressive on this point, with information left on their website that suggests to some gullible folks that Hillary might yet pull out a win with more than a 5 point polling lead. In fact, they bravely declare that their modeling more than 99% of the time predicted a Clinton win. Maybe still fanning hope for an upset in the electoral college vote?

Now, fast forward. Fakenewswatch.com is a site that provides a service that identifies sites that publish fake news. The "bad" category is occupied by sites that are "FAKE/HOAX NEWS WEBSITES", defined as sites that "....are satire sites that are not funny. They are an attempt to play on gullible people who do not check sources and will just pass the news on as if it were really true."

Here's a story that comes from a site categorized as FAKE/HOAX NEWS": newsmutiny.com. newsmutiny.com describes itself as "Satire for the wise. News for the dumb." Horrifying.

A lead story today on newsmutiny.com is this one:

Trump Nominates Chris Christie Ambassador to Fatfuckistan

Now, in case there are some poor folks out there who believe this is true, as a service to our readers let me state that this is story is categorically false. The Trump folks have already stated that they will look to aggressively cut government spending. Since Mr. Christie insisted as a condition of acceptance for the ambassador role that the purchase of two adjacent seats for any government air travel to accommodate his girth was a requirement, Trump retracted the job offer.

I'm proud to support this effort to inform, and help counteract the corrosive impact of "fake news".

The right conflates opinions they disagree with, humor they don't get, and inaccurate polling with fake news in an effort to say "everybody's doing it" or "all news other than Fox News, Breitbart and talk radio are fake news." You've fallen for the scam. Congrats.

Meanwhile, Trump's National Security Advisor and Trump himself suck up this stuff like a vacuum cleaner and tweet it out to the masses and Trump installs one of the great purveyors of fake news as his primary White House policy advisor.

There, there Finn. It's OK. I know these are troubling times for you. I can see it in your posts. Its with folks like you in mind that this thread was created. I just want to help with your recovery and healing.

Trump was named "Person of the Year" by Time Magazine. I suspect you'll rush to make the lame point that Hitler and Stalin were once named Person of the Year as well, so I'll save you the trouble of embarrassing yourself with that, since its really not the point.

The point is the observation that the writer of the story makes about the electorate:

For those who believe this is all for the better, Trump’s victory represents a long-overdue rebuke to an entrenched and arrogant governing class; for those who see it as for the worse, the destruction extends to cherished norms of civility and discourse, a politics poisoned by vile streams of racism, sexism, nativism. To his believers, he delivers change—broad, deep, historic change, not modest measures doled out in Dixie cups; to his detractors, he inspires fear both for what he may do and what may be done in his name.

So, there you are Finn. The writer understands your fear, and that your fear motivates you and colors your perceptions. Take heart that you're not alone, but also take heart that folks are here to help.

Oh, and Fox News polling forecast a Hillary win, too. So I guess Fox contributed to fake election news as well.

To appease the Hillarybots. :D

https://fellowshipofminds.files.word...y-edition1.jpg

Thanks for that. I had forgotten about that aborted attempt at fake news. ;)

Rajoo, you're getting more whell-like every day.

Speaking of whell...the OP is a stupid argument that misrepresents and distorts reality. It waves the 'great American people' flag and scoffs that no one will be taken in by satire? As if no BIG barrels of bullshit are not presented as real every day, and taken in as such by a whole bunch of people hooked on the right's propaganda narratives.

As if not one just showed up at a pizza restaurant and shot off his gun.

"Pizzagate" puts the lie to the OP, completely.

There you go again, distorting reality. Or should I say 'lying.'

Just having a bit of fun DQ and I do owe the Hill's here occasional pleasantries. :D

Stuff it. You bait for your own pleasure.

Not just his pleasure.

I enjoyed it too. :D

Made me smile. :cool:

You can stuff it too, then. Hard, with a stick. :D


(See the :D? Just a joke. You can take a JOKE, can't you?)

http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/...o/blowkiss.gif

I can take anything you throw at me Don. ;)

Just wait till he gives you a kiss. :eek:

On the way to the gym today, I decided to listen to talk radio (as I often do to see what "news" is being pushed by Limbaugh and Co.). Anyway, on the way to the gym, Chris Plante (a far-right bomb thrower) insisted that since Comet Ping Pong was in a liberal neighborhood, the original source of the fake news must have been a disgruntled liberal who got a bad pizza. Then on the way home, Rush Limbaugh's sit-in, Mark Steyn, insisted that there was no such thing as "fake news" and that "fake news" was in fact real news that liberals didn't want to hear. It seems Trump and Co. are feeling the heat over Gen. Flynn and his wayward son (and/or Trump's discredited 3 million illegal votes claim) and are trying to discredit the existence of fake news or to say that it is only a liberal phenomena.

It seems Whell got the memo.

Missed the little "wink" in that post, didja Don?

Actually you're another one that this thread is all about. I know life has gotten scarier for you post-election, as witnessed by some of your...umm...unhinged posts. Consider this thread outreach, and effort to help folks like you sort things out.

Hmmm....I fear Finn may have a more severe case of PESS than I thought.

Your insults masked as faux concern are just more of your dishonesty.

Unlike you, I'm skeptical of politicians on both sides (and didn't vote for Hillary - Kasich was my guy). For whatever reason, manipulation and manipulative people have long been things I strongly dislike, find disreputable, and often strike out against. That's my primary beef with Trump and the campaign he ran, which featured "fake news" as a primary component. Trump helped normalize this behavior with his constant lying and retweeting fake news are things he should be held to account for.

Now that this has come to the fore with Comet Ping Pong (a place I know well and have eaten at several times), I find the concerted effort by Trump and his minions in right-wing media to deny the existence of fake news and how Trump benefited from it distasteful and dishonest.

Thanks for showing your true far right stripes.

Kasich would have been worse than Hillary.

If the election had been Kasich vs. Hillary, or any of the other Republicans other than Trump vs. Hillary, I would have voted for Hillary.

The only candidate on the Republican side that was better than Hillary was Trump.

I find this fascinating, really. The selective indignation is stunning. We still have folks right here on this forum this still believe the Gabby Giffords shooter was inspired by Sarah Palin. The story ran ad naseum in the "mainstream" news. The NY Post ran a story headlining that "Giffords Blood was on Palin's Hands". There was ZERO evidence that the shooter saw or even cared about Palin's "target" ad. Didn't matter a whit, the story was debated in the press for weeks.

Yet you guys are all spun up about a few tweets. Amazing.

Is the New York Post mainstream media? I always thought it was a tabloid.

You're grasping at straws, dude. The has never been a presidential candidate with such a casual relationship, even contempt, for truth and facts. Trump's own surrogate proclaimed "there are no such thing as facts" as she defended her boss's incessant lying and forwarding of fake news tweets from Infowars and Breitbart (measure at ~75% of what he said - about triple any other candidate present or past). Then he hires one of the premier purveyors of fake news, Steve Bannon, as his key advisor while his national security advisor retweets verifiably fake news, the same fake news which caused some clown to shoot up a local pizza joint. Maybe I take it a bit personally that one of my preferred pizza places gets shot up by some asshole reacting to fake news distributed by, among others, the National Security Advisor and his chief of staff (and son). Unlike you, I expect more from the National Security Advisor.

As for it being just "a few tweets," how about ~30,000 tweets, in which the most frequently source for his retweets was Breitbart. For whatever reason, I expect the president to be a bit more discriminating as to the source of his "news." Meanwhile, he blows off intelligence briefings and defies the intelligence community when they show compelling evidence of Russian involvement in the election.

There's a reason why the Oxford Dictionary announced a couple weeks ago that "post-truth" was its 2016 word of the year and yer boy, The Donald, is the driving force behind that choice. I guess you're OK with him accusing Ted Cruz's father of conspiring to assassinate JFK - so very presidential of him. If it helps you sleep at night to believe that Trump is a virtuous, dignified person, have at it. I'll pass.

Who knows what whell believes when he's lying in his bed. We'll never know. Whell gives little or nothing of himself here. He just throws party-line brickbats.

With his public persona so welded to the party line, if he ever has the slightest doubt of Trump's virtue and dignity, we'll never hear of it.

Nothing to see here, eh Mike? :rolleyes:

'Feds: Woman made death threats to Sandy Hook victim’s parent'

"MIAMI — A Florida woman has been charged with making death threats against the parent of a child who died in the Sandy Hook school shooting massacre because she thought the attack was a hoax, federal authorities announced Wednesday.
Lucy Richards, 57, of Tampa was arrested Monday after a grand jury indictment on four felony counts of transmitting threats, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...=.684ba976b640

And the primary purveyor of this particular trash is InfoWars' Alex Jones, a friend of Trump's whose reputation Trump refers to as "amazing" and who one of the very first people to receive a phone call from Trump after the election.

Here's another factoid for you:

Legitimate news stories outperformed the fake ones in the early months of the 2016 election campaign. But in the last three months, fake news sources saw their engagement surge. There’s a clear partisan dimension to this story. According to Silverman, 17 out of the 20 fake news stories had information favoring Donald Trump.

https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploads/cho...79332078_1.png

Hell, the Twitter prez loves the National Enquirer along with any other bag o' hammers news source that catches his eye. The pendulum has swung once again and now the far right morons are in charge. I hope these idjits don't get us in a shooting war with China.

Welcome to the Confederate States of Idiocracy.

The crazy thing in that graph is the lack of resurgence of interest in the mainstream media as the election neared. Instead the fake stuff, with glitter and button-pushing, effectively captured the bounce.

And now the Pope speaks out against fake news in very strong terms.

Media that focus on scandals and spread fake news to smear politicians risk becoming like people who have a morbid fascination with excrement, Pope Francis said in an interview published on Wednesday.

Francis told the Belgian Catholic weekly "Tertio" that spreading disinformation was "probably the greatest damage that the media can do" and using communications for this rather than to educate the public amounted to a sin.

Using precise psychological terms, he said scandal-mongering media risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/08/pope-...liticians.html

The right also believes that if they don't win an election, it's been rigged.

Interesting that you linked to this article. Its an excellent example of WaPp creating fake news. Here's what the article wants you to believe:

A post apparently written by Tracy maintained that Sandy Hook was faked, that no one was killed and that “local co-conspirators” were paid to pretend to grieve their young children.

That claim is not made by the parents, and in fact the professor in question has never claimed that the Sandy Hook shootings didn't occur, never claimed that "no one was killed." Why would WaPo make that claim?

I'm not saying that the folks who question the information that was reported about the Sandy Hook shooting. I've never met him or seen him on news, but from what I've read I strongly believe that Professor Tracy is a crank. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists out there, and Wapo seems to be playing pretty fast and loose with the facts.

Fake news? Yeah, I think so. Is Tracy blameless here? Well, when you push a stick into a hornets nest, you'd better assume you might get stung, or you're and idiot.

Tracy was an idiot to send a certified letter to the Pozner family demanding for them to prove that one of the photos that were circulating out there of the shooting victims was really their son. What the WaPo story doesn't mention is that one of those same photos showed up a photo montage of kids killed in a Taliban school bombing in Pakistan. That montage is what got the Tracy - again I think the guy is a crank - fired up, and why he sent a letter to the parents, thus stirring up the hornets nest.

To me, seems like some key points for WaPo to leave out, especially since Tracy's beef is not whether or not Sandy Hook occurred, but with the reporting of it, and how the inconsistencies in reporting fueled his...ummm...interesting ideas that there was an effort to embellish or omit reporting on elements of the shooting in an effort to push gun control legislation.

If you're interested, here's the video that is Tracy is connected to.

There! Service provided: fake news addressed. :p

The left believes that if they don't win an election, they need to blow up the electoral college.

And there it is. That's exactly what keeps, for example, some folks in this forum animated for months on end about police shootings, and what animates some groups like, maybe, Black Lives Matter.

Reminds me of WC Fields complaining about a card shark: "...And besides, I know what I dealt him."

Fake news is more entertaining.

...and by the way, before you (or the CNBC article you linked to) try to pass the pope off as some great civil libertarian who is interested in freedom and democracy, let me help you with that. He's not. I think what animates this very leftist Pope is the election of Trump, as the last sentence in the article suggests.

This is the same pope who thinks its just fine to have the Chinese government involved in picking church leadership in China. He ignores the "underground" Catholic church in China (which truly believes in the separation of church and state), and supports the "Chinese - approved" church, which is believed to have fewer adherents.

The idea of sinning against God is fake news.

Yes. Often not in so good a way....