Fake News

"Edward S Herman, perhaps most famous for writing 'Manufacturing Consent' and other books with Noam Chomsky, has died. His last piece appears to have been 'Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies'..."

https://twitter.com/samhusseini/status/930182430153158656

... and a nice article by Matt Taibbi on the death of Ed Herman and the need for a new "Manufacturing Consent":

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/matt-taibbi-on-the-death-o...

"The main reasons for this have to do with the structure of the current commercial media. Because of tech companies like Google and Facebook, it is significantly easier to "manufacture" consent today than it was before.

A small handful of monopolistic tech companies like Facebook have life-or-death power over media companies. They can steer traffic wherever they please simply by tweaking their algorithms. Firms that don't themselves create news content wield this monstrous influence.

Controlling how, where and when you got the news was how media companies were paid previously. Since those processes are mostly out of their hands now, news companies no longer control their own economic fates.

They have become vassals to essentially unregulated, monopolistic distribution mechanisms like Facebook, who additionally appropriate the lion's share of the profits that used to fund things like investigative journalism.

Moreover the policing mechanisms are far more powerful now. Herman and Chomsky wrote about flak in the era before social media. Today blowback against dissenting thought is instantaneous and massive."

The above piece is to my eye typical of the genre.   It is a polemic against Trump disguised as media criticism, but the media criticism is paper thin and missing the point.    It's largely a lament that the uneducated masses aren't as trusting as they used to be.  When the writer makes a relevant point he disregards the conclusions that come from it:

"The media is guilty of atrocious hypocrisy: we assign value to life based on race (disasters in the Third World usually merit coverage after the death toll rises above several thousand), reporters posing as experts repeat conventional wisdom, we insist on the delusion of objectivity, we often make it more about ourselves than the actual news, we are hopelessly bourgeois and we genuflect obsequiously to authority, all the time posing as stern watchdogs.

That has always been the case, though. There are poor reporters and brilliant ones. I've always had faith that educated readers and viewers (I love educated people) will identify and trust the best of us. Hence the New York Times and the Economist and the New Yorker and the Washington Post, among others."

The New York Times is one of the most widely studied media properties in the world.   It's reporting of Cambodia was featured heavily throughout Manufacturing Consent.   That the writer takes the NYT and Washington Post (!) as worthy objects of trust (for educated people) tells me all I need to know.   

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/16/the-honest-ads-act-fundamental-r...

"Hobert asserts, Americans have a ” fundamental right to know who is trying to influence our votes and our views on public policy.”

Well, no. Americans — and Russians — have a fundamental right to say what they want to say, with or without their names attached to it.

“Who the Author of this Production is,” reads an old political pamphlet, “is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the Doctrine itself, not the Man.”

That old pamphlet is Common Sense, the manifesto of the American Revolution. We know its author’s name — Thomas Paine — now, but its first readers didn’t. From Cato’s Letters to The Federalist Papers, anonymous and pseudonymous political speech defined early American free speech in ideology and in practice.

There’s a right to speak. There’s a right to listen or not listen to what someone says. There’s a right to ask who’s saying it, and to condition one’s belief or non-belief on the answer. But that answer may be “none of your business,” and there’s no right to forcibly dictate otherwise.

Don’t let demagogues like McCain, Klobuchar, and Warner exploit the current moral panic to manufacture fake new rights at the expense of old real ones."

Fake and manufactured political news is prevalent but we don't seem to mind if it's on our side.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/richard-bergeron-valerie-plante-p...

Ousted in the election, Richard Bergeron seeks a job with the party he founded

A reporter went to Bergeron and asked him if he would be willing to work for the Plante administration. Obviously he said yes. That doesn't mean he was looking for a job with them. The reporter then went to see Plante to ask if she would be willing to hire Bergeron implying that he wanted to.

CrossTalk Bullhorns: Fake Diplomacy (and vid)

https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/410361-rt-foreign-agent-media/

"RT America was required to register as a foreign agent. Why have prominent media outlets and civil liberties groups been largely silent?..."

Sean says:

"When information is designed to manipulate a result and it affects not only the listener but the behaviour of the listener who affects others, then this is not a fair comment.

When we are bombarded by messages, if there is a hand behind a large number of them, we have a right to know whose hand that belongs to. 

Individuals, with a low reach should be able to preserve their anonymity but when the reach is so broad that it will effect many people initially and then even more people through secondary reach and when it is an organization that can use economic power to shout over individuals, that is another story.

Yes, we have the right to determine if we want to believe something or not. That right includes the basics in giving information credibility -- knowing the source."

Sean:  I don't agree with most of this, and would reword the parts I do agree with.  

Regarding information effecting a result and influencing behaviour, that is what most political speech aims to do and I don't see why you feel this distinction is necessary or relevant.   If the speech was unimportant and had no effects, I doubt anyone would care how it was labelled or who made it.

Regarding bombardment of messages and the disparate "volume" of speech between organizations and individuals, this is somewhat of a modern problem now that the means to distribute speech are so developed and entirely privatized.  However the bombardment is, curiously, almost entirely opt-in.   And the distribution method is a large for profit company that filters traffic and prioritizes certains kinds of posts from certain kinds of posters using an internal, private process, over which we have no knowledge or control.     I agree it is a problem for democracy that a large movement or consensus around an issue can be "faked" on social media.   I don't think it's a new problem, just made more acute by the internet and social media.   But I think focusing on a few actors spending money on a social media buys, rather than the companies running the distribution networks privately, for profit, is seeing the tree instead of the forest.

" This is an article seeking permission to decieve and over power others in the information age. It is effectively asking for a coup given the power information has because no democracy can exist without reliable information and the strength of those that do exist lies in the strength of the information that underpins social consent."

There is no deception involved in anonymous political speech.   You are free to disregard all "unsourced" speech if you want.   Sometimes an argument is valid, logically sound and persuasive regardless of who says it.    And sometimes people making valid persuasive political arguements fear punishment by the powerful, and need to be protected.    Stripping that protection will hurt democracy.

I agree that there is a relatively new increased tolerance for censorship and repression on the left.   There are progressives pleased that Fox news is being investigated by the FBI for collusion with Russia, that the US Senate is seeking authority to classify and label messaging on Facebook and Twitter, and the recent requirement for RT to register as a foreign agent, for example.

Quote:

However the bombardment is, curiously, almost entirely opt-in.

Agreed.  We're not talking about the government broadcasting propaganda over loudspeakers night and day.  We're talking about people who WANT their source of information to be, well, Breitbart, or Counterpunch (or Goop, the Facebook feed of some stranger, or Swiftboat Veterans For Truth, or Paul Craig Roberts' blog, or whatever).

I think that the people who want k00K information aren't that worried about who, specifically, is "pulling the puppet strings".  More like those who (reasonably IMHO) reject that information wanting to know.

50 years ago we might have been concerned with "journalistic integrity" -- is a journalist or a news organization honest about their biases?  Do they have conflicts of interest?  Have they gone so far as to "create" or fabricate "news"?

But today, thanks to the internet, we get news sites whose "photos" of a war crime are screengrabs, or whose "photos" of a missile attack came from a video game or whatever.  But even when those forgeries originate with a news site, it's still the people who so earnestly wish them to be true who forward them to everyone in their address book.  If it were just this or that "news" site, we could agree to shut them down or block them maybe.  But the real problem arises when they go viral because someone really wanted to believe.

FWIW, Snopes.com is a great place to just go and read, and find out what people are personally invested in believing, even when the "evidence" is ridiculous.

Google Will 'Derank' RT Articles

https://youtu.be/8eFJbwHism8

"Eric Schimdt, the Executive Chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, says the company will 'engineer' specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent."

"Cheering googlenews' decision to de-rank RT and Sputnik? It's part of the company's ongoing crackdown against 'offensive sites'. Here are some of the other apparent targets..."

https://twitter.com/KevenRothrock/status/932742868678201344

Google Announces Moves To Censor RT and Sputnik

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/21/gacl-n21.html

"The blacklisting of media platforms like RT and Sputnik is part of a broader campaign of internet censorship, backed by the US intelligence agencies and supported politically by the Democratic Party, in particular..."

Michael:   Would you agree with me that Google rankings  and the criteria by which they list search results should be public information ?   

It seems to me that in an ideal world, rankings would reflect broader interest by the public in a transparent way.   So for example, if CNN is the most popular news site for Americans, when an american searches for a news item, CNN would show up high on the list, regardless of their ideology, politics or spin.  

Quote:

I think Google should be a publicly owned utility, but the problem is that since it is everywhere, there is no national government that can control it, even if the political will existed.

Having read many opinions of our national broadcaster, the CBC, and the vehement assertion that they're either deep in the pocket of the Conservatives, deep in the pocket of the Liberals or deep in the pocket of the NDP, I shudder to imagine the complaints if the goverment also literally controlled the way we find things on the web.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

I think Google should be a publicly owned utility, but the problem is that since it is everywhere, there is no national government that can control it, even if the political will existed.

Having read many opinions of our national broadcaster, the CBC, and the vehement assertion that they're either deep in the pocket of the Conservatives, deep in the pocket of the Liberals or deep in the pocket of the NDP, I shudder to imagine the complaints if the goverment also literally controlled the way we find things on the web.

Well, you certainly have a point, but do you really believe that a totally unaccountable private bureaucracy, with profit as its one and only motive, would be better than a somewhat corrupt but also somewhat accountable public bureaucracy with a statutory mandate to be truthful and fair?

Michael and Magoo:   This is the crux of the problem for me.   Your question at post 47 is particularly apt:

 " ..do you really believe that a totally unaccountable private bureaucracy, with profit as its one and only motive, would be better than a somewhat corrupt but also somewhat accountable public bureaucracy with a statutory mandate to be truthful and fair?"

My answer would be yes, I do think the unaccountable private bureaucracies of Google/Facebook/Twitter are preferable to US government regulation of web traffic and search results .   In an ideal world, media companies with global reach should be regulated by a democratic agency with a global mandate, perhaps through the UN or the UN's human rights frameworks.   But in the right here and now, the current spate of regulation by the US government is neither transparent or democratic, and I think the US government in its present unhinged form is about the last government entity on earth we should be trusting to regulate the internet.

ETA -- the article posted above by NDPP is pretty good for a random blog, and gives a good summary of the effects of the new filters on Google and Facebook have on progressive or anti-imperial sites that are outside mainstream DNC-led  progressive politics.