Trump's War on Factual News Journalism.

FOR DECADES, U.S. government-funded foreign broadcasting has distinguished itself from that of undemocratic nations with its commitment to quality journalism and editorial independence. Though the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other outlets may not have had the resources of Russia’s RT or Qatar’s al Jazeera, foreign audiences often have turned to them for their independent reporting, both of news of the United States and that of their own countries.

Now that legacy may be in danger, thanks to President Trump’s newly installed chief executive at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker and associate of alt-right propagandist Stephen K. Bannon, kicked off his tenure this week by firing the chiefs of RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. The two top editors of Voice of America resigned days earlier.

Mr. Pack also dissolved the boards of the first three of those networks, which operate as grantees of the U.S. government; a bipartisan cast of luminaries including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former ambassador Ryan Crocker was replaced by low-level Trump political appointees from unrelated federal agencies, along with Mr. Pack and his chief of staff. The sole outside board member comes from the far-right Christian group Liberty Counsel Action, which is known for its militant anti-LGBTQ advocacy.

Mr. Pack offered no explanation for his actions, but issued a self-congratulatory news release quoting himself as saying that “every action I will carry out will be geared toward rebuilding the USAGM’s reputation, boosting morale and improving content.”

In fact, in a stroke, he has accomplished the opposite. Disheartened agency insiders tell us that the new CEO seems bent on carrying out a purge of what Mr. Bannon has described as an outpost of the “deep state” and converting it into another vehicle for promoting Mr. Trump.

The president has made no secret of his contempt for the “disgusting” VOA; in April, a White House statement falsely and ludicrously claimed its news reports had disseminated Chinese propaganda. After Mr. Trump bullied supine Senate Republicans into confirming Mr. Pack, despite unresolved ethical questions, it was a foregone conclusion that VOA’s top leadership, including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amanda Bennett, would be forced out. But Mr. Pack’s purge also extended to respected RFE/RL head Jamie Fly, a former Republican Senate staffer, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks’ Alberto Fernandez, another Republican. Was it because they can’t be counted on to convert their organizations into Breitbart-like propaganda outlets?

That such manipulation of U.S. government media is even possible is due to a misguided reform Congress passed four years ago, which abolished the independent, bipartisan board that previously governed the broadcasters and provided a buffer from the White House. Congressional sponsors and Obama administration officials at the time brushed off our concerns that it could destroy the very qualities of independence and journalistic integrity that have distinguished U.S. government media. Mr. Pack appears on his way to demonstrating just how wrong they were.

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Unclebaldrick said:

Amazing how many Americans always wanted this country to be a two-bit dictatorship, isn't it.

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President Trump’s fury was palpable last week after CNN released a poll that showed him trailing in his reelection bid by 14 points. He lashed out on Twitter and took the unusual step of threatening a lawsuit over the result, a move that might be called dubious in the same way that LeBron James might be called athletic. It is — but that’s underselling the point a bit.

Happily for the president, there exists an ecosystem of questionable actors willing to assuage whatever concerns might emerge. His repeated excoriations against “fake news” have made clear to his supporters that any reporting that may be in any way construed as negative should be considered untrue. That puts pressure on outlets such as Fox News that, although certainly more generous to Trump than other outlets, still at times include voices other than the most sycophantic. That’s a frustration to the president — and an opportunity by One America News, a tiny cable-network upstart that has earned praise from Trump for being unfailingly positive about his presidency.

Last week, we reported that OAN’s core mission of supporting Trump had been hampered by some bad news: a poll of Florida that the company’s chief executive pledged would offer good news for the president instead showed him in a tie with former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in the state. This state, remember, is one Trump won four years ago and is also his newly adopted home.

This was not positive news for Trump, despite the network’s initial effort to cast it as such. And because bad news is fake news, it got deep-sixed, the network’s report erased from its website and the video removed from YouTube.

That was not the end of the story, however. While reporting on another story, The Post’s Aaron Blake noticed that the network had created a new report based on the same poll conducted by Gravis Marketing — one that framed the same numbers in a significantly different way.

“In a hypothetical matchup,” host Patrick Hussion reported, “when [voters] in Florida were asked, ‘If you had to choose a candidate right now, for whom would you vote?’ the OAN-Gravis poll shows the president with a 53 to 47 percent lead over former V.P. Joe Biden there in the Sunshine State.”

That was accompanied by this graphic.


Trump won Florida by a little more than one point in 2016, so this would reflect a significant improvement.

But Hussion left out a very important bit of context for those numbers: The people being forced to choose a candidate were people who already had indicated that they were undecided in the race. A screen shot from the prior report shows the actual question, which applies only to “uncertain responses from Q2″ — meaning Question 2.



The report that was removed from OAN’s website last week made clear (unintentionally) that there were two questions in a row. The first, Question 2, asked whom respondents would support. The second, Question 3, forced those who were undecided to pick a candidate. When those two results were combined, Biden and Trump were tied at 50 percent, as the prior report showed.



Normally, pollsters report the results of questions like Question 2: For whom would you vote if the election were today? That’s why most polls have results in which support for the two candidates doesn’t add up to 100 percent; they include a “not sure/not decided” option.

That’s important because it’s necessarily the case that the results for Question 2 in this poll were more favorable to Biden than the results for Question 3 — that is, than the results that OAN reported. If Trump has a six-point lead among those undecided voters forced to pick a candidate, then Biden must have an advantage among the other group in order for the combined result to be a tie. How big Biden’s advantage is depends on how many people indicated that they were undecided. The bigger the pool of undecideds, the smaller Biden’s advantage over Trump in the poll — but the less representative the results OAN shared actually were.

It’s hard to overstate how dishonest this was. Imagine if you asked 20 people what kind of ice cream they wanted. Nine pick vanilla and seven pick chocolate. Four people have no opinion — maybe simply because they like both — but you make them pick. Three say they would take chocolate if they had to choose one or the other, while the fourth picks vanilla.

The original report claimed that vanilla and chocolate were equally popular. The new OAN headline is essentially that people forced to pick an ice cream flavor pick chocolate by a 3-to-1 margin.

If you’re curious whether this was perhaps a new poll, it wasn’t. The numbers reported for Trump’s approval were identical in both reports.


It’s the exact same graphic, with that “2%” indicator floating up over the red bar. Even without that detail, though, the fact that the numbers are precisely the same indicates that this is the same poll. The only time approval numbers remain unchanging time and time again is when they’re invented onestweeted out by Trump.

OAN’s deceptive presentation of the poll doesn’t end with cherry-picking a result that casts the president in the most favorable light. Hussion also reported on how Floridians view the candidates’ ability to handle the economy.

“Now, when it comes to the economy, the poll also shows Florida voters are decisively more confident in President Trump’s economic policies than the direction Biden would go in if he were elected,” Hussion said. “The president pulls in nearly 50 percent of the respondents compared to Biden’s 44 percent.”



This is ... a five-point difference. This is not only not a demonstration of “decisively more confidence,” it’s almost certainly not even statistically significant. It’s also extremely bad news for Trump if the factor on which he’s predicating his reelection — his ability to keep the economy strong — has him under 50 percent against Biden in a state he needs to win.

This is fake news, folks. It’s invented, cherry-picked and deceptively framed information meant not to convey actual information but, instead, to placate the president and his supporters. It is to news what your mom’s evaluation of your performance in your Little League game was — reassuring but hardly objective. And not only is this report misleading and unethical, it makes very clear why OAN removed the initial report last week: It wasn’t positive enough for Trump. This one is, even if it’s dishonest, so it’s still online.

Yet somehow I am skeptical that Trump will reject OAN as an untrustworthy news source.

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The release of two Senate-commissioned reports has sparked a new round of panic about Russia manipulating a vulnerable American public on social media. Headlines warn that Russian trolls have tried to suppress the African-American vote, promote Green Party candidate Jill Stein, recruit “assets,” and “sow discord” or “hack the 2016 election” via sex-toy ads and Pokémon Go. “The studies,” writes David Ignatius of The Washington Post, “describe a sophisticated, multilevel Russian effort to use every available tool of our open society to create resentment, mistrust and social disorder,” demonstrating that the Russians, “thanks to the Internet…seem to be perfecting these dark arts.” According to Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, “it looks increasingly as though” Russian disinformation “changed the direction of American history” in the narrowly decided 2016 election, when “Russian trolling easily could have made the difference.”

The reports, from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge, do provide the most thorough look at Russian social-media activity to date. With an abundance of data, charts, graphs, and tables, coupled with extensive qualitative analysis, the authors scrutinize the output of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) the Russian clickbait firm indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018. On every significant metric, it is difficult to square the data with the dramatic conclusions that have been drawn.

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• 2016 Election Content: The most glaring data point is how minimally Russian social-media activity pertained to the 2016 campaign. The New Knowledge report acknowledges that evaluating IRA content “purely based on whether it definitively swung the election is too narrow a focus,” as the “explicitly political content was a small percentage.” To be exact, just “11% of the total content” attributed to the IRA and 33 percent of user engagement with it “was related to the election.” The IRA’s posts “were minimally about the candidates,” with “roughly 6% of tweets, 18% of Instagram posts, and 7% of Facebook posts” having “mentioned Trump or Clinton by name.”

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• Scale: The researchers claim that “the scale of [the Russian] operation was unprecedented,” but they base that conclusion on dubious figures. They repeat the widespread claim that Russian posts “reached 126 million people on Facebook,” which is in fact a spin on Facebook’s own guess. “Our best estimate,” Facebook’s Colin Stretch testified to Congress in October 2017, “is that approximately 126 million people may have been served one of these [IRA] stories at some time during the two year period” between 2015 and 2017. According to Stretch, posts generated by suspected Russian accounts showing up in Facebook’s News Feed amounted to “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content.”

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• Spending: Also hurting the case that the Russians reached a large number of Americans is that they spent such a microscopic amount of money to do it. Oxford puts the IRA’s Facebook spending between 2015 and 2017 at just $73,711. As was previously known, about $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election. That amounts to about 0.05 percent of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined. A recent disclosure by Google that Russian-linked accounts spent $4,700 on platforms in 2016 only underscores how minuscule that spending was. The researchers also claim that the IRA’s “manipulation of American political discourse had a budget that exceeded $25 million USD.” But that number is based on a widely repeated error that mistakes the IRA’s spending on US-related activities for its parent project’s overall global budget, including domestic social-media activity in Russia.

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• Sophistication: Another reason to question the operation’s sophistication can be found by simply looking at its offerings. The IRA’s most shared pre-election Facebook post was a cartoon of a gun-wielding Yosemite Sam. Over on Instagram, the best-received image urged users to give it a “Like” if they believe in Jesus. The top IRA post on Facebook before the election to mention Hillary Clinton was a conspiratorial screed about voter fraud. It’s telling that those who are so certain Russian social-media posts affected the 2016 election never cite the posts that they think actually helped achieve that end. The actual content of those posts might explain why.

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• Covert or Clickbait Operation? Far from exposing a sophisticated propaganda campaign, the reports provide more evidence that the Russians were actually engaging in clickbait capitalism: targeting unique demographics like African Americans or evangelicals in a bid to attract large audiences for commercial purposes. Reporters who have profiled the IRA have commonly described it as “a social media marketing campaign.” Mueller’s indictment of the IRA disclosed that it sold “promotions and advertisements” on its pages that generally sold in the $25-$50 range. “This strategy,” Oxford observes, “is not an invention for politics and foreign intrigue, it is consistent with techniques used in digital marketing.” New Knowledge notes that the IRA even sold merchandise that “perhaps provided the IRA with a source of revenue,” hawking goods such as T-shirts, “LGBT-positive sex toys and many variants of triptych and 5-panel artwork featuring traditionally conservative, patriotic themes.”

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• “Asset Development”: Lest one wonder how promoting sex toys might factor into a sophisticated influence campaign, the New Knowledge report claims that exploiting “sexual behavior” was a key component of the IRA’s “expansive” “human asset recruitment strategy” in the United States. “Recruiting an asset by exploiting a personal vulnerability,” the report explains, “is a timeless espionage practice.” The first example of this timeless espionage practice is of an ad featuring Jesus consoling a dejected young man by telling him: “Struggling with the addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we will beat it together.” It is unknown if this particular tactic brought any assets into the fold. But New Knowledge reports that there was “some success with several of these human-activation attempts.” That is correct: The IRA’s online trolls apparently succeeded in sparking protests in 2016, like several in Florida where “it’s unclear if anyone attended”; “no people showed up to at least one,” and “ragtag groups” showed up at others, including one where video footage captured a crowd of eight people. The most successful effort appears to have been in Houston, where Russian trolls allegedly organized dueling rallies pitting a dozen white supremacists against several dozen counter-protesters outside an Islamic center.

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Based on all of this data, we can draw this picture of Russian social-media activity: It was mostly unrelated to the 2016 election; microscopic in reach, engagement, and spending; and juvenile or absurd in its content. This leads to the inescapable conclusion, as the New Knowledge study acknowledges, that “the operation’s focus on elections was merely a small subset” of its activity. They qualify that “accurate” narrative by saying it “misses nuance and deserves more contextualization.” Alternatively, perhaps it deserves some minimal reflection that a juvenile social-media operation with such a small focus on elections is being widely portrayed as a seismic threat that may well have decided the 2016 contest.

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Unclebaldrick said:

Amazon Prime has a nifty little series on the Black Plague. Twenty four lectures. Good stuff.

Watching it made me start to think that Trump has not really done anything to society except exploit our natural tendencies that had been repressed for a while.

If you go back to plague times, a small number of learned people understood that the plague was an illness being transmitted through some means that they did not fully understand - not really having a grasp on the nature of bacteria and viruses. Nevertheless, they sought to learn it from and divine whatever information they could about its means of transmission and develop reasonable and practical countermeasures.

The common folk in the villages and countryside were not similarly encumbered. In their ignorance, they quickly developed reasons for it and countermeasures of their own. Perhaps it was caused by witches. Maybe god sent it to them because they did not do the right things. Or was it caused by foul odors. All of these ideas had more currency than what in intellectuals had to say about invisible organisms like bacteria. Fucking magnets, how do they work? Burning the witches seemed much more logical than washing your hands and keeping rodents at bay.

In this same way, the information coming from people of knowledge about the pandemic carry less weight than a meme, which is easy to understand and doesn't make the common folks' brains hurt or make them feel intellectually inadequate.

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People have always been like this - stupid, superstitious and easily misled.

But for a while, at least in free societies, this sort of idiocy was held in check allowing us to concentrate on our personal hatred of "the other" through things like lynching and genocide. Electronic mass media temporarily disrupted society's normal dumbness in that it was developed and curated by intelligent people. Radio and television news were not controlled by the masses and held such sway that the usual rumors and gossip had little chance of spreading like an informational virus.

The internet changed all that and the old order was restored. Now anybody can appear to know what they were talking about. Why read a paper when a simple meme on Facebook tells you all you need to know? The common folk, unable to comprehend the difference between fact and opinion were unprepared for it and it is now sweeping through society like it did during the black plague era and Salem witch hunt. We just haven't developed herd immunity to it. We lost the race to educate our population before the dark ages returned.

That's the thing about Trump - whether he was intelligent enough to perceive the problem (my guess is that he certainly wasn't), was led in that direction by those who have made misinformation and manipulation an art form through restriction and control of the media (that would be my guess), or just happened to be in the right place at the right time with a message dumb and dark enough to gain traction with the under-educated, doesn't really matter. All we can do now is hope for a new age of enlightenment.

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hanimmal said:

So turns out Trump fired everyone in charge of the Voice of America, and put his right-wing propagandist (who was also involved in Cambridge Analytica) Steve Bannan's cultist in the top job, who then filled up the new vacancies with other right wing trolls who have zero credibility. Now it is only a matter of time before we get to see what kind of propaganda Trump will try to push through these previously-highly credible news sources.

Trump loves to have his minions masquerading as 'Administration officials' lie to the American citizens through the news media, this is pretty scary to me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/voice-of-america-and-other-us-government-media-never-engage-in-propaganda-is-that-about-to-change/2020/06/19/b6577f0a-b247-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html
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Proof of Trump sending his cronies out to lie to America:
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It amazes me still that Trump's cultist fall for all their lies and seem perfectly fine with it. And are more than willing to believe Trump when he tries to project his lies using the news media, who are forced to cover him because he is the current POTUS.

Trump is a liar and a cult leader.

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schuylaar said:

simple. 1% of 327M are narcissists..they ARE him. final answer.

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hanimmal said:

So turns out Trump fired everyone in charge of the Voice of America, and put his right-wing propagandist (who was also involved in Cambridge Analytica) Steve Bannan's cultist in the top job, who then filled up the new vacancies with other right wing trolls who have zero credibility. Now it is only a matter of time before we get to see what kind of propaganda Trump will try to push through these previously-highly credible news sources.

Trump loves to have his minions masquerading as 'Administration officials' lie to the American citizens through the news media, this is pretty scary to me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/voice-of-america-and-other-us-government-media-never-engage-in-propaganda-is-that-about-to-change/2020/06/19/b6577f0a-b247-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html
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Proof of Trump sending his cronies out to lie to America:
View attachment 4600477

It amazes me still that Trump's cultist fall for all their lies and seem perfectly fine with it. And are more than willing to believe Trump when he tries to project his lies using the news media, who are forced to cover him because he is the current POTUS.

Trump is a liar and a cult leader.

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RonnieB2 said:

Trump is counting on the ignorance of many voters. This base is fear based. They're scared of one thing or another. And POTUS is banking on that. I live in the deep Bible belt and Ive seen the most outrageous things you can imagine. They were tearing Obama apart a while back because he had "Muslim prayer curtains " installed in the white White House. i shit you not, they believed it was true. Fox news, is the biggest offender of lying to its supporters. And to be honest MSNBC was/is number 2. What Ive found alarming is people reading blogs, opinion pieces, and other far right garbage and accepting it as facts. Pizzagate could have been a massacre. And it was because of fake news. The MAGA bomber victim of fake news. Charlottesville, fake news played a huge roll. Dylan Roof, conspiracy theorist, and infowars Breitbart Qmap QANON fan. See a pattern yet?

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RonnieB2 said:

The difference between 2nd and 1st is huge. MSNBC is hard leaning left and they're gonna appeal to that audience. I prefer unbiased journalism. just the facts, no matter if they hurt my feelings or not. When it comes to facts, Democrats are far more honest. What did Trumps Kelly Anne call them? Alternative facts? Lol. Demagogues and Trump fits the definition of demagogue perfectly, are a disgusting bunch of greedy, self serving, slime balls. Politifact.com and factcheck.org are two sources that I rely on. of course a blogger started a rumor that Breitbart picked up. Stating factcheck.org was started by a far left extremist who was trying to advance the Muslim brotherhood agenda lol

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hanimmal said:

Full Trump Axios video:

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schuylaar said:

i saw part of it from yesterday..axios plays trumpy* like a fiddle.

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