Now known as 'glamor'

Well! Good thing the Fair 'n' Balanced Network had a lead story for Tuesday afternoon, so the faithful wouldn't be distracted by any pesky stories about anyone's former campaign manager going on trial or anything:

Twitter’s campaign to foster healthier conversations on its platform with the aid of academics is itself facing an allegation of anti-Trump bias.

In previous tweets from their personal accounts, a number of the academics involved in the high-profile project have repeatedly slammed the Trump administration.

Sound familiar? Drudge foreshadowed it on Monday afternoon:

And you know that when "academics" are hired to "monitor" "hate speech," no good is going to come of it. Scare quotes and all, as it turns out, we've known that since 1942. The World's Greatest Newspaper is going to tell us all we need to know about Harold Lasswell, investigator of "glamor" (or, as you might recall from your first masscomm survey class, the guy who articulated the who-says-what-to-whom-through-what-channel formula for looking at media effects). At the Trib, of course, he's just another nutty perfesser:

The propaganda rating of America's newspapers, it was disclosed today, is being studied by Harold D. Lasswell, a former University of Chicago assistant professor who attained publicity a decade ago thru:

1. A scholarly investigation of the meaning of "it," a feminine quality now popularity* known as "glamor" and termed thruout history by various titles, all meaning what the boys like in the opposite sex.

2. A learned thesis on the meaning of the Bronx cheer -- an expression which also has historic qualities but which Dr. Lasswell now thinks has no place in newspaper columns.

A Formula of Questions.

Lasswell is director of war communications research for the library of congress and has produced a "weighted average" system intended to be used in measuring the volume of Nazi propaganda in American publications. The system was explained at a postoffice hearing by Dr. Lasswell himself.

The Post Office, you might recall, was a pretty big factor in the travails of the "vermin press"; this particular hearing was about banning The X-Ray from the mails, and a month earlier, Fr. Coughlin's Social Justice had been impounded at the Royal Oak post office** to see if it was still being seditious. See if you can figure out why the Trib (or Fox, or Drudge) might be so concerned about Lasswell's formula for analyzing a publication:

1. Does it follow the Nazi propaganda that the United States is economically corrupt?

2, Does it oppose the administration's foreign policy or conduct of the war?

3. Does it assail the President on moral or ethical grounds?

4. Does it disparage Great Britain or other allies?

5. Does it say that Washington is run by  Communists, plutocrats, Jews, or crooks?

I hope we can all agree at this remove that the Roosevelt administration overreacted to the threat of the vermin press (though at the same time, we can note that banning Alex Jones from Twitter in 2018 isn't the same as banning The X-Ray or Social Justice from the mail in 1942). And there's not a lot of point to having a free press if anyone isn't free to oppose any administration's foreign policy. It's still worth noting who screams loudest when one asks why some news outlets consistently paint their enemies as commies, crooks and people named Soros.

* (Sic), adjective fans. The War on Editing has been with us for a while. This is May 1942, so only a few weeks until an unfortunately accurate headline was part of a package that almost got the paper indicted.

** It's still there. The new parking deck across the street looks really nice, too.

How fake news works

Won't that just put you off your cornflakes? Right at the top of the page, a deadly virus -- coming right at you! 

Or not. Does it seem a little less exciting when you click through to the Metro story?

Pesky news routines! The headline doesn't tell you whether it's "this" pandemic or "any old" pandemic, but at least -- well, what is it?

A chilling simulation has revealed just how easily a new pathogen could wipe out a huge slice of the world’s population – up to 900 million people.

Researchers at John* Hopkins University simulated the spread of a new illness – a new type of parainfluenza, known as Clade X.

How many experts, and what are they warning us about?

American politicians played out the scenario – which was built to be extremely realistic – where a doomsday cult released a genetically engineered virus.

By the end of the simulation in May, representing 20 months after the start of the outbreak, there were 150 million dead around the world – and no vaccine.

The researchers say that the simulation would have ended with up to 900 million dead, nearly 10% of the world’s population.

That'd be a good bit more than 10% of the world's population, but of course that's not what the experts said, given that -- as the preceding paragraph says --  the simulation ended with 150 million dead. (None of them killed by either Clade X or Bigfoot.) Metro is playing at news, not doing news; there are two outgoing links in the text, but both go to versions of the same Business Insider story.

Business Insider doesn't exactly cover itself with glory either, which should be a sign unto you when you see it quoted regularly. But it does get some details:

On May 15, when the "Clade X" simulation was played out real-time, the people acting out the scenario were the sorts of individuals who'd be responding to this situation in real life.

... Yet by the day's end, representing 20 months after the start of the outbreak, there were 150 million dead around the globe, and 15 to 20 million deaths in the US alone.

With no vaccine for the illness yet ready, that death toll would have been expected to climb.

"I think we learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, devoted senior public officials who have lived through many crises still have trouble dealing with something like this," Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health Security and the designer of the Clade X simulation, told Business Insider.

... "If efforts to develop a vaccine continued to fail, Toner said a disease like this could kill 900 million people, or more than 10 percent of the world's population.

Let the record show here that I have no objection to stories about sandtable exercises or about public perceptions of responses to emergencies (that's one of the things I write about). This seems like a pretty good story idea -- so good that it would be surprising if someone hadn't covered it back in May. The Washington Post, for example:

A novel virus, moderately contagious and moderately lethal, has surfaced and is spreading rapidly around the globe. Outbreaks first appear in Frankfurt, Germany, and Caracas, Venezuela. The virus is transmitted person-to-person, primarily by coughing. There are no effective antivirals or vaccines. U.S. troops stationed abroad are infected. Now the first case to reach the United States had been identified on a small college campus in Massachusetts.

So began a recent day-long exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The simulation mixed details of past disasters with fictional elements to force government officials and experts to make the kinds of key decisions they could face in a real pandemic.

It was a tense day. The exercise was inspired in part by the troubled response to the Ebola epidemic of 2014, and everyone involved was acutely aware of the very real and ongoing Ebola outbreak spreading in Congo.

In the simulation, a bipartisan group of current and former high-ranking U.S. government officials played a team of presidential advisers faced with a host of real-world policy, political and ethical dilemmas. The actors included former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who played the Senate majority leader, and Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.), who played herself. They had to react as the outbreak unfolded according to a script provided by Johns Hopkins, with no advance knowledge about how the mock disaster would play out.

I could do without any more headlines that begin "This" forever, but otherwise a pretty nice story. Not at all what you might think if you get your news from the Drudge Report, though.

* Yes, this would have been a red flag for a real editor.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day

Headlines 'round the world continue to march to the music that only their creators hear. I'm tempted at first glance to call the BBC example above a noun pile, except that it isn't one. It doesn't stack nouns up to modify each other (as in "Bannon Congress Trump Russia hearing row"*); it just throws some nouns at the wall to see if they stick.

Drudge, as usual, simply does stuff that Drudge readers appear to have come to expect:

* Or  "Palestinian viral slap video teen," downpage.

Baby names: A slight return

Well, here's an old friend back on the Drudge homepage, just in time to welcome Pete Hoekstra to his new job. The name count is sourced here to the vermin press (specifically, ZeroHedge) rather than to the London press, but the end result is much the same:

Dutch mainstream media reported that Noah was the most popular baby name for boys in the Netherlands, but a little digging turned out a different finding.

Pesky mainstream media!

The name Noah was putatively considered the most popular boy’s name for 2017, having been given to 635 new-born boys in the Netherlands. But as VoE reports, a journalist from broadcaster Powned did some research into the database, however, and noticed that another name, a non-traditional Dutch name, was slightly more prevalent.

This journalist checked for Mohammed and its alternative spellings.

Brave journalist! Or whatever you call someone from "broadcaster Powned," which you may now look up on your own. But does the prose seem sonehow -- less like a home-language English speaker than you're used to expecting from Tyler Durden?

He thus counted:

Mohammed 221, Mohamed 211, Muhammed 110, Mohammad 51, Muhammad 43 and reached a total of 636. Other forms like Mohamad, Muhamed, Muhammet, Mouhamed, Muhamad and Mahamuud could not be checked for “privacy reasons”.

Of course, other forms of Noah like Noa and Noach should be checked as well for the sake of fairness: both, however, were not listed according to the Dutch journalist.

The author says, it is the second year in a row that Mohammed is the most popular name for baby boys: In 2016 there were 724 baby’s named Mohammed (or one of it’s Arabic alternatives) in the Netherlands.

Well, no. If you can get over cringing at the apostrophes, those aren't "Arabic" alternatives; they're Dutch, English and French ones, and probably a number of other languages as well.

He also mentions that the same tendency was seen in England in 2016: It is not Oliver, but Mohammed (with all its permutations), that is the most popular name for baby boys.

That's a little odd, in that -- to hear the redtops tell it -- 2016 was the year little Oliver knocked Muhammad out of the top spot. But we still have a bit of a question: Other than a minor tweak to the second graf (not well enough done to avoid the "but ... however" problem), did our little friends at ZeroHedge do anything here besides putting their name on someone else's work?

Today in framing

Now that President Tinybutton has made the airways safe for travel again, is there anything he can't fix? Well, maybe. Here's the lede from the AP auto sales story linked above:

DETROIT (AP) — The U.S. auto industry’s historic growth streak may be ending, but demand for new vehicles — especially SUVs — remains healthy as the new year begins.

... not great?

U.S. auto sales are expected to fall 2 percent to 17.1 million in 2017, according to Kelley Blue Book. That would be the first year-over-year decline since 2009, ending an unprecedented seven-year expansion.
 
Speaking of healthy, it's actually kind of salubrious for the AP to put a statistical trend into context. Detroit's homicide rate is its lowest since 1979, but violent crime overall is up:

The FBI has released new numbers that show violent crime in Detroit has spiked more than 15 percent in 2016. The numbers show 13,700 violent crimes which include murder, rape, assault, and robbery. Chief James Craig says they don't tell the whole story.

There's a whole framing book to be written on which numbers stand by themselves and which get a "don't tell the whole story," but overall, he's right -- largely because no set of numbers in any lede has ever told "the whole story." Please do your best to resist suggesting that, rather than "Auto sales strong," Drudge had gone with something like TRUMP DESTROYS YEARS OF OBAMA GAINS IN AUTO SALES!!1!!!!1!1!!

Sword and shield of the Party

Oh, my. Something seems to have gotten the party press into a tizzy on Saturday night.

There's precious little hitting in the evening's top story at the Formerly Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

President Donald Trump’s eldest son, son-in-law, and then-campaign chairman met with a Russian lawyer shortly after Trump won the Republican nomination, in what appears to be the earliest known private meeting between key aides to the president and a Russian.

Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner’s attorney confirmed the June 2016 meeting of the men and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower. Then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended, according to the statement from Donald Trump Jr.

What on earth do you suppose made them confirm that?
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Today in framing

O labor force participation rate, where art thou? Actually, that's not a fair question. The labor force participation data won't be released until Friday, along with the other data in the monthly BLS employment report. Drudge is linking to the (ahem) scrupulously accurate Daily Mail's account of ADP's estimate of the February job market total:

Even Fox is a bit more cautious:

The ADP National Employment Report showed on Wednesday that private payrolls grew by 298,000 jobs last month, well above economists' expectations for a gain of 190,000. January's private payrolls gains were revised up to 261,000 from 246,000.

The report, jointly developed with Moody's Analytics, came ahead of the release on Friday of the U.S. Labor Department's more comprehensive employment report. The ADP report, however, has a poor track record predicting the private payrolls component of the government's employment report.

Could it not quite three years since -- how did the the Murdoch press treat a gain of 288,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in May 2014? Let's ask Lexis-Nexis:

There was a job boom in the US economy in April that was as phony as any Hollywood explosion.

If you keep up with these things, you might have noticed that drooler outlets like Drudge essentially abandoned the the job-creation stat in favor of labor force participation a while ago, once job creation and the unemployment rate seemed to be consistently in the Kenyan's favor. I have no idea what the numbers will look like on Friday, but I do expect it'll be interesting to see how the patterns of the past few months hold up.

Pronouns: The farewell tour

Shed a tear in passing for the specious pronoun count as an index of thinly veiled right-wing racism presidential narcissism. We may never see its like again -- though with a few hours left in the regular season, you don't want to rule anything out.

The pronoun meme deserves a spot in the Fake News Hall of Fame for its sheer persistence. (The flying verb in Drudge's play from last Wednesday  makes clear that this isn't a story that needs a lot of explanation.) It relies on three observations:
1) The Kenyan usurper uses first-person pronouns! Which most of us -- oops -- do pretty often.
2) The Kenyan usurper uses them N or NN or NNN times! Whether that's a proportion or a raw number, whether it's per minute or per word, or whether it's more or less than any of his predecessors, doesn't signify. GAAAAAAH!
3) Therefore narcissism! Which, sort of like the perpetual bedwetting over the Kenyan threat to "fundamentally transform" America, always ends up leading back to someone like Reagan, who used first-person pronouns with a pretty human regularity and closed out his tenure by congratulating himself on fundamentally transforming a lot more than that:

And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

Imagine what Fox News might have thought. Wait, don't.

Anyway, there's an enduring archive of pronoun madness over at Language Log. That doesn't quite get all the details, such as what we learn from how the meme spreads. Drudge's Wednesday play is from the Daily Caller, which seems to have a new aura owing to Tucker Carlson's ascent at Fox but is otherwise its same old droolery self:

President Obama referred to himself 75 times in his farewell address Tuesday night, according to a review of his prepared remarks by The Daily Caller.
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Well, not really. Not at all, actually

Let's skip all the stuff about context, framing and the social construction of reality and look at a chunk of nice, old-fashioned, entirely fabricated fake news. Given those conditions, we're less interested in the creation of meaning -- after all, there is no unframed condition of news -- than in how far toward the center an out-and-out lie can spread.

The Drudge Report, as usual, isn't the originator, but it's an important indicator, because outfits (say, the Times) that don't spend much time with the drooler media do look at Drudge. Here, the vaguely policy-oriented sites (Heat Street, Campus Reform, the Education Action Group), which often wipe most of the foam off before they go out in public, are on an equal footing with sites that dispense entirely with the bib, like InfoWars and -- have you guys met ZeroHedge yet?

In the month leading up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead (see "New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through 'Oversamples'" and "ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary's "Lead" Shrinks To 2-Points").

Sadly, no. As in no, you didn't "demonstrate" anything, and no, that's not how sampling works, unless you have access to cheap and reliable time travel, in which case -- for an operation touting "the news that moves the markets" -- you seem to be missing a major career opportunity. As even the morons of the "unskewed polls" movement acknowledged four years ago, a difference between party identification and voter intent is not evidence of playing around with the sample. If you know the former, you can go back in time and skew the latter. Do send a postcard.

The point, again, isn't whether another huckster is playing Duke-and-Dauphin with the rubes. It's how far up the beach any specific fiction is washed before someone picks it up. Not every made-up story leads the Drudge page; the one about the pizza parlor didn't make it, but the one about Podesta drinking the chicken blood did:

And, to reiterate, the intent doesn't have to be for every story to produce an armed attack on an innocent restaurant. All that has to happen is for the story to get close enough that someone has to spend time denying it.

This is going to be a tough habit to break for news organizations that still fear they might miss the next Hoovergate, but really -- if you can't ignore fake news, at least you can run a laugh track behind it. The polls weren't rigged, the employment data weren't cooked, and you should make sport of anyone who says otherwise.

Including the president-in waiting? Well, that would be an encouraging sign.

Charge for the ... wait, what?

"Fake news" (the real thing, not the stuff about the pizza parlor*) works because of the kind of context that makes news in general work. Information has to become a story to become news. Making up the information is generally not that effective, and it's often easy to spot. Making up the context -- making a story mean something that slips past the sometimes drowsy guards of the poor human brain -- is the better way to do real damage. So while you're restocking the survival bunker with ammunition and freeze-dried food at the thought of World War III, let's enjoy the miracle of a well-honed Drudge fake.

Start with the image, which is certainly real (here's what it looked like at the RealClear site in 2013). It started the morning at Drudge doing something else (right): reminding us that the Kenyan and his mooching family** are planning to fritter away some more of your tax money on food and scary music. Soon, thanks to Mr. Murdoch's bestselling London tabloid, the photo took on its new meaning. Take it away, The Sun:

PRESIDENT Obama has deployed US special forces troops along Lithuania’s border with “aggressive” Russia.

Tensions between Washington and the Kremlin have reached Cold War levels amid reports Vladimir Putin is deploying nuke-ready missiles in the Russian province of Kaliningrad – which borders Poland, Belarus and Lithuania.

Geographically challenged, but otherwise not untrue so far.*** Spotted the fakery yet?

And Lithuanian Defence Ministry spokeswoman Asta Galdikaite confirmed America has offered additional military support following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

... She added: “US Special Operations Forces presence in Lithuania is one of the deterrents” against military threats by Putin’s aggressive regime, reports the Express.

US military chief General Raymond T Thomas told the New York Times that America has a “persistent” presence in the Baltic states bordering Russia.

... The US and its Nato allies will send battalions of up to 1,200 to each of the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – and Poland by spring this year, reports the New York Times.

If "persistent" set your bullshit buzzer off, here's a detail from the Times's Sunday story:
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Fake news by omission

Three guesses on where in the newsosphere the morning's third most important story began!

Dammit, you peeked.

Fox is sticking with best practices for a career in, say, armed robbery or terrorism: follow the routines to reduce the risk of being noticed. Here, the routine is to spin the story forward -- "forward spin," unlike "Spin Alley," is a valence-neutral term of practice -- by adding context, reaction or interpretation. Going to Twitter, in this case, is no different from finding a Concerned Passerby to say "grinch" after someone robs the Salvation Army kettle. Here's the Fox tale in its entirety, credited to Heat Street (again):
 
Prior to the 2012 presidential election, the Washington, D.C., Metro system began preparing  special commemorative “SmartTrip” cards for Inauguration Day featuring both major candidates.

President Obama would go on to win reelection that year, but the Metro also designed a fancy Mitt Romney-themed SmartTrip card for the special occasion, just in case.

It looks like the D.C. Metro has gone to considerably less effort to prepare for Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Here is the design for this year’s commemorative Inauguration Day SmartTrip card:

The word “Trump” is nowhere to be found. Trump himself does not appear on the card. Twitters users were quick to point out what they saw as an obvious snub.

 

And that's that. (Though you can click through to the Heat Street original for a better sense of Fox's editing skills and Heat Street's awesome news judgment.) Conveniently, we've forward-spun right past that pesky WTOP story that Drudge was forced to link to, because WTOP -- hang on, kids -- actually committed some "reporting":

In an emailed statement to WTOP, Metro said it requested permission to use a photo of Trump but didn’t receive a reply from his campaign. “Due to the long lead time to produce the cards, the new pass commemorates the national celebration of the 58th Presidential Inauguration,” the agency stated.

In other words, it looks like Trump snubbed Metro, not the other way 'round. But that's not going to give the audience the right impression of the liberal establishment's perfidy, is it?

Can you call "fake news" on a story in which all the facts are true? (I mean, it's not Fox's fault that the hed doesn't say who snubwayed whom.) Reply hazy, ask again later. But by way of distinguishing Fox from the adults in the room, you can certainly call it fake journalism.

Drudge's lips to God's ear

Whether any particular bit of "fake news" is true or false -- and let's go ahead and stipulate that everything in this Tuesday morning screenshot is at least technically not false -- doesn't matter if the story doesn't spread. Mapping how bullshit moves from the fringe to the mainstream is thus central to the de-bullshitting process.

"Blood on her hands!" isn't any more or less evaluative than a hed that attributes the local sportsball team's win or loss to a particular play or player. The difference is that the game here is more opaque: we didn't see it, so we have to take someone's word for it. And whose word?

GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a backlash after 12 people were killed when an attacker ploughed through innocent revellers at a Christmas market in a truck.

The country’s far-right leaders have blasted the chancellor’s “open-door” immigration policy for sparking the attack in Berlin – and even her own party is putting the boot in.

“These are Merkel’s dead,” Marcus Pretzell, chairman of the Alternative for Germany party in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, posted on Twitter.

Oh. The AfD chairman's Twitter feed, as reported by the Murdoch tabloid in London. But certainly enough to help raise a little attribute salience by midafternoon for Murdoch's most influential voice in the US:
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Today in GAAAAAAAH!

The baby names are back! It kind of pains me to acknowledge that I've been writing about the damn baby names since before the dissertation was finished, but at this point, it'd be ungrateful to deny the value of deranged racist paranoia to the overall scholarly project. And this time, Drudge seems to be committing a couple of basic violations of the way news works. 

First, for you junior-league players, is the axiom that heds are drawn from the lede: If the reporter made something a priority, the hed writer either follows in train or -- should the reporter have somehow* missed the point -- fixes the lede so it reflects the real news. Thus, if you link to the Mirror, which kicks off with Posh and Becks:

Celebrities continue to be a source of inspiration for new parents choosing names for their children.

Coleen and Wayne Rooney's name choices have been extremely popular this year, with twice as many babies called Kit and Klay compared to last year.

But Olivia is officially the most popular name for girls and Oliver the most popular for boys.

... your job is to capture at least some of the Roonsian magic.

More importantly, though, your hed needs to reflect the news itself.  In that Muhammad has been sneaking up on Jack (or Oliver) for years on end, your hed really ought to tell the audience how today is different from yesterday. "Muhammad in second" might have been a big deal when he was closing in, but -- unless the tables are fabricated -- the real story here seems to be that Muhammad has been knocked out of the top spot.

You'd think that might be cause for dancing in the street for Drudge and his ilk. Perhaps he's still trying to figure out how to give credit to his tangerine master.

* Shock horror outrage

Don't let it fall on me

Q: Is it possible that the drooler media are irredeemably racist?
A: Why, did someone suggest that the drooler media were redeemable?

 (Top, 2016; bottom, 2015. Guess the occasion!)

Trump makes sun rise in East

There was certainly good news this morning, Mr. and Mrs. America: Guess which cowardly automaker backed down in the wake of the radiant one's victory? (The flag is a lovely touch; Drudge has used it before on stories that were, um, completely false, but what's a little framing among friends?)

As almost everyone has already pointed out, no. The image isn't technically a lie -- Ford is, after all, staying -- but does qualify as cask-strength bullshit, in that Ford had never planned to leave. It had apparently been considering sending production of one SUV to Mexico so it could make more of one that sold better at the current plant. As the Reuters update puts it:

So were Trump’s tweets that there would be “no Mexico” because he “worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky” misleading?

“I’ll let each individual reach their own conclusions, but the true answer should be clear to anyone,” Dunn [the UAW oficial mentioned earlier] said in an interview. “What is important is the transparency between Ford Motor Co. and the UAW. We’re doing a good job and that wasn’t decided in an overnight tweet.”

Which is really no nevermind when America has been made great again, right? You can see the theme developing from Wednesday:

As even the the truck farm of quantitative disinformation that is ZeroHedge points out, yes and no. The strong dollar is not a universal sign of greatness.

The concern about "fake news" on Facebook is amusing but, in the long run, pretty trivial. The open dishonesty of the new regime's favorite "real news" sites, on the other hand, is going to be a challenge.