Here's Fox, making up a story

The Fair 'n' Balanced Network is usually rather good at covering its tracks, fibwise, but for some reason it gets careless when Massster is in the spotlight. Here's a fresh example from Monday:

President Trump was asked why Dr. Anthony Fauci, who works for his administration, has a high approval rating on the handling of coronavirus but Trump himself does not. “It can only be my personality,” the president said.

“I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci,” Trump said at a White House coronavirus briefing Tuesday. “I agree with a lot of what he’s said.”

Trump said that “for the most part” his administration has done what Fauci has recommended.

"He's got this high approval rating—so why don't I have a high approval rating, and the administration, with respect to the virus?" Trump continued. He touted the administration’s work on testing, PPE supplies and producing ventilators.

"Nobody likes me. It can only be my personality. That's all,” the president said.

Everything after the first sentence is true -- not very accurately assembled (there's some unmarked snippage that makes Trump sound fractionally more coherent than he is), but true. Here, though, according to the White House, is what Trump "was asked":

Q: On that note, Mr. President, last night, in tweets that were deleted by Twitter, you said that Dr. Fauci misled the country about hydroxychloroquine.  How so?

THE PRESIDENT: No, not at all.  I think — I don’t even know what his stance is on it.  I — I was just — you know, he was at the — he was at the task force meeting a little while ago.

I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci. ...

In other words, the lede is bogus. It's not a case of the press sharing Trump's obsession with approval ratings, which would be a little snippy if true. ("Mr. President, lots of Faber coeds say Dr. Fauci is the only Delta they'd go out with.") It's a question about why Trump shared, and then deleted, derogatory claims about Fauci. Which might be a small thing in the context of the rest of Trump's performance, but still -- it's the lede, you guys.

As a rule, you should avoid lying about things people can check. Fox may be slipping a bit as the election draws near.

Reverse double suplex

The Fair 'n' Balanced Network really had the snowflakes on the run Friday morning, didn't it? Or ... what did that frontpage spot look like 12 hours later?

 Let's try to get a few more wrestling metaphors into the hed there, shall we?

 That's better.

Anyway, the story:

Wrestler turned international movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson body-slammed a British tabloid on Friday for posting what he called a “fabricated” interview featuring him bashing “snowflakes.”

Johnson took to Instagram Friday evening to “set the record straight” over a story published earlier in the day by The Daily Star. In the interview, he was quoted as lamenting the rise of snowflake culture and criticizing millennials’ need to search for reasons to be offended.

“Earlier today, online, an interview dropped with me, apparently it was with me, where I was insulting and criticizing millennials,” Johnson said in a video posted to his social media page. “The interview never took place. Never happened. Never said any of those words. Completely untrue. 100 percent fabricated.”

Wait -- he's saying a redtop out-and-out fabricated a story? About a CELEBRITY? Well, why is that our concern?

Media outlets, including Fox News, had picked up the story, in which the actor was said to have derided millennials for doing a disservice to war heroes by constantly complaining.

Fox was a little more enthusiastic than it lets on. It had already spun a companion story off the original fabrication before the rebuttal* caught up:

In fairness ("to be sure" is the technical journalistic term), it's technically possible that the Daily Star has exactly the exclusive it claims and the craven wrestler is running for cover on his agent's orders**:

He "laid the smackdown" on PC softies in an exclusive chat with the Daily Star.

While The People’s Champion applauds the fact nowadays anyone can “be who they want to be” the musclebound man-mountain raged at the constant offence snowflakes take from everything.

The legendary wrestler turned actor says it does a disservice to war heroes who fought for freedom of speech.

I don't keep up a lot with Dwayne Johnson's unscripted speech, so maybe somebody he's wont to lapse into British English collective noun agreement:

... “So many good people fought for freedom and equality - but this generation are looking for a reason to be offended.

So it sounds like we ought to to go with "at minimum, partially fabricated"; the Star is going to laugh all the way to the bank anyway, and Fox will have to go back to stoking its own outrages. But it's fun to note how a verb like "body-slams" can switch sides in such a hurry.***

* Both URLs point to the same story now, alas.
** See the comments at Fox; it takes a while to get down to the point where the text is updated, but it's worth the effort.
*** Maybe it means something different at Fox when you put in the hyphen than when you leave it out.

The missing middle

If you're fond of Fox (and you know you are), you've seen this fake news trick before. It's how "a longtime activist against Islam" arrested for violating a court order gets into the headlines as "arrested for filming outside child grooming outside trial": all you do is leave out the middle term in the news syllogism.

In the case at hand, as it turns out, there are half a dozen middle terms, assisted by a head fake from the particular journalistic use of "after" to mean "as a consequence of" or "in the course of" ("2 killed after truck hits car"). This is more or less the sequence, as Fox tells it:

• Suspect tries to fill water cup with soda
• Employee tells him he'll have to pay for that; suspect declines and leaves the restaurant
• Employee follows to remind suspect he isn't welcome back
• Suspect responds by trying to kick employee and heads for another restaurant
• Cops pursue him into bathroom of second restaurant, where he begins "to resist and fight with the officers"
• Enter the Taser

So, technically, yes. He was "Tasered after filling water cup with soda," but you probably don't need to look over your shoulder the next time you go for seconds -- any more than the jackbooted advance guards of sharia law will swoop down on you if you go to Britain and decide to film a random street scene with your phone. The latter is a more distinctively Foxian ideology, but the former is ideological as well, as long as you count tabloidism as an ideology.

And yes, "Coke Fiend" is in strikingly poor taste, but at least it holds out the possibility that someone at Fox thinks "Coke" is a generic term for soft drinks.

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.

Lese-majeste

Another installment in the occasional series of Perfect Fox Front Pages. Collect them all!

In the first and second spots, we have two cases of Massster calling "fake news" on the librul media.

At No. 3, ghastly foreigners foiled! (Third paragraph, first sentence: "President Trump went to Brentwood in July and vowed to crush MS-13, while pledging a tougher approach on immigration.")

At No. 4, black people behaving badly! (Second graf, first sentence: "Brittany Covington, 19, entered her plea in a case that received national attention because it involved an 18-year-old disabled white man and four blacks who taunted him with profanities against white people and President Trump.")

The lese-majeste triumph, though, is the causal implication of the No. 5 story:

Skiing star Lindsey Vonn suffered a back injury during a World Cup super-G race in Switzerland Saturday, two days after she criticized President Donald Trump in an interview about next year's Winter Olympics..*

Let's skip to the ninth graf:

... The two-time Olympic medalist told CNN in an interview that aired Thursday that she would "absolutely not" visit the White House if the United States Olympic team gets a traditional post-games invitation.


You can check out the reader comments yourself, if you're wondering what one buys into as a Fox reader.


* (sic), if you're scoring along at home

Today in drooling racist paranoia

Shock horror outrage! How bad is it, elite Washington Times "Rapid Reactions" team?

London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan declared an end to any kind of advertising in the city that promotes “unrealistic expectations of women’s body image and health,” or, in layman’s, typical Western-style fashion spreads.

Sharia, meet London.

As the Gatestone Institute notes, this reminds of when ISIS took over Sirte in Libya a couple years ago and immediately set up sharia shop, ordering via billboards for all women to don baggy burka’d robes if they wanted to walk in the streets without, say, getting acid thrown in their faces, or raped.

Well, not quite. What it most "reminds of" is -- how did the Washington Times put it back in June 2016?

London’s first Muslim mayor is hitting the ground running with a ban on ads in the city that feature “unrealistic” body images.
 
Labor Party’s Sadiq Khan pledged before his May 7 election win to prohibit ads across Transport for London (Tfl) like those seen in a “beach body ready?” campaign by the company Protein World.

... The decision by Mr. Khan comes just months after the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) began looking for way to “proactively regulate” images of men and women.

Well, that's at least marginally closer to the truth. As noted by professional media outlets, of course, it was a ban on body-shaming ads on the Transport for London network (whose ad policies, we noted at the time, are fairly easy to find), not "the city." And there's some flavorful irony in the link the Gatestone Institute* itself uses to illustrate its sharianoid babbling; it's a column in the Independent headlined "Sadiq Khan is right to ban objectifying ads from the tube -- we never consented to this sexist wallpaper." Much of the adult world, indeed, seemed quite capable of putting this into the general context of how commercial speech is regulated. (Hint: At least he isn't fining anyone half a million dollars for half a second of accidental breast at halftime of the Super Bowl.)

But of course that's not why we have deranged race-baiting fishwraps like The Washington Times, is it? Back to today's story:
Read more »

Halfway round the world

In which the fake news gets halfway round the world -- OK, about 220 miles south, given the I-75 detour -- before the editors put on their trousers:

Columbus received a top ranked among 75 other cities in a comparison done by QuoteWizard, an online insurance comparison marketplace. Unfortunately, the ranking isn’t good news. It’s for the worst-driving cities in America.

And you can write the rest from there. A competent spellcheck* probably should have caught "received a top ranked," but it wouldn't tell you that the "comparison" is meaningless babble designed to snag a few bursts of free publicity for QuoteWizard. For that, it would help to have an editor, and guess what the Dispatch** did that doesn't bode well for editors?

Please don't mistake that for a cause-and-effect argument. We're no more hospitable to post hoc claims now than back before the War on Editing began. But it's worth pointing out that if you're, oh, the New York Times and you want to avoid running stupid post hoc editorial claims about the better-forgotten Sarah Palin, you probably shouldn't start by eliminating the job classification*** with the highest proportion of people who will call your writers on bogus reasoning.

* Word didn't, from which you may draw conclusions next time Word questions you about the passive voice.
** Your Editor and frequent commenter RayB are somewhere amid the throng in this crowd shot.
***  Which is still holding the bridge with class, if you've missed it.

Today in lying

The afternoon's top story at the Formerly Fair 'n' Balanced Network certainly rips the mask off one of the chief miscreants of the 0blamer administration, dunnit? I mean, daring to play the race and gender card when Unmaskinggate is closing in:

Susan Rice, the Obama national security adviser under fire over her alleged involvement in the “unmasking” of Trump associates during the 2016 presidential election, suggested in a fresh interview that race and gender might be playing a role in the scrutiny she’s faced.

Sounds serious! I wonder if it's true.

In an interview with journalist Michael Tomasky for New York Magazine, Rice reportedly questioned the criticism she’s faced dating back to the Benghazi controversy.

Funny, lots of adults do that. What's the problem here?

“Why me? Why not Jay Carney, for example, who was then our press secretary, who stood up more?” she asked.

Tomasky noted in the piece that Carney “isn’t an African-American woman, of course” and apparently asked Rice whether that is the key factor. Rice, in response, left the door open:

“I don’t know… I do not leap to the simple explanation that it’s only about race and gender. I’m trying to keep my theories to myself until I’m ready to come out with them. It’s not because I don’t have any.”

In other words, Susan Rice "links" race and gender to "the 'unmasking' backlash" by ... declining the opportunity to link them to BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can see why -- other than the marginally literate prose its staff produces -- Fox doesn't want you to read past the headline. It doesn't just lie about the evidence; it lies about what it's lying about.
Read more »

The case of the missing rally

It wouldn't be a "fake news" story if Fox wasn't somehow involved, would it?

President Trump is creeping up in the polls now that foreign policy has seized center stage.

...  It’s hardly surprising that Trump’s approval rating is getting a little better—up six points, to 40 percent, in a new Quinnipiac poll. He launched widely praised airstrikes against Syria over a chemical weapons attack, and used the Mother of All Bombs against ISIS in Afghanistan.

Fox, of course, is hardly the only news outlet to salivate over a phrase like "mother of all bombs." Nor is it the only one to link Trump's recent bellicosity to an improvement in public assessment of his performance; that would be a "rally 'round the flag" effect, of the sort that political scientists have been tracking for decades. What's interesting here is that Fox was only just catching up with the grownup media (at top is the Washington Post, claiming a "small boost in Trump's approval rating" in an April 14 article). And what's really interesting is that the evidence shows no rally effect. This isn't just fake news; it's fake news where there should be real news, and that's news.

Read more »

Arrest them, in the name of the people!

How many sources does it take to lead the front page, Reagan's Favorite Newspaper?

Trump administration officials believe that a Department of Homeland Security report that undercut the president’s position on his travel ban was drafted with the express intent of leaking it to the press, a source close to the department says.


"Close to the department."

The source said the report was drafted by those loyal to the Obama administration inside the department’s office of intelligence and analysis. The drafters relied solely on open source material, which meant it could be delivered to reporters without violating federal laws on mishandling classified information.

“This was not really a leak but sabotage,” the source said. “This report was commentary. This is insurrection. They all took an oath.”

Arrest them, in the name of the people! But the plot's about to thicken:

The leak to The Associated Press appears to follow a pattern of suspected Obama loyalists still inside the government releasing draft documents that are immediately refuted by the White House, such as a supposed plan to mobilize the National Guard to arrest illegal criminal immigrants.


It must be a slow Sunday when you can't even get someone to go on the record to denounce the enemies of the state. Perhaps we'll hear more later in the week.

Bogus heds: 666 and all that

Shock horror outrage, The Washington Post! Quick, tell us what the guy really said:

I have been in places and experiences before where demonic activity was palpable. The power of the Holy Spirit of God was protecting me in those moments and was once again protecting me and my daughter in this moment.

There are deeper questions of practice afoot: why the Post plucked a blog post out of the blue to build a story around (lacking even the "quickly went viral" excuse), how the audience is supposed to distinguish a second-hand claim* of supernatural activity at a Trump rally from the preelection tale of John Podesta drinking the blood at a satanic ritual, or why it takes 27 paragraphs to reach the quote that allegedly supports the hed and lede. And my sympathies are certainly with the protagonist, who seems to have done nothing more than politely try to keep some Trump droolers from getting out of hand. But if the Fair 'n' Balanced Network had baked a quote this seriously, I'd like to think the Post would join the civilized world in calling bullshit.

Apparently not, though:

Sigh. What do you suppose she really said?
Read more »

Getting ahead of the story

You have to figure anyone at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network could have written the hed in their sleep -- when Massster speaks, it's going to be "rousing," whether anyone actually saw the candidate eat the rat or not. But just as a matter of not getting caught, don't you think it might help to wait for the speech itself?

President Trump returns to friendly and familiar ground Saturday with a campaign rally in Florida, after a challenging first several weeks in the White House, largely deprived of the voter enthusiasm that helped propel him to his unexpected November win.

Trump will hold the event inside an airplane hangar in the central Florida city of Melbourne. The Republican president visited Florida nearly two dozen times during the 2016 presidential campaign and won the state after Democratic President Obama was victorious there in 2008 and 2012.

Even the alleged kings of the fake news business had updated their story before 8 p.m. Eastern:

Melbourne, Florida (CNN) President Donald Trump, after a month of arduous and, at times, turbulent governing, got what he came for Saturday during a dusk rally here: Campaign-level adulation.

... "I am here because I want to be among my friends and among the people," Trump said to open his rally. "This was a great movement, a movement like has never been seen before in our country or before anywhere else, this was a truly great movement and I want to be here with you and I will always be with you."

As of 8:25, though, Fox was still mired in the future:

... Since his November win and officially entering the White House in late-January, the president has continued to argue that much of the news media has treated him unfairly, which has slowed progress for his young administration.

Trump has continued to use Twitter to sidestep reporters and communicate directly with Americans. But his use of social media has not appeared to spark as much energy as his freewheeling campaign stops -- notorious for chants of “Drain the swap,” "Lock her up" and “Build a wall.”

Saturday’s rally will likely be a return to the old style, which appeared to energize Trump as much as it did voters, if his roughly 70-minute press conference Thursday was a prelude.
Read more »

Break it, don't fake it

For those who still have your "News: Break it, don't fake it" buttons from the ACES plagiarism summit a few years back, here's a real-life reminder: The more you rely on fake news ...

... the less likely people are to believe it when you break news:

In the second position, we have an important story -- the new national security adviser appears to have lied like a rug about "inappropriate and potentially illegal" doings, and in turn the vice president either was misled or lied right along -- done with old-school heft:

“They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia,” Pence said in an interview with CBS News last month, noting that he had spoken with Flynn about the matter. Pence also made a more sweeping assertion, saying there had been no contact between members of Trump’s team and Russia during the campaign. To suggest otherwise, he said, “is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy.”

Neither of those assertions is consistent with the fuller account of Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak provided by officials who had access to reports from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies that routinely monitor the communications of Russian diplomats. Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

All of those officials said ­Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president.
 
Nine sources is pretty good. Unlike, say, the accompanying case of Mission Not Impossible:

On its face, this is a remarkable story. The man whom Trump picked to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court is turning on the president just a week after he was nominated. Given how much Trump hates being criticized by alleged allies, it was a stunning comment — and one that lit the political world on fire Wednesday night. How would Trump react? Would he pull the nomination? Attack Gorsuch? Both? Neither? As always with Trump, all options were on the table.

But dig a little deeper and the conspiracy theories begin to seem, well, not so conspiratorial.

That's been true of conspiracy theories at least since Roosevelt orchestrated Pearl Harbor. It made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed his fate, and that Obama had Scalia murdered in a fit of pique. And when you're told that the witch Elizabeth Warren soured the milk of Mitch McConnell's cows, the first source you should turn to is ... 

The Democratic National Committee, for one, was not fooled. “While Donald Trump’s morning tweets show [White House strategist] Steve Bannon may not have clued him in on the ruse, this is clearly a meaningless White House-orchestrated attempt to help Judge Gorsuch pretend he won’t be a rubber stamp for the Trump administration,” said a DNC spokesman.

This is actually serious, kids. The Post has done, and continues to do, noble and risky work in cataloguing the incompetence, thuggishness and buffoonery of the entire Trump enterprise. That's not the same kind of checking and balancing a real branch of government might do, but it's a reminder of why we've conceived of the press as a "fourth branch": an independent actor that puts the evidence-based question to the public when the existing three branches get out of line. That role is critically compromised when the press decides to buy into conspiracy theories, period -- whether you side with the proponents of the theory or not. We are supposed to be the adults in the room, not the ones who come home with a handful of magic beans we got in trade for our credibility.

The other statements are inoperative

Why do you suppose it took the Fair 'n' Balanced Network a whole day to catch up with the tale of the Bowling Green massacre? (Still in the No. 2 position on the homepage, though the Penitent Conway image only lasted a few hours.) Finding the right tone apparently wasn't easy, even for a seasoned media critic like Howard Kurtz:

Kellyanne Conway admits she made a mistake in talking about a Kentucky massacre that never took place. But that’s not all she has to say about it.

In an interview airing Sunday on “Media Buzz,” President Trump’s counselor called some of her critics “haters” and said she corrected her error as soon as she learned about it. The misstatement has drawn substantial media attention, given Conway’s high profile.

And, not to put too fine a point on things, because it was a lie -- several of them, as it turns out:

... On MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Conway was defending the president’s temporary ban on refugees and on any travel to the United States from seven countries, including Iraq. She said that after former President Obama greatly restricted the flow of refugees from that country, “two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre” -- which, she said, “didn’t get covered.”

We're eliding something important here. How does that last thought go, Washington Post Fact Checker?

"Two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. Most people didn’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”

So she didn't just make up a massacre that didn't happen or lie about the order of events (the perps of the non-massacre admitted involvement in attacks on American troops while they were still in Iraq, according to the Post's reconstruction). She wove the lie into a causal claim about the impact of liberal media failures, which she supported by tweeting a link to a 3-year-old liberal media story hedded "US May Have Let 'Dozens' of Terrorists Into Country As Refugees." That's some major-league lying, right there. But Fox, of course, has a mission:

“They’re masterminds, I had said that before,” Conway told me. “I should have said plot or I should have just called them terrorists. … I clarified immediately. I should have said terrorists and not massacre.” Still, she said, “I’m sure it will live on for a week.”
I'm still having trouble with the second paragraph: "as soon as she learned about it." How long does it generally take to "learn" that the thing you made up wasn't true? According to the Post, somewhere north of 90 minutes:

Conway was on her way to a Four-Pinocchio rating when, about an hour and a half after The Fact Checker sent her a query about her remarks, she tweeted that she meant to say “Bowling Green terrorists.” ... She added that this was an “honest mistake” of the type also made by journalists.

So "immediately" means "an hour and a half after somebody asked why I made something up"? Got it! Back to Fox:

She encouraged people to read a 2013 ABC News article on how the two Iraqis in Bowling Green were later convicted of sending weapons to al Qaeda in Iraq to kill American soldiers. She also said MSNBC and host Chris Matthews did not catch the error.

She could also, of course, have encouraged them to travel back in time and read their local newspapers -- which generally don't cover things that don't happen, but might after all have done a pretty good indexing job with the events that did happen.

Keeping track of the Trump people is a challenge; they lie so casually, and so consistently, about everything under the sun that you can see why nobody jumped in to correct her. When the whole statement is fabricated, how do you even start to prove the negative? Fox again:

Conway added: “I misspoke one word. The corrections in the newspapers that are attacking me are three paragraphs long every day.”

Which may or may not be another lie -- I mean, I'm sure there are days in which the corrections in the newspapers that are attacking her run to three paragraphs exactly, but a daily newspaper contains a lot of words, many of them not about Kellyanne Conway. If you screw up one hockey score, one former employer of the bride in a society wedding and one world despot in a caption from overseas, you're already at three paragraphs. Conway told three lies in the space of a moderate-sized lede, and she couldn't even correct one of them without -- how's that again, The Fact Checker?

In an email she wrote to The Fact Checker, she said: “Not exactly the paragraphs of corrections we see in WaPo but hopefully this helps.”

It's charitable, in a self-congratulatory way, of the Post to let her off easy:

Uncorrected, this would have been worth Four Pinocchios. But Conway says it’s an “honest mistake.” We appreciate that she sought to correct the record. Readers can judge for themselves, but as we don’t play gotcha, we will leave this unrated.

Well, good for you. She lied like a rug, backed out of a fraction of her lies when caught at it, and kneed the media in the fusebox when the ref wasn't looking. I'm still waiting for The Fact Checker to come to grips with its tortured intellectual gymnastics about BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!, but I suppose partial credit is better than no credit. Fox's media analysis, on the other hand, is exactly what you'd expect.

No, but thanks for asking

Given the frontpage play in both local dailies Saturday (and on the radio Friday), it's worth asking: Is it OK to indulge in fake news when the cause is good and your intentions are pure?

For those of you outside the immediate area, Macomb County is dealing with some fairly serious problems stemming from the collapse of a sewer line and the resulting risk of sewage spills (the request to hold down water use came last week). Hence, the top of today's Freep:

More Lady Gaga watching and less toilet flushing in central Macomb County during halftime of Sunday's Super Bowl.

Well, that's not exactly what* County Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller encouraged today, but she is urging residents in 11 communities affected by the Dec. 24 sewer interceptor collapse and sinkhole in Fraser to restrict water usage.

And the point is?

That means during the big game and what is known — either in reality in some places or urban legend in others — as "The Big Flush."


Sadly, no. The reason a "big flush" associated with a broadcast event is an urban legend in some places is that it's an urban legend, period -- according to Snopes (frequently cited in the numerous stories debunking the myth), one that dates to the days of "Amos 'n' Andy" on the radio. But some fictions, under some circumstances, are just too hard to resist.

As football fans head to their bathrooms en masse during the Super Bowl halftime — residents in northern Macomb County may want to hold it. Or at least not flush.

The News's presentation is less adolescent than the Freep's,** but it relies on the same underlying misperception: Why would you think people wait until halftime to use the bathroom? And it raises the same question: Given that the event is true (there is such an official, and she did make such a plea), and that it's in the public interest to pay attention to the underlying situation, are you justified in drawing attention to the matter by putting a bogus claim on the front page?

I'd like to think not. If nothing else, we hardly seem to have run out of true stuff to say about the sinkhole matter. For another, what you print tends to set the boundaries of what you consider credible; a high proportion of Bigfoot stories suggests that you should be very careful around those friendly games of chance. I'm all for printing what Commissioner Miller said:

“I hope everybody enjoys themselves and has a great time. Just be cognizant of how much water you’re using. That’s going to be a very high water usage day.”

... as long as we note that it's going to be a high water usage day, no matter whether you contribute before, during or after the halftime festivities. Go ahead and call an urban legend an urban legend. The credibility will come in handy the next time you have to point out that the president is lying.

* Sorry, a "that's not what" lede still qualifies as a "that's what" lede, and thus is on the banned list. And you're short a few hyphens, too.probably jget one
** Why a porta-john would be "closed for halftime," given that you could probably help the situation by having a few of them trucked in from Oakland or Wayne, is a question for the ages.

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.
Read more »

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.

Fake news: It isn't fair, it isn't right

These aren't "news," in that they've been sitting on the desktop for a while and I'm trying to get things cleaned up for a new semester, but they're a part of the spectrum that we need to not overlook amid the broader discussion of news and faking it. That's the Washington Post above, from Jan. 18, 2016,* and the Washington Times, below, from July 9.

The Times has slightly the worse of it, both on general suckerhood and on syntax:

If luck be a lady tonight in the $540 million Mega Millions lottery, she very well could appear at the Tenley Market on Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest Washington.


And then again, she might not. But the larger problem is that some of the most dangerous forms of fake news are self-inflicted. The lottery story is a persistent example. It's not a partisan affliction, and the Russians aren't pumping it into our water supply to sap our precious bodily fluids. News organizations do it to themselves, and they're the ones who can stop doing it to themselves. File with Bigfoot; tell him his poetry smells and kick him downstairs.

* Yes I'm aware that the URL and the online hed both say "Sorry, Powerball dreamers: There’s no such thing as a ‘lucky store.'" Let us know how you inferred that from the 1A "numbers don't lie" play, OK?

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:
Read more »