The 2016 US General Election

[Chunder]

This has nothing at all to do with what Donald J. Trump ate for breakfast yesterday. That hoopla is the sensationalized obfuscation that we should be looking past.

Mate, while it's agreed, it's still on front pages 1 - 6 of major publications. You might want to take a step back and think for a second that published information is as good as the sources credibility if it's OK, then who in actual fact is bothering to push it, interpret it, write it, publish it, circulate it, right down to which demographic reads it. I.E Hillary collapses, Paul Joseph Watson covers it - Denounced by all MSM because 'infowars' until, yes Hillary has a "flu". Well bugger me.

If US foreign and domestic intelligence services, presumably apolitical sources, have any well substantiated information indicating foreign interference and/or manipulation in US democratic election process ( heavy emphasis on "if"), then that is a serious matter and a subject worthy of attention and public dissemination.

The intellectual rigor required to vette who is pushing this intel aside from agencies delivering is too time consuming as major publications can't be relied on. That's the problem. Attempted manipulation? Ask the average person who voted for Brexit what they think of Obama weighing in on the matter, ask them again what they think of HRC's characterization of them post referendum, SHITLOADS of countries might have something to say about perceived U.S. meddling. Russia has been flagged for months - nothing new, ask the average American if they know of any controversies regarding E-voting. All well covered issues. You know what else is serious? People actually having to concentrate on putting food on the table

Regardless the underlying political motivations of those seeking dissemination of information, and regardless that the information will always be incomplete, any information that is available would be coming from US foreign and domestic intelligence services and would be disseminated to all Congressmen regardless their party affiliation. Any well substantiated factual information that exists will not change relative to whomever won an election.

Classified information only gets released to those cleared to see it, else you rely on those cleared to see it to tell you the interpretation of it. You then go tell your constituents that or play chinese whispers. There's been a rather inglorious history of that in the last 15 years, MP's resigning, inquiries, etc. I guess we should rely on insightful investigative journalism to get to the bottom of it. Oh wait...

Yeah, there's a reason intelligence information should matter. Just there's a serious question mark over it's delivery. Too bad if you've just spent the last year calling a group of people a bunch of misogynist racist bigoted homophobe islamophobes then want them to tune in and believe you when you have a crap history of delivering intel in the first place.

All of this might be a good story if there wasn't such a huge recent history of the miscarriage of it.

[Parihaka]

Too bad if you've just spent the last year calling a group of people a bunch of misogynist racist bigoted homophobe islamophobes then want them to tune in and believe you when you have a crap history of delivering intel in the first place.

All of this might be a good story if there wasn't such a huge recent history of the miscarriage of it.

Not just the last year but since Bill's second election. The only change in that time is the 'right' has matched the 'lefts' disinformation campaign for the first time over the last year.
Hence we now have the 'fake news' meme when in fact its been happening for twenty years, but within the legacy media. Some observers/commentators trace it even further back, to Nixon.

[Gun Grape]

Not just the last year but since Bill's second election. The only change in that time is the 'right' has matched the 'lefts' disinformation campaign for the first time over the last year.
Hence we now have the 'fake news' meme when in fact its been happening for twenty years, but within the legacy media. Some observers/commentators trace it even further back, to Nixon.

maybe even earlier than that




Where did this notion that once upon a time (back in my day) they only reported the facts, or ,it was news,not opinion, come from? Yellow Journalism has been around since the 1800's.

Nil novi sub sole

[YellowFever]

Speaking of fake news, I remember I posted this youtube video some weeks back.

Turns out the guy they "interviewed" was a CNN cameraman.

Watch the last 20 seconds of the video.

Can fake news get any "faker" than this "mainstrean" news outlet?

[Parihaka]

maybe even earlier than that



Where did this notion that once upon a time (back in my day) they only reported the facts, or ,it was news,not opinion, come from? Yellow Journalism has been around since the 1800's.

Nil novi sub sole

exactly and precisely. Newspapers were monolithic and controlled, television was monolithic and controlled, both prey to wealthy vested interests including the governments of the day. Recently, in the US (as above) the Dems were effectively able to gain control of both, after the conservatives had controlled the press for decades. Now with the interwebs the hoi polloi get to spread whatever bullshit they feel like without needing big money. It'll change again, but it is satisfying to watch the old monoliths being out evolved.

[Triple C]

From my perspective, a news agency tend to benefit from being bankrolled by rich people who are interested in a paper or channel as a vanity project to garner personal prestige, by being associated to a reputable establishment. Bad reporting starts to happen when you treat a media outlet as a commercial enterprise, because most consumers have terrible taste, and once you start going chase viewer numbers and click rates, it's all over.

[astralis]

good thing there's Jeff Bezos? :-)

[GVChamp]

Was there really a Golden Age of Journalism or is this just another case of nostalgia-goggles?

[astralis]

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...showman-crisis

Updated by Matthew Yglesias

Donald Trump is a true master of getting attention, and he has been for decades. Where other New York developers built buildings, Trump built a brand based on always being the center of attention. Trump is so good at getting attention that his 2016 presidential campaign was long seen as essentially an attention-grabbing stunt rather than a sincere effort to win. But one of the big lessons of the 2016 primary is that the ability to grab attention is a profoundly important part of winning a presidential nomination.

A general election is different. And, indeed, despite the fact that Trump won in the end, it’s worth recalling that he probably fared quite a bit worse than a more conventional Republican Party nominee with less baggage would have done. But now that the election is over, Trump is back to displaying his incredible knack for publicity, having within a few short weeks mastered a problem that has bedeviled incumbent politicians for years: How do you get people to pay attention to what you’re doing?

This is a real skill, and as long as objective conditions in the world remain roughly the opposite of how Trump described them — unemployment and crime low, incomes rising, ISIS on the defensive — it’a going to serve Trump very well and drive liberals batty. The problem for Trump will come where it comes for any president: when the going gets tough.

The final months of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign played out against the backdrop of a genuine crisis situation. Big companies were filing for bankruptcy, being nationalized, or seeking bailouts from various governments. The United States was bleeding jobs, and foreign labor markets were heading downhill as well. A genuine and nearly universal fear about the immediate future of the country dominated the Bush-Obama transition, which also featured a commitment by the president-elect to end an ongoing military presence in Iraq.

Obama delivered a transition, and a first 100 days, that was suited to the mood. It was not without its problems and hiccups, but at every margin it erred toward being boring and orderly. People were eager for change but fearful of chaos, and Obama brought a reassuring calm to a nerve-racking situation.

But as the economic situation normalized in his second term, calm became something more like boring and ignorable. His team would routinely offer the classic incumbent’s lament — why weren’t journalists ever interested in covering the myriad good things that were happening in any given week?

It’s not that Obama never bothered to come up with small-scale initiatives to help people or tour the country to tout signs of progress. But this is boring stuff, and it largely got ignored, just as Obama’s responsible, well-managed Twitter feed is routinely ignored.

Trump’s tweets, by contrast, are really “bad” by the standards of big-time politics. His feed features lots of vendettas, lies, and trivia that make it a fascinating antidote to the antiseptic, workshopped tweets of the typical politician. So people pay attention.

Every Trump live television appearance carries the tantalizing possibility that something awful will happen — maybe he’ll call for his opponent to be jailed or say something racist or simply false. Whatever happens, we can be pretty sure we won’t just get an anodyne stump speech. Unpredictability guarantees interest.

By the same token, Trump rather brilliantly turned the Carrier affair into so much more than a case of dickering over a single plant and ultimately settling for half a loaf. There was drama, there was conflict, and there was mystery. A more professional handling of the matter would have garnered Trump some positive headlines in Indiana and been ignored nationally. Instead, Trump dominated the agenda for days with a rather small initiative, inspiring overblown criticism about how his approach threatens to erode capitalism itself.

Rather than offering calm in dramatic times, Trump sells drama around small stories — driving massive interest among fans and critics alike, but ultimately focusing attention on what he wants to focus attention on. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s likely that when temperatures cool down, politicians from both parties will learn that there is an upside to Trump’s looser approach and a downside to the knee-jerk gaffe aversion that has taken over so much of politics.
The problem is there are going to be problems

The issue here is that for all that Trump painted an exceptionally dark portrait of the United States of America during the campaign, his attention-grabbing tactics work well primarily because the actual situation is pretty good. As Brian Beutler writes at the New Republic, “Against a backdrop of economic growth, climbing wages, and a quasi-stable global order, Trump’s weird, personality-driven industrial policy will be consistent with a story in which Trump is taking a decent situation and making it better.”

The Carrier deal isn’t remotely big enough to move the needle in terms of the macroeconomic situation. But as long as the macroeconomic situation is stable and improving, that kind of thing works as a powerful symbol of the president’s hard work on behalf of the American people.

Unfortunately, past presidents have generally learned that the problem of how to best claim credit for good times — though difficult — is not really the hardest part of the job.

The difficult problem is dealing with actual problems in a remotely satisfactory way. Whether we’re talking about a financial markets panic, a foreign crisis, or a natural disaster, the inevitable vicissitudes of life suggest that sooner or later a big scary story will dominate the landscape. Past presidents have found that when something bad happens, once-valorized personality traits become demonized. The relatable, comfortable-in-his-skin George W. Bush was viewed as passive and incompetent in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and a growing insurgency in Iraq. The calm, collected Obama was seen as cold and out of touch as ISIS stormed to power in the Middle East.

Trump’s frenetic, unpredictable personality makes him a fascinating attention magnet in a way that’s very useful in good times. But when all eyes are on the president and looking for a workable solution to a very real crisis, that same disposition is likely to seem unnerving and erratic. Maybe he’ll get lucky and nothing bad will happen while he’s in office. Or maybe he’ll surprise us and prove to be an astute crisis manager and student of public policy, who swiftly solves problems as they arise and keeps us on the path of peace and prosperity.

But most likely Trump’s publicity successes will thrill his fans and infuriate his foes (which will only thrill his fans more), right up until the moment disaster strikes — at which point we’ll all remember that showmanship isn’t really the most important part of the job.

[Parihaka]

I'm curious as to whether he will sub-let the White House to the Kardashians?

[JAD_333]

All the bellyaching about the MSM misses one key point. The MSM, unlike the fake news outlets, usually tries to get the story right and, if not, will own up to its mistakes. I'm not going to research to find examples, but I recall times when reporters for major news outlets were exposed, sometimes internally, for making up or embellishing stories, and were fired. Some reporters have been axed for failing to vet sources. Dan Rather comes to mind. In some cases, news organizations have apologized and even paid out damages to injured parties which happened to Rolling Stone recently for an erroneous story about a college's handling of sexual assaults on campus. In general, editors for major news organizations, ride herd on their reporters and won't allow stories to run without checking facts and sources. There is such a thing as journalistic ethics, and I think most journalists live by them. Underline "most".

As any newshound will attest, the MSM is not perfect. Stories that ought to be "just the facts" often use qualifying adjectives and quotes from "experts" to convey an editorial slant. But in general, news junkies that follow several well staffed news organizations, get a pretty good picture of the facts of a story. They know which news organization have a liberal bias, like the New York Times or the Washington Post and those that
have a conservative bias like The Dallas Morning News or the Detroit News. These outlets will all agree on the essential facts of the story, but take a different slant, which will become obvious to anyone who reads them regularly. They all claim to be balanced, but the bones they throw to the other side are few and far between.

Fake news outlets are different. They either outright make up news or make up stories using obscure facts, such as was done using emails from Podesta to create the Pizza-gate story. People who see the MSM as the enemy often defend fake news, arguing that the MSM misrepresents or ignores their views or attacks them as off-the wall. Of course, they don't see fake news as fake, but rather as true stories that the MSM misses. And to them the stories are true until proven wrong and, if proven wrong by the MSM, they reject the proof because the MSM can't be trusted. It's not logical, but these are weird times, especially when well-connected people like General Flynn's son working on Trump's transition team tweets that the Comet pizza sex-trafficking story should be considered true until proven otherwise, and a radio show host claims the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a government hoax. One gullible North Carolina man is in jail for believing the Comet story, and now a Florida woman has been arrested for making death threats to the father of a child killed in the Sandy Hook shootings because he dared to challenge the hoax story.

Of course, these incidents don't top the case of a false story starting a war. Gunny posted the old articles about one that did exactly that--the Spanish-American war--113 years ago. In that case, while the facts of the sinking of the Maine were superficially accurate, the blame was wrongly attributed to Spain without any real proof. So, it's not like fake news is a new phenomenon. For the most part, it consists of claims that defy established, mainline beliefs and efforts to disprove them.

It's also profitable. A neighbor of mine, who is well versed in Illuminati lore, spends a good bit of money on CDs sold by various "experts" on the subject. The latter make a living at it. I don't see much harm in that. The MSM makes a living on news, too. Sadly, however, some fake news rises to the level where actual harm results, as the Pizza-gate story demonstrated. The anecdote is to teach people to have a healthy sense of skepticism, whether they're liberal or a conservative. As for people who know a story is untrue, but use it because it advances their particular agenda, nothing can be done except to challenge their facts. The truth actually does win out in the end.

[YellowFever]

The problem is not fake news or either alt-right/left sites but rather the Internet as a whole.

The Internet offers a worthless nobody sitting in his basement to type away in his underwear and making all kinds of crap up and usually, it's totally harmless until the MSM, or in this case, Edrogen supporters, or even Edrogen's government themselves pick it up and make a big deal out of it.

There were crazies or zealots all throughout history but now these same nut bags have a voice, regardless of how small it is (via twitter, FB, and mostly 4 Chan) and someone will hear it.

If that someone has a bigger voice and has less than pure intent, it will get around.

I don't see how we can stop it without a huge violation to the constituation.

Yeah, yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater is against the law. But going into the theater is not.

There will always be nuts.

It's just that the net gave them easier access to sprout their views and lies.

[JAD_333]

The problem is not fake news or either alt-right/left sites but rather the Internet as a whole.

YF:

That's an important point. Without the internet fake news would be less of a problem.

We could also point a finger at companies like Google and Facebook that allow websites to run their ads and get paid for clicks. Several enterprising website owners have proudly admitted they design fake news stories just to make ad money.

To their credit, Google, Facebook and others are pulling their ads from these websites, but that won't stop them from existing. Plenty of other websites out there are in it for other reasons than the money.

[astralis]

a little while ago Mark Zuckerberg had a meeting with conservative activists back when Facebook still used to have human editors. IIRC one of the changes stemming from that meeting was the use of algorithms (which to be fair, Zuckerberg preferred anyways as he would rather Facebook be a 'technology company' and not a media one).

now there's a nice thriving Macedonian/Albanian factory for fake conservative news.

[Albany Rifles]

now there's a nice thriving Macedonian/Albanian factory for fake conservative news

Just to be clear, that's Albanian not Albany!!!