Media and Society Spring 2017

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

News apps

Download at least one new news app for your smartphone or tablet. Use it for a week and then report back to this blog. What do you like about it? Don't like? How does it affect your news consumption, having it at your fingers? Would you recommend it to others? Why or why not?

20 points, due by 10 a.m. Monday, Feb. 6.
Posted by Donna Lampkin Stephens at 9:06 AM 18 comments:
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Thursday, January 19, 2017

Evaluating sources

Here's a presidential-sized example of our ongoing issues of critical thinking skills and evaluating sources. Read and comment. How can people avoid being susceptible to such fake news?

Your thoughtful response, due by 11 a.m. Monday, Jan. 30, is worth 20 points.

Here's the link; if it doesn't work, please read below:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/business/media/trump-fake-news.html


10 Times Trump Spread Fake News


By SAPNA MAHESHWARI UPDATED January 18, 2017


Photo

Donald J. Trump demonstrating from his office in Trump Tower how he sends Twitter messages through his smartphone. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

In the heated discussions over the effects of fake news on democracy and civil society, Donald J. Trump has often taken center stage.

He has used false claims to attack his political opponents, question the legitimacy and loyalty of the Obama administration and other Democrats, and undermine the news media, the federal government and other institutions that many of his supporters do not trust.

The practice has paralleled his rise from reality TV star to holder of the nation’s highest elected office, according to an analysis of his social media activity.

When discussing some of his claims, Mr. Trump has cited as evidence articles posted through Breitbart News, manipulated YouTube videos and celebrity gossip publications like The National Enquirer.

Mr. Trump has also tweeted links from right-wing blogs like WND.com and TheRightScoop.com that often promote sensational conspiracy theories and contain little original reporting.

His sourcing highlights the bounty of misinformation accessible on the web and its power in a deeply divided America — especially when endorsed by someone of Mr. Trump’s influence and visibility.
He offered this explanation for his actions while discussing an altered YouTube video he had tweeted as part of an unsubstantiated claim that a protester at one of his rallies had ties to the Islamic State: “I don’t know what they made up; all I can do is play what’s there,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“All I know is what’s on the internet.”

Below are examples from the last several years of Mr. Trump’s penchant for making fraudulent claims and backing them up with information gleaned from unsubstantiated sources.
  1. The Affordable Care Act and ‘Death Panels’
    ObamaCare does indeed ration care. Seniors are now restricted to “comfort care” instead of brain surgery. Repeal now! http://bit.ly/spcorH
    9:13 AM - 28 Nov 2011
    In November 2011, Mr. Trump proclaimed that the Affordable Care Act would “ration care,” linking to an article on TheRightScoop.com. The story cited an anonymous caller’s comments on a conservative radio talk show as proof the act established so-called death panels that would determine whether or not elderly patients received care.
    The notion of death panels was deemed the “Lie of the Year” in 2009 by the fact-checking website Politifact, which traced its rise to comments made by Sarah Palin on Facebook. The additional claims in the story Mr. Trump shared were debunked by the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Department of Health and Human Services, according to Snopes, another fact-checking website.
  2. President Obama’s Holiday Message
    What a convenient mistake: @BarackObama issued a statement for Kwanza but failed to issue one for Christmas. http://bit.ly/vUmvpM
    11:02 AM - 28 Dec 2011
    Mr. Trump took to Twitter to share a story from TheGatewayPundit.com, a conservative blog, which falsely claimed that Mr. Obama had issued a statement for “the fake holiday” Kwanzaa but not for Christmas. (Mr. Obama’s Christian faith has been questioned by political opponents; some have sought to assail the legitimacy of his presidency by falsely claiming he is a Muslim.) After the political blog Talking Points Memo refuted the story, Mr. Trump shared it again on Twitter, starting his post with “I’m right, TPM is wrong.”
    President Obama and his wife wished Americans a “merry Christmas” on Dec. 24, 2011, in a video address shared on Twitter, YouTube and the White House website. Earlier that month, Mr. Obama said he hoped Americans had “the merriest of Christmases,” as his family lit the National Christmas Tree in front of the White House, and separately said that “the story of Jesus Christ changed the world” in remarks at the “Christmas in Washington” concert. The statement on Kwanzaa was in line with those made by George W. Bush through 2008.
  3. Birtherism
    An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.
    4:23 PM - 6 Aug 2012
    In March 2011, Mr. Trump started raising questions about President Obama’s birthplace and birth certificate on television, on shows that included ABC’s “The View” and NBC’s “Today.” The notion had been debunked and pushed to the realm of conspiracy theorists after Mr. Obama released his short-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health in 2008.
    Mr. Trump also promoted his claims through Twitter, citing “an ‘extremely credible source’” that called his office and allegedly told him the certificate was a fraud, as well as linking to posts on blogs like WND.com and FreedomOutpost.com. While Mr. Trump was roundly denounced for continuing to push the conspiracy theory, it solidified his connection to the largely white Republican base that was so instrumental in his election victory in November.
  4. Secret Oil Deal to Control Gas Prices
    Mr. Trump has also made claims without supporting material of any kind. He once shared political views through a YouTube video series, “From The Desk Of Donald Trump,” sounding off on the Republican Party and Mr. Obama, but also on topics as varied as Andy Roddick’s talent and the state of the desk itself. (“Many people have been asking about my desk and the fact that I have so many papers on my desk,” it began.) He tweeted links to the posts with the hashtag #trumpvlog throughout 2011 and 2012.
    In April 2012, Mr. Trump posted a segment in which he said, “I have no doubt in my mind that President Obama made a deal with the Saudis to flood the markets with oil before the election so he can at least keep it down a little bit.”
    He added: “After the election it’s going to be a mess. You’re going to see numbers like you’ve never seen if he wins.” He repeated this allegation about a secret deal on CNBC in June of that year, which Fox published under the headline “Trump: Obama’s Secret Saudi Oil Deal to Win Re-election.”
  5. Linking Autism to Vaccinations
    Autism rates through the roof–why doesn’t the Obama administration do something about doctor-inflicted autism. We lose nothing to try.
    9:19 AM - 22 Oct 2012
    Starting in 2012, Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed his personal belief that autism is linked to childhood vaccinations, saying it in interviews, on Twitter, and even during a Republican debate.
    On the show “Fox & Friends” in April 2012, Mr. Trump was asked about the rising number of children with autism diagnoses and said, “I have a theory and it’s a theory that some people believe in, and that’s the vaccinations.” Later in the segment, one host noted most doctors disagree and that studies do not show a link, which Mr. Trump acknowledged, adding, “It’s also very controversial to even say, but I couldn’t care less.” He said he had seen changes in children firsthand to support his belief.
    Plenty of studies, including a recent one that involved almost 100,000 children, have shown there is no scientific evidence linking vaccinations to autism, and that there is no benefit to delaying vaccinations. Instead, children who are not vaccinated on the regular schedule can be at risk for infectious diseases for a longer period. One doctor told Scientific American that “misinformation on the internet often frightens parents away from following” the vaccination schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the only one endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 2015, a measles outbreak in California, which started at Disneyland, was partly attributed to diseases spread by children who were not vaccinated.
    In October 2012, Mr. Trump took to Twitter to ask why President Obama’s administration was not intervening. He then wrote in March 2014, “If I were President I would push for proper vaccinations but would not allow one time massive shots that a small child cannot take - AUTISM.”
  6. Questioning Unemployment Data
    The underemployment being quoted as 14.9% is way low–real number could be 20%.
    2:24 PM - 13 Jul 2012
    Think of it—20% of our country is essentially unemployed.
    2:25 PM - 13 Jul 2012
    Mr. Trump has a long history of casting doubt on the unemployment data and figures on “underemployment,” a measure that also includes people working part time for lack of full-time jobs and others who have given up looking for work. In mid-2012, he remarked on Twitter that an underemployment rate of 14.9 percent was “way low,” and could actually be 20 percent. A couple of months after that, he said on CNBC that “the real unemployment number is over 17 percent, when you add back the tremendous numbers of people that gave up looking for jobs and all of the other things they do to manipulate them.”
    Just as I said last October, census workers cooked the job numbers for Obama right before the election http://bit.ly/1b4B8Pe
    12:18 PM - 19 Nov 2013
    In November 2013, Mr. Trump, on Twitter, linked to a column from The New York Post headlined, “Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report.” The story was quickly criticized by The Columbia Journalism Review for “turning a nugget of news into a blockbuster conspiracy exposé.” It noted that the column was largely premised on the misbehavior of a worker who left the Census Bureau in 2011, well before the election.
    In December 2014, Mr. Trump tweeted a story from WND.com, a conspiracy-minded conservative site, with the headline “Donald Trump: Obama’s Jobless Figures ‘Phony.’ Economists agree.” The story cited comments Mr. Trump made on “Fox & Friends” alleging that the actual unemployment rate was almost 18 percent, an estimate supported by John Williams, an independent economist who has a newsletter called “Shadow Government Statistics.” It says says it “exposes and analyzes flaws in current U.S. government economic data and reporting.”
    Mr. Williams, in the WND story, estimated November unemployment at 23 percent. Trump later repeated that figure during a campaign speech at Liberty University in January 2016, a number The Washington Post showed to be false.
  7. President Obama and the Boston Marathon Bombing
    Obama’s $1T+ deficit budget expanded welfare & green cronyism & it cut domestic bomb prevention in half http://bit.ly/XRjmcP
    4:17 PM - 17 Apr 2013
    Mr. Trump shared a link from TheRightScoop.com on Twitter, claiming the president’s budget “cut domestic bomb prevention in half.” The post relied on a story from The Daily Mail, which based its claim on an estimate from a former official at the Department of Homeland Security who resigned in 2005.
    Separately, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Is the Boston killer eligible for Obama Care to bring him back to health?” He went on to circulate a post based entirely on that tweet from Newsbusters.org, a blog from the Media Research Center, which states its goal as “documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.” Outside of the fact that federal law requires any patient requiring emergency treatment to be treated regardless of insurance status or ability to pay, the attack occurred in Massachusetts, where the health insurance program under Mitt Romney served as a model for the Affordable Care Act.
  8. Ted Cruz’s Father
    Mr. Trump made comments in a Fox News interview last May accusing Senator Ted Cruz’s father of associating with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
    Mr. Trump’s remarks — made on the day of the Republican primary in Indiana — came after The National Enquirer claimed it had photographic proof that Mr. Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was “palling around” with Mr. Oswald before the shooting. Mr. Cruz’s campaign called that report error-filled and condemned Mr. Trump for campaigning “on false tabloid garbage.”
    The fact-checking website Politifact noted that “several historians of the period told us they’ve never seen Cruz’s name come up in connection with Oswald.”
  9. Protester Was Member of ISIS
    USSS did an excellent job stopping the maniac running to the stage. He has ties to ISIS. Should be in jail! https://amp.twimg.com/v/977860d3-6b1b-4a5f-a81e-67baa6e2e3b1 …?ssr=true
    6:41 PM - 12 Mar 2016
    Mr. Trump claimed at a rally last year that a man who charged him at another event was linked to the Islamic State, yet no government agency suggested the man was connected to ISIS or terrorism. He repeated the allegation in a tweet, linking to a video that claimed to show the man. It was overlaid with Arabic text and music and appeared to have been created as a hoax.
    When asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about the lack of evidence tying the man to ISIS and the video hoax, Mr. Trump did not seem deterred.
    “He was dragging a flag along the ground and he was playing a certain type of music and supposedly there was chatter about ISIS,” he responded. “What do I know about it?”
  10. Voter Fraud
    In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
    3:30 PM - 27 Nov 2016
    After winning the presidential election but losing the popular vote, Mr. Trump took to Twitter to claim that he actually received more votes than Mrs. Clinton “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” The notion was popularized by Infowars, a website replete with conspiracy theories that include questioning the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
    The overwhelming consensus from people who oversaw the general election in states around the country was that the amount of voter fraud in 2016 was next to none.
Posted by Donna Lampkin Stephens at 12:00 PM 23 comments:
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From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece


Read this article from The New York Times last week. Is the fake news phenomenon a threat to our society? How do we handle it going forward?

Your thoughtful suggestions will be worth 20 points and due Wednesday, Jan. 25, by 11 a.m.

Here is the link with photos. If you can't access it, read the story below.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton-cameron-harris.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece
By SCOTT SHANEJAN. 18, 2017

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — It was early fall, and Donald J. Trump, behind in the polls, seemed to be preparing a rationale in case a winner like him somehow managed to lose. “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” the Republican nominee told a riled-up crowd in Columbus, Ohio. He was hearing “more and more” about evidence of rigging, he added, leaving the details to his supporters’ imagination.

A few weeks later, Cameron Harris, a new college graduate with a fervent interest in Maryland Republican politics and a need for cash, sat down at the kitchen table in his apartment to fill in the details Mr. Trump had left out. In a dubious art just coming into its prime, this bogus story would be his masterpiece.

Mr. Harris started by crafting the headline: “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.” It made sense, he figured, to locate this shocking discovery in the very city and state where Mr. Trump had highlighted his “rigged” meme.

“I had a theory when I sat down to write it,” recalled Mr. Harris, a 23-year-old former college quarterback and fraternity leader. “Given the severe distrust of the media among Trump supporters, anything that parroted Trump’s talking points people would click. Trump was saying ‘rigged election, rigged election.’ People were predisposed to believe Hillary Clinton could not win except by cheating.”

In a raucous election year defined by made-up stories, Mr. Harris was a home-grown, self-taught practitioner, a boutique operator with no ties to Russian spy agencies or Macedonian fabrication factories. As Mr. Trump takes office this week, the beneficiary of at least a modest electoral boost from a flood of fakery, Mr. Harris and his ersatz-news website, ChristianTimesNewspaper.com, make for an illuminating tale.

Contacted by a reporter who had discovered an electronic clue that revealed his secret authorship of ChristianTimesNewspaper.com, he was wary at first, chagrined to be unmasked.

“This topic is rather sensitive,” Mr. Harris said, noting that he was trying to build a political consulting business and needed to protect his reputation. But eventually he agreed to tell the story of his foray into fake news, a very part-time gig that he calculated paid him about $1,000 an hour in web advertising revenue. He seemed to regard his experience with a combination of guilt about having spread falsehoods and pride at doing it so skillfully.

At his kitchen table that night in September, Mr. Harris wondered: Who might have found these fraudulent Clinton ballots? So he invented “Randall Prince, a Columbus-area electrical worker.” This Everyman, a “Trump supporter” whose name hinted at a sort of nobility, had entered a little-used back room at the warehouse and stumbled upon stacked boxes of ballots pre-marked for Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Harris decided.

“No one really goes in this building. It’s mainly used for short-term storage by a commercial plumber,” Prince said.
In case anyone missed the significance of the find, Mr. Harris made it plain: “What he found could allegedly be evidence of a massive operation designed to deliver Clinton the crucial swing state.”

A photograph, he thought, would help erase doubts about his yarn. With a quick Google image search for “ballot boxes,” he landed on a shot of a balding fellow standing behind black plastic boxes that helpfully had “Ballot Box” labels.
It was a photo from The Birmingham Mail, showing a British election 3,700 miles from Columbus — but no matter. In the caption, the balding Briton got a new name: “Mr. Prince, shown here, poses with his find, as election officials investigate.”

The article explained that “the Clinton campaign’s likely goal was to slip the fake ballot boxes in with the real ballot boxes when they went to official election judges on November 8th.” Then Mr. Harris added a touch of breathlessness.
“This story is still developing,” he wrote, “and CTN will bring you more when we have it.”

He pushed the button and the story was launched on Sept. 30, blazing across the web like some kind of counterfeit comet. 

“Even before I posted it, I knew it would take off,” Mr. Harris recalled.

He was correct. The ballot box story, promoted by a half-dozen Facebook pages Mr. Harris had created for the purpose, flew around the web, fueled by indignant comments from people who were certain that Mrs. Clinton was going to cheat Mr. Trump of victory and who welcomed the proof. It was eventually shared with six million people, according to CrowdTangle, which tracks web audiences.

The next day, the Franklin County, Ohio, board of elections announced that it was investigating and that the fraud claims appeared to be untrue. Within days, Ohio’s secretary of state, Jon Husted, issued a statement to deny the story.

“A Christian myself, I take offense to reading such unbelievable lies from a publication alleging Christian ties,” Mr. Husted said.

There was nothing especially Christian about his efforts, Mr. Harris admits; he had simply bought the abandoned web address for $5 at ExpiredDomains.net. Within a few days, the story, which had taken him 15 minutes to concoct, had earned him about $5,000. That was a sizable share of the $22,000 an accounting statement shows he made during the presidential campaign from ads for shoes, hair gel and web design that Google had placed on his site.

He had put in perhaps half an hour a week on the fake news site, he said, for a total of about 20 hours. He would come close to a far bigger payday, one that might have turned the $5 he had spent on the Christian Times domain into more than $100,000.

The money, not the politics, was the point, he insisted. He had graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina in May, and he needed to pay his living expenses. “I spent the money on student loans, car payments and rent,” he said.

By the time he launched his fraudulent story on ballot fraud, he had found minimal success with “Hillary Clinton Blames Racism for Cincinnati Gorilla’s Death,” a reference to the sad tale of Harambe, the gorilla shot after he grabbed a little boy visiting the zoo. He had done better with “Early Morning Explosion in DC Allegedly Leaves Yet Another DNC Staffer Dead,” spinning off conspiracy theories around the earlier shooting death of a Democratic National Committee staff member.

Later, he would tell gullible readers “NYPD Looking to Press Charges Against Bill Clinton for Underage Sex Ring,” “Protesters Beat Homeless Veteran to Death in Philadelphia” and “Hillary Clinton Files for Divorce in New York Courts.” Eight of his stories would merit explicit debunking by Snopes.com, the myth-busting site, but none would top the performance of the ballot box fantasy.

President Obama thought the fake news phenomenon significant enough to mention it as a threat to democracy in his farewell speech in Chicago last week. “Increasingly,” he said, “we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.”

That was exactly the insight on which Mr. Harris said he built his transient business: that people wanted to be fed evidence, however implausible, to support their beliefs. “At first it kind of shocked me — the response I was getting,” he said. “How easily people would believe it. It was almost like a sociological experiment,” added Mr. Harris, who majored in political science and economics.

By his account, though he voted for Mr. Trump, his early preference had been for Senator Marco Rubio. Mr. Harris said he would have been willing to promote Mrs. Clinton and smear Mr. Trump had those tactics been lucrative. But as other seekers of clicks discovered, Mr. Trump’s supporters were far more fervent than Mrs. Clinton’s.

In late October, with the inevitable end of his venture approaching, Mr. Harris sought an appraisal for the web domain that by then had vaulted into the web’s top 20,000 sites. An appraiser said that given the traffic, he could probably sell it for between $115,000 and $125,000.

But Mr. Harris made a costly mistake: He decided to wait. Days after the election, denounced for making the peddling of fake news remunerative, Google announced that it would no longer place ads on sites promoting clearly fabricated stories.
A few days later, when Mr. Harris checked his site, the ads were gone. He checked with the appraiser and was told that the domain was now essentially worthless.

All was not lost, however. He had put a pop-up on the site inviting visitors to “join the ‘Stop the Steal’ team to find out HOW Hillary plans to steal the election and what YOU can do to stop her!” and collected 24,000 email addresses. He has not yet decided what to do with them, he said.

Asked whether he felt any guilt at having spread lies about a presidential candidate, Mr. Harris grew thoughtful. But he took refuge in the notion that politics is by its nature replete with exaggerations, half-truths and outright whoppers, so he was hardly adding much to the sum total.

“Hardly anything a campaign or a candidate says is completely true,” he said.

Lately he has picked up Mr. Trump’s refrain that mainstream news organizations are themselves regular purveyors of fake news. Last week, when BuzzFeed released what it called an “explosive but unverified” dossier suggesting that Russia had planned to bribe and blackmail Mr. Trump, Mr. Harris posted on Twitter:

He did not mention his own expertise in the field.


Posted by Donna Lampkin Stephens at 11:07 AM 22 comments:
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