If, like pollster Matthew McDermott, you shared (or at least chuckled at) that Jimmy Kimmel clip of VP Pence joking about delivering empty boxes because it confirms what you already believe about Pence; or, if you feel the C-SPAN clip that unfairly makes the VP look bad confirms your attitude about the lying America-hating media,…
You sheep who trust the lamestream fake news media think you know them as Prince Charles, the heir to the UK throne, and Prince Harry; but this exclusive from NewsBreak.com exposes them as a married couple who died of COVID-19 within hours of each other. You’ve heard of newsbreak.com. They’re the source that exposed this…
Have you seen this image mashup being cited as evidence that you should wake up because “the media” is lying to you? Newsbreak.com is an aggregator. Its business model is scraping stories off of various places on the Internet and reposting them on its own site. I found a page on newsbreak.com with the headline…
For years, I’ve been teaching a fake graph. In pretty much every course I teach, on some day when students seem discouraged or distracted, I’ll draw an X axis labeled “Experience” and a Y-axis labeled “Confidence,” and sketch out the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” curve, as preparation for an informal pep talk. (Update, 27 Nov 2021: My…
Public officials misspeak all the time. Journalists make mistakes all the time. Ordinary citizens over-react to headlines without reading the full article all the time. We are all of us human. It’s unfair for any of us to treat every gaffe as evidence of malice or incompetence. For example, critics of President Trump are stretching…
Not fake news. Not the enemy of the American people. “Nobody ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” said the the president at Thursday’s press event. Feb 27: “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” [Narrator: “Cases were not going down.”] Feb 26: “The 15 [documented cases of COVID-19 in the USA] within…
I tell my journalism students they won’t hear me talk about Trump’s policies at all. But I do talk about his interactions with journalists, which I frequently find appalling. Here’s the latest example.
Do you have a regular news-consumption routine? Facebook doesn’t want you to leave Facebook, so it’s algorithm favors posts that will keep you on Facebook, rather than links that will send you elsewhere. I listen to a 5-minute podcast from NPR News Now about once a day, usually while I am doing my morning exercises.…
Don’t blame “the media” for using this photo, often identified as immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in a cage. I saw this image in my social media feed numerous times over the weekend; it wasn’t journalists who kept sharing it, it was random people (and probably a non-trivial number of bots) on…
The Washington Post, which was one of about a dozen news outlets that Trump banned from his campaign events for a few months this summer, has released a Chrome browser plugin that adds Post-sponsored commentary into Trump’s Twitter feed. Sometimes the Post says the commentary will simply add context, but they are announcing it as…
The links under your friend’s post got your attention. What the hyperbolic, go-for-the-gut click-baity blurb did to your lizard brain will make steaming blood gush out of your empty eye sockets. Ok, probably not, but still… [A] Facebook official made clear that the company does not apply the same fact-checking standard when offering readers related…