Fake news sites

This is pretty sinister stuff: Zuckerberg: Facebook will develop tools to fight fake news.

Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a series of measures that should help prevent fake news from being shared on Facebook.

The planned controls, which were announced in a late night Facebook post, follow accusations that a flood of fake news stories influenced the U.S. presidential election.

“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” wrote Zuckerberg. “We take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.”

The CEO said that Facebook (FB, Tech30) is working to develop stronger fake news detection, a warning system, easier reporting and technical ways to classify misinformation. Facebook has also been in contact with fact checking organizations.

For Zuckerberg, it’s a sharp reversal in tone from comments made in the immediate aftermath of the election.

“I think the idea that fake news on Facebook — of which it’s a small amount of content — influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” he said last week.

Does he mean NBC, CBS, The Washington Post and New York Times? Here’s the initial list from Zero Hedge, who is on the list, along with Drudge and Breitbart!

fake-news-1

fake-news-2

These people cannot even begin to understand that it is they who are the totalitarians, the fascists, the brown shirts, the Nazis, the Red Guards, the Stazi. But they are, as plain as day to the rest of us and invisible to them.

Dealing with media bias

Media bias is among the largest problems our democracies have, and I don’t have to tell you in which direction that bias goes. This election has been a truly learning experience: MRC/YouGov Poll: Most Voters Saw, Rejected News Media Bias. Here are the reported stats:

Key findings:

7 in 10 (69%) voters do not believe the news media are honest and truthful.
8 in 10 (78%) of voters believe the news coverage of the presidential campaign was biased, with nearly a 3-to-1 majority believing the media were for Clinton (59%) vs. for Trump (21%).
Even 1/3 (32%) of Clinton voters believe the media were “pro-Clinton.”
8% of Trump voters said they would have voted for Clinton if they had believed what the media were saying about Trump.
97% of voters said they did not let the media’s bias influence their vote.

It is this last one that is the most ludicrous finding. It is impossible not to be influenced by the media and anyone who thinks they are not is kidding themselves in a very comprehensive way. The media are like crowd noise at a football match which affects not just the players but the referees. The number of so-called conservatives I met with during the election who were saying things that came straight out of the New York Times was astonishing.

It was therefore interesting to read the second editorial in The Oz this morning: Making the media listen again. It begins:

Donald Trump’s victory has exposed serious flaws in so-called quality media, mainly a refusal of many ideologues to deal with facts.

If “ideologues” is the new word for journalists, I could not agree more. So this is what they think should be done, which I agree with while doubting it is even remotely likely:

Best report the facts, listen to the public and share a variety of opinions.

A variety of opinions on the pages of a paper you no longer trust is not going to work. You need to be able to balance what is found there with sources that are seeing the world as you see it yourself. What made following the election so that I could see more clearly what was going on depended on the following online sources, of which there were others from time to time. I didn’t necessarily agree with everything they wrote, or even their general political line, but they did give me a different perspective and helped to anchor my thoughts in the midst of a maelstrom. These are the ones that worked for me in alphabetical order:

Ace of Spades
Atlas Shrugs
BadBlueNews
Breitbart
Drudge
FrontPageMag
Instapundit
Lucianne
Powerline
PJ Media
Quadrant
Stefan Molyneux
Taki’s Mag
VDare

The MSM has discredited itself. For those of us on this side of politics, reading newspapers or watching the news will now and forever be an endurance test in getting through presentations and articles we no longer trust. At least, for now, there are alternatives. To a very important extent, Donald Trump is president-elect because of the alternative media. Watch below:

Another media lie

And this one is more ridiculous than all the others: New York Times publisher vows to ‘rededicate’ paper to reporting honestly. Confession may be good for the soul, but there are limits:

The publisher of The New York Times penned a letter to readers Friday promising that the paper would “reflect” on its coverage of this year’s election while rededicating itself to reporting on “America and the world” honestly.

Fool me once, etc. But the reality beneath it all is that people read the NYT so that they can avoid finding out what’s going on that might suggest that people on the right have a legitimate point of view. That kind of reporting you will never see in the mainstream American media.

Where’s the outrage?

I wonder if LIQ will continue with his advice to accept the result if Trump wins. It is now fully understood that the Democrats will do everything they can to steal this election, and this is the official view of the left from the President on down. The question is whether Trump can win beyond the range of deceit. So, as we head into the home stretch.

CONFUSED COMEY CLEARS HER AGAIN!
TRUMP: ‘SHE’S PROTECTED BY RIGGED SYSTEM’
POLL: THISCLOSE
TRUMP MARATHON SUNDAY
CLINTON WARNS ‘FAKE’ WIKIS COMING

Astonishing reversal by Comey, somehow managing to sift through 650,000 emails in a few days. It still seems to me that the aim is to make Tim Kaine president. She wins and is then indicted seems simple enough, but of course she first has to win. Comey re-opening the investigation suddenly brought Trump back to life so here they close it again. That they did shift back does make it seem that there now is a genuine possibility that Trump could win.

But what most of this has done is sidetrack the election from Trump’s main issue, which is open borders. The United States will be about as wealthy as Argentina when all this is over, with the same sort of distribution of income. Fascinating to have watched all of this even if extremely depressing.

The top ten of the (so far) top 100 wikileaks

Via Andrew Bolt: The Top 100 Most Damaging Wikileaks (so far). There is nothing new in any of it for anyone who has been paying attention. What makes Wikileaks and now the Weiner additions so devastating is that the media cannot avoid covering them and therefore slowly – very slowly – the tide may be turning against the most morally corrupt individual ever to run for President from a major party. Here are the top ten of the (so far) top 100, but I’ve added in Number 100 to show what a deep bench there is. You should also go to the link to see the detail which really is overwhelming.

1. Obama lied: he knew about Hillary’s secret server and wrote to her using a pseudonym, cover-up happened (intent to destroy evidence)

2. Hillary Clinton dreams of completely “open trade and open borders”

3. Hillary Clinton took money from and supported nations that she KNEW funded ISIS and terrorists

4. Hillary has public positions on policy and her private ones

5. Paying people to incite violence and unrest at Trump rallies

6. Hillary’s campaign wants “unaware” and “compliant” citizens

7. Top Hillary aides mock Catholics for their faith

8. Hillary deleted her incriminating emails. State covered it up. Asked about using White House executive privilege to hide from Congress

9. Bribery: King of Morocco gives Clinton Foundation $12 million to have meeting with Hillary, 6 months later Morocco gets weapons

10. State Department tried to bribe FBI to un-classify Clinton emails (FBI docs)

100. Obama picked people in his administration from the suggestion list of CiTi bank advisor/Wall Street shill

The proof that the media have the astonishing power to hide and distort is shown by the polls that say Obama still has a plus-50% approval rate. After Syria, Obamacare, the open southern border and the state of the economy, and that’s just to begin with, you have to wonder what he could have done to make things worse. But elect Hillary and we may yet find out.

The right question is whether the media is off track

The great genius of the Clinton campaign is to make it seem that Hillary and Trump are just two of a kind, with no signifcant difference between them in what each would bring to the presidency. So when you read this [via Instapundit], remember Peggy Noonan supported Obama not just in 2008 but also in 2012. She is another Democrat shill pretending to be a Republican. This is what she wrote:

What I’m thinking about this week is a focus group led by Peter Hart, the veteran Democratic pollster, Tuesday night, in Charlotte, N.C., still a toss-up state. Present were a dozen late-decider voters, three Democrats, six Republicans and three independents.

What struck me about the group wasn’t its new insights, which were few. What was powerful was its averageness, its confirmation of what you’ve already observed. The members weren’t sad, precisely, but they were unillusioned. They were seeing things with clean eyes and they were disappointed. They wanted a candidate they could trust and believe in.

Which when you think about it shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Raise your hand, said Mr. Hart, if you like both candidates. No one did. Raise your hand if you like one candidate. No one did. Raise if you don’t like either. All 12 did. . . .

Mr. Hart asked: Will the next generation be better off? No one raised a hand. This is not news; it’s been a cliché since the crash of 2008. You get used to the data: Americans no longer assume their children will have it better than they did. But it was striking to see these dozen thoughtful people keep their hands down.

Asked what has been lost in America, one respondent said security for kids: “They can’t just go out and play.” “Innocence for kids,” said another. Parents no longer feel the world, even the immediate one, is a safe place.

What is missing in America? “A freshness,” said a middle aged man. He went on to speak of the 1950s, “Ozzie and Harriet,” when things seemed newer somehow and assumptive of progress.

Is America off track? They all nodded.

The people she describes are so deluded that it is breathtaking.

All we like sheep

All of the stories from Drudge are crucial but for me one stands out:

HILLARY AT WAR WITH FBI
DEMS RAGE AS SURVIVAL IN DOUBT
LYNCH MOVED TO SPIKE COMEY
HUMA GOES INTO HIDING
TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EMAILS
Homeless woman attacked by mob for defending Trump’s Hollywood star…
HILLARY HELL WEEK: 10-POINT VANISH IN WASHPOSTABCNEWS…
Poll Tampering?
How Clinton campaign allowed hacking of Podesta’s e-mail account…

It may take all of the information that has come from two entirely different directions – from Wikileaks on one side and the Weiner investigation on the other – but the role of the media in distorting and suppressing what the public needs to know to make an informed decision remains to me the greatest scandal of them all. You cannot trust the press. The sudden ten-point fall in the Washington Post-ABC News poll, all before the latest revelations, is a reminder that what you read in the papers is almost entirely what those on the left want you to read. This is the question posed by the report:

Just yesterday we wrote about the very curious ABC / Wapo poll which seemed to show Hillary’s blow-out 12-point lead from last Sunday get cut in half in a matter of just two days. But the ABC/Wapo enigma continues to grow today as their latest poll shows the presidential race has now tightened to just 2 points, which is within the margin of error. Ironically, these new results do not reflect the latest FBI bombshell as polling was concluded on October 27th and it still includes an 8-point sampling advantage for democrats. . . .

Now, while ABC / Wapo claim that the 10-point swing (in less than a week) was driven by changes in “who’s intending to vote,” we find it quite curious that their own data shows just a 2-point swing in people who said they were “certain to vote” on 10/23, when the poll reflected a 12-point Hillary lead, and 10/27 when the lead had collapsed to just 2 points. So, are we really expected to believe that a 2-point swing in voter intentions somehow translated to a 10-point swing in the poll results? Not likely…something tells us it had a little more to do with including “ethnic ‘oversamples’ as required.”

We are fed lies from the very top through to every official and unofficial organ of government to keep us in line. It has required a politically-driven independently-wealthy billionaire with a flair for publicity to perhaps bring us to the point of some kind of change in the way the United States – and pretty well all of the democracies – are governed. But it’s not over yet, but at least there is more hope for change than there was a week ago, which even the Washington Post and ABC are being forced by circumstance to reveal.

“Do not follow our lead in terms of politics and do not follow our lead in terms of the fourth estate”

Why is that? “Because we are losing morality and courage in covering and holding politicians accountable.”

She is the former political director at CNN [!], on Q&A yesterday. She describes a corrupt political system drenched in money. To which she adds: “The problem is this. Over the course of the last eight years, that we have government officials threatening journalists, that we have journalists not doing their jobs in terms of coverage”. What happened eight years ago that changed all that, do you think? Listen to it all.

Via Andrew Bolt