Tag: fake news

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News News Blog

TN Lawmaker Wants CNN, WaPo Labelled as “Fake News”

CREDIT: Micah Van Huss/Twitter

Micah Van Huss/Twitter

Today a real Tennessee state House committee will hear a real House Joint Resolution from a real Tennessee House member to label CNN and The Washington Post as “fake news.”

On the agenda for the real Constitutional Protections and Sentencing Subcommittee, is HJR 0079 by Rep. Micah Van Huss (R-Jonesborough).

Here is exactly what the resolution would do:

“Resolves to recognize CNN and The Washington Post as fake news and part of the media wing of the Democratic Party, and further resolves to condemn such media outlets for denigrating our citizens and implying that they are weak-minded followers instead of people exercising their rights that our veterans paid for with their blood.”
[pullquote-1] Van Huss explained the resolution to conservative talk show host (and self-proclaimed Memphian) Todd Starnes, on his podcast, “the ToddCast.” Van Huss said the resolution stems from reports last fall from both news outlets that labeled supporters of President Donald Trump as “part of a cult.”

TN Lawmaker Wants CNN, WaPo Labelled as ‘Fake News’

Further, Van Huss said CNN recently “mocked Trump supporters for being rude, basically as hayseed hicks.” Van Huss said in 2016 that more than 60 percent of Tennesseans voted for Trump.

“My constituents are tired of these elitists in the media for denigrating them,” Van Huss told Starnes. “They’re tired of Republicans who don’t fight.”

Van Huss said his Republican colleagues in Nashville were “excited” about the legislation and that he is “looking forward to making this statement on behalf of all Tennesseans.”

TN Lawmaker Wants CNN, WaPo Labelled as ‘Fake News’ (2)

Some northeast Tennessee lawmakers told Bristol, Virginia’s WCYB News 5 that the resolution isn’t necessary.

The resolution has 13 House co-sponsors, including Rep. Andy Holt (R-Dresden).

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Editorial Opinion

Tribunes of the People

CREDIT: Palinchak | Dreamstime

Let’s get one thing straight: There is such a thing as “fake news,” but 1) it isn’t what Donald Trump says it is; and 2) his claim that he invented the term is itself a bit of fake news.

The term came into being during the presidential campaign of 2016 as a description of misinformation that explicitly favored Trump. The Internet-circulated story that Hillary Clinton was channeling captive juveniles to pedophiles from the bowels of a Washington, D.C., pizza joint was a case in point. That obvious canard, one that ultimately would compel a “self-investigating” gunman to shoot up a harmless pizzeria, was the kind of patently false story that the term “fake news” was first coined to describe.

Palinchak | Dreamstime

Donald Trump

We now know that thousands of more tales like that, some halfway plausible, others from halfway round a full moon, were created by Russia to poison social media and the traditional media during the presidential race, as part of the “active measures” campaign undertaken by Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services to undermine Clinton’s chances of victory.

The term “fake news” (or, more accurately, FAKE NEWS!) was first co-opted by Trump in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration, when the now famous Steele “dossier,” containing a compilaton of opposition research into his background, gained sudden currency. Trump first used the term against CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who at a press conference attempted to ask the president-elect about the just revealed document.

“No, you’re fake news!” Trump countered, borrowing an existent term in declining to recognize Acosta or his network, and simultaneously disparaging a dossier, much of which has subsequently proved out.

Thereafter, Trump has habitually employed the purloined term to represent anything that, as Wikipedia would put it, was “negative news about himself,” or, more simply, “accurate news” that he didn’t like. 

Meanwhile, Trump himself became the leading practitioner of fake news, beginning with ordering his press secretary to describe his Inauguration Day crowd as the biggest in history, and continuing with multiple lies per day throughout his presidency to date.

In the process, America’s Bizarro President has managed to create a shadow universe, one whose inversions of reality would put Orwell to shame. In Trump’s world, the free media have morphed into “the enemy of the people,” a phrase made famous in the title of a play, An Enemy of the People, by Norwegian realist Henrik Ibsen. In Ibsen’s drama, a scientifically minded citizen, Dr. Stockman, discovers that toxins are poisoning his town’s public baths and attempts to warn the population, thereby angering the local political establishment, which retaliates by branding the would-be whistleblower as “an enemy of the people.”  

In the play, Stockman heroically remains determined to resist the unfair attacks, remaining loyal to the truth. In the reality show that is Donald Trump’s America, we of the free media, the tribunes of the people, can and must aspire to be equally steadfast.

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1487

The Killer

On Sunday, CNN reported that the fire in Jerry Lee Lewis’ great balls had finally been extinguished. Sun Records’ piano-pounding problem child was dead at the tender age of 91.

Improbable as it may seem, Lewis, a notorious hell-raiser who’s already outlived label-mates like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, etc. is still very much alive and only 81 to boot. CNN got the name wrong. It was actually Jerry Lewis, America’s great cinematic clown and mighty lion of the Labor Day telethon who’d gone on to headline that big casino in the sky.

The badly titled obit went viral soon after it went live thanks to the cable news channel’s army of sworn enemies (aka Trump voters) who shared contempt on social media with posts saying, “Oh Wow! They are so used to reporting #FakeNews, when they have a real item to report, they can’t do it. Why are they still on the air?”

and …

“The Clown News Network reports Jerry Lee Lewis died, not Jerry Lewis. These people are the fake news kings. Utterly corrupt and incompetent.”

It’s a pretty ridiculous screw-up and the sort of thing Fly on the Wall would normally make fun of, too. But sometimes an error is just an error and not the CNNd of times.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Look Before You Link

Saturday morning dawned clear and bright, but I knew the heat was coming. So I set off around 8 a.m. for a bike ride. I planned to pedal to Overton Park, hit the trails for a circuit or two, then get onto the Hamp Line down Broad and work my way back through Binghampton to Midtown.

When I came to the intersection of McLean and Poplar, I encountered a huge fustercluck of traffic and illegally parked cars on both sides of McLean. There was a line of people out the door of the Exxon station that stretched down the sidewalk for 50 yards.

What in the world?

I worked my way through the mess and continued north, figuring I’d find out later what was going on. What was going on, as everyone in Memphis now knows, was Z-Bo-gate — or Kiosk-gate, if you prefer. All over the city, kiosks set up for folks to pay their MLGW bills were giving people the information that their accounts were paid off. That news, which spread like a California wildfire on social media, was further fueled by a rumor that departing Grizzlies superstar Zach Randolph had given $1 million to MLGW to pay off people’s utility bills.

Thousands of people waited hours in line to spend the $2 kiosk fee, happily exiting with zero-balance MLGW bills in hand, only to find out later that it was all a computer glitch of some sort and they’d just spent $2 — and wasted lots of time — chasing a fantasy.

What does this incident say about Memphis? For one thing, it says that we have a lot of poor people, folks desperate enough to get relief from, say, a $300 utility bill, that they would spend hours on a beautiful Saturday waiting in line, hoping for a miracle. It says further, that social media has the power to lead people down a primrose path of foolishness. And it says people will often believe what they want to believe, even in the face of what common sense or a little fact-checking might otherwise tell them.

But it’s not just poor people or people looking to beat the system who fall for this kind of stuff. That same weekend, thousands (maybe millions) of people on Facebook passed along a pasted-in message urging everyone they knew not to accept a friend request from one Jayden K. Smith, because doing so would expose all their personal information. Or some such hogwash. That was also a hoax, and though it had nothing to do with getting a bill paid, it had everything to do with human gullibility or the lack of initiative to do a little fact-checking before passing along false information as gospel.

We, all of us — rich, middle-class, poor, black, white, brown — are constantly being inundated with news stories, rumors, memes, gossip, videos, and other useful and useless information through our phones and computers. It’s often difficult to discern the difference between what is true and what is just internet horse puckery. The lines are blurred and getting blurrier as cries of “Fake news!” continue to emanate from the highest office in the land. That being the case, we should all keep in mind that the miraculous devices bringing us all this information also give us the ability to deter the spread of falsehoods by making an inquiring phone call or fact-checking via Google or Snopes.

The bottom line is that we all need to remember to look before we leap — or link. Or before we go stand in line for three hours with Jayden K. Smith.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Highly Invisible

Did you read this week about the two Australian guys who devised a scheme to enter any facility or event without being checked for identification or asked to pay? It was a very funny webpost.

The two fellows had noticed that no one questions or pays any attention to people who appear to be working at a venue. What if, they thought, you were able to … blend in as an employee or as someone making a maintenence call? Could you just walk in? Would employees and customers just assume you were there on a service call of some sort? They decided to test their theory and ordered some yellow “high-visibility” vests, the kind universally worn by work crews and service employees.

For their trial run, the two men went to a local movie theater. To their delight, they were able to walk past the entrance booth with barely a glance from the ticket taker. In they went and down they sat, right in one of the front rows. Free movie!

They then decided to up the ante and try their hi-vis vest theory at the Melbourne Zoo. The two mates boldly walked past a line of patrons waiting to buy tickets and even chirped a cheeky “G’day” to the ticket seller and security guard as they entered. And again, no one questioned their right to do so. They snapped lots of photos of themselves posed in front of various cages and had a fine time.

A few days later, they ventured out to a Coldplay concert at a stadium venue in Melbourne. Again, they walked past security without the slightest notice being given to their entry. They stolled down the side aisle, circled past the restraining barriers in front of the stage, and stood looking up the nostrils of the band as they performed. And again they took lots of smirky photos of themselves. The men discovered that the hi-vis vests, ironically enough, actually served as a sort of invisibility cloak. There’s probably a lesson there for all of us: If you act like you belong (and wear the right clothes), you can get away with just about anything. People are too preoccupied with their own jobs and lives to pay much attention to anything else. Maybe this “fake crews” phenomenon is just another variation of fake news?

Speaking of … It was reported this week that Facebook’s plan to weed out fake stories is backfiring. When the social media giant tags a story as “disputed,” that post often gets tagged and shared in a viral fashion by those who think Facebook is trying quash or censor a story favorable to their political views.

Similarly, President Trump’s spokespeople are getting burned on an almost daily basis by their own boss. When a negative story breaks, press secretary Sean Spicer, Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, and others are sent out to face the press with a denial of one sort or another. Then, almost without fail, the next day the president goes on television and says something (or tweets something) that destroys the officially crafted response. What’s fake? What’s real? What’s the truth? Who’s on first? We don’t know any more. And neither does the administration, apparently. Now, it’s being reported that the president is taking almost his entire White House staff along with him on an 11-day, five-country tour that begins later this week. Those traveling with Trump include Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Stephen Miller, Sean Spicer, Rex Tillerson, McMaster, and several others.

If you think the idea of this traveling circus going on the road is terrifying, just imagine what the foreign governments must be thinking. Me, I think they all ought to be required to wear hi-vis vests.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The “Fake News”

For reasons he cannot fathom, President Donald Trump has been asked recently about anti-Semitism, not just the rising number of incidents both here and abroad but also — as he oddly interpreted a question at his latest news conference — his own attitudes. As for the latter, he is, by his own testimony and that of others, no anti-Semite. If he were, he’d have to hate one of his own daughters, her husband, and their children, who are all observant Jews. So when he declares, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” his crude hyperbole aside, I believe him.

Richard Cohen

But either out of calculation or instinct, Trump operates as an anti-Semite of old in the way he describes the news media. Listen for the anti-Semitic tropes: Journalists are urban — or as the communists used to say, cosmopolitan. They live in a bubble, a kind of ghetto. They are rootless — another communist opprobrium — in the sense that few journalists work where they were born and are not responsible to their original community. They are politically and culturally liberal and secular, meaning they are free of conventional morality or religion. They can lie. They can sin. They can, as a result, be attacked with impunity.

Anti-Semitism is largely a spent force in America. We live in an era of Seinfeld and Streisand and Stewart. A Jew ran for vice president (Joe Lieberman), and one recently ran for president (Bernie Sanders), and both of last year’s presidential nominees have a child who was married by a rabbi. This is not your grandfather’s America. That one was virulently anti-Semitic. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, Charles Lindbergh cuddled with Hitler, Jews fleeing the Holocaust were told to go somewhere else, and my mother had to go from Pearl Rosenberg to Pat Tyson to find work as a bookkeeper. All that is gone.

What remains, though, is the continuing need for some force that could serve as a scapegoat. Trump, a man of considerable ability in such matters, has found it in the media. As it always was with anti-Semitism, portions of the culture were already receptive. Many people needed to find someone to blame for a society that was becoming less comforting, less conventional, that was depressing their standard of living, closing their factories, favoring foreign labor — doing all the things that Jews once supposedly did. Here is Trump at his news conference last week:

“Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles, in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system. The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk about it, to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

This is a neo-Hitlerian statement — only the word “Jews” is missing. Not missing is the alien, secular big city, the unnamed “special interests,” the loaded word “profiting,” and, of course, the utter mystery of it all. Why are these people doing such things? Why do they lie? Why do they want to hurt “the American people”? Why? It’s because they are not-like-us. They are evil.

You may argue that this is nothing new. I remember Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s corrupt vice president, ranting against the liberal press. At one Agnew event I covered, his denunciation of the media brought Republican women out of their chairs, fists in the air, shouting their agreement and serenely unaware that Agnew’s words were probably written by future New York Times columnist William Safire.

George Wallace, both a racist and self-pronounced champion of the working man, castigated the press for its unaccountable hostility to Jim Crow, naming “the Time magazine,” “the Newsweek,” and so on. Still, even an Agnew or a Wallace would have shied away from Trump’s expansive conspiracy theory.

Trump has set himself an agenda. He must rid America of the evil that he describes and that is visible only to him and his followers. He must, in other words, rein in the news media, limit their scope and influence — a task that will become more and more urgent as he fails in his presidency. The fault for that, after all, cannot be his. He will go from florid-faced fool to brooding menace. It is an old pattern. Only the scapegoat is new.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Opinion The Last Word

See Ya, 2016: Some Things We Need to Leave Behind

At work the other day, I received an email from a vendor that opened with “2016 was truly one for the books!” I guess you could say that, if we’re talking about Infinite Jest or a Stephen King novel or something. We can agree 2016 was kind of a dud, right? So much ink has been spilled on the topic, it feels pointless to even rehash how much of a tsunami of suckitude this year has been. It was such a slow-burning dumpster fire, it’s probably time to retire the phrase “dumpster fire.” Here is but a tiny sampling of other things that can stay in 2016.

Pepe the Frog

The word “great”

Remember when “great” used to mean something? That’s a trick question, because it never did. Great is the most generic, vague, useless word in the English language. “Great” is the “no offense, but” of adjectives (adverbs too, for you grammarians) because it rarely means what the speaker is saying. “Great” is what you say when someone asks how you’re doing, and things are actually pretty terrible but you know they ain’t looking for an honest answer. When I’m trying on clothes and a store employee says “That looks great on you!” I assume they’re not even looking.

The alt-right

I used to think “political correctness” was an exaggeration. What some people consider PC, I call being considerate. Then I found out there was a PC term for white supremacists that they, ironically, came up with themselves. Hell. No. Neo-Nazis don’t get a “safe space.” Racism doesn’t deserve a nickname. Or a cartoon frog mascot. The alt-right attitudes of sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia don’t belong in 2016, 2017, or any year, and ascribing a kinder, gentler descriptor to the movement only makes it sound okay. It’s not.

Blaming everything on the year

One refrain in the symphony of suck that was 2016 was the death of an alarming number of celebrities. Well-loved figures whom we presumed were immortal — David Bowie, Prince to name a couple — proved us wrong. Yes, many of our heroes left this world too soon. The emotional weight of endless bad news is heavy. It’s okay to grieve! But y’all, we cannot say “Ugh, 2016 strikes again” whenever someone dies. The year 2016 didn’t kill John Glenn. He was in his 90s. And it didn’t take Muhammad Ali; Parkinson’s disease did. Don’t give this devil year any more credit than it deserves.

Fake news

Anyone who has read the “literature” available in a grocery store checkout line knows “fake news” is not a new phenomenon. Nor is the notion that people believe everything they read on the internet, particularly if it’s compatible with their worldview. What is new is dismissing any news that displeases us as “fake news.” To paraphrase the late Senator Pat Moynihan, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Pizzagate? Fake news. Actual events, recorded on camera, with witnesses? Not fake news. Fake news and calling real news fake can hit the road, as far as I’m concerned.

Nightmarish Memphis Driving™ situations

The flyover is open! It’s still a mess, but the hard part is over … maybe? Otherwise I might turn into my mother and never go anywhere that can’t be accessed via Poplar, which sucks in its own right, but I’d rather wait for a train than worry about my vehicle launching into oblivion from the height equivalent of an eighth-story window. By the way, if you’re ever stuck on the flyover behind a little white Toyota going 20 miles an hour, I apologize, but that thing scares the bejeezus out of me.

Grizzlies injuries

I don’t mind a little late-game drama, especially since the Grizzlies usually prevail. I’m convinced Coach Fizdale is a wizard (yes, already), so I enjoy watching him conjure up wins. I love seeing how the team responds to adversity and watching the rookies develop, but man … what do we have to do to get a healthy squad? Does this have something to do with that crystal skull in the Pyramid? How about just a few games at full strength? Maybe blow out a couple of weaker opponents. For the sake of our collective health.

Honorable mentions: 1990s TV and movie reboots. Crying Jordan. Harambe. College football conference expansion or lack thereof. Whatever is going on in Russia. News reports about viral video sensations. Gimmicky fast-food menu items. Most of all, though, I’d like to leave behind the lurking premonition that 2017 might suck even worse. Let’s turn the page and hope for the best.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and digital marketing strategist.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

All the News That’s Fake

Did you read where purchasing the items in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” would cost you $567,000 this year? Crazy, huh? Well, it’s not true. I just made up that number. It was fake news. But if I had put that information on your Facebook wall, you’d have had no real reason to doubt it; a variation of that same silly story comes up every year at Christmas. You might have even shared it. LOL.

Did you read where Vladimir Putin’s popularity among Republicans rose 56 points in the past year? Not fake. Though I wish it were.

Did you hear that conservative Republican State Senator Brian Kelsey has teamed up with liberal Democratic State Senator Lee Harris to fight against TVA drilling in the Memphis Sand aquifer? That’s also true — and heartening. I read it in Jackson Baker’s column last week, and Jackson doesn’t do fake news.

I also read a commentary last week wherein the writer was denouncing The New York Times and The Washington Post as pawns of the liberal establishment and how you couldn’t trust anything you read in those papers. It’s the new frontier of debate; you debunk the source of your opponent’s facts, and thereby render his arguments moot. If you cite a story in the Times to back up your argument, you’re just citing biased, and thereby “fake,” news. Check and mate, libtard!

The Flyer is a liberal paper, but when Toby Sells reports on a Memphis City Council meeting, it’s news, not liberal opinion. Differentiating between opinion and reporting is a nuance that’s lost on many. Unless it’s intentional.

For example, in a speech last week to a conservative group, Newt Gingrich, that paragon of truth and honor, said about mainstream media: “All of us on the right should describe it as the ‘propaganda media,’ drop the term ‘news media’ until they earn it, and begin to realize that the propaganda media cannot come to grips with the level of talent that they’re dealing with.” 

I must agree that it is difficult for traditional media to come to grips with the “level of talent” that’s being put forth as President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet, but not for the reasons Newt thinks it is.

But it’s been part of the strategy of strongmen and dictators throughout history. Destroy the public’s trust in the media, and you control how they think. And the GOP is doing its best to make that happen by demonizing any American media outlet that publishes or broadcasts negative news or opinions about them.

Our boy king-elect is one of the worst perpetrators. Last week, while thousands were dying in Aleppo, Trump was upset by a bad review of a Trump Tower restaurant in Vanity Fair, so he tweeted: “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of Vanity Fair magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”

The following day, more people subscribed to Vanity Fair than in any 24-hour period in its history. And that’s how you beat a political bully. You support his enemies, those speaking truth to power, and those who support that truth by advertising with them. I just took out digital subscriptions to the Times and the Wall Street Journal. I did so because both publications do real reporting, even if their political viewpoints are appositional. I also gave Vanity Fair subscriptions to a few folks for Christmas.

And I’m still holding out hope that I can tick off The Donald enough that he’ll attack The Memphis Flyer. That would make for a merry Christmas, indeed.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

“Deconsolidation?”

Now there’s a word you seldom hear coming from the executive offices of Big Media. But according to The New York Times, it was the word used by Joseph G. NeCastro, the chief financial officer for Scripps Howard (parent company of The Commercial Appeal) as he discussed the fate of Scripps’ newspaper division. Citing ever-declining readership and nervous investors, NeCastro was quoted as saying that “the most advantageous route is to separate the newspaper business in some fashion.”

NeCastro’s comments have prompted speculation that the company will either split its cable and newspaper divisions into two separate media companies operated by the Scripps family trust or put its print properties on the auction block.

The Scripps story broke as 3,500 liberal Moonbats descended on downtown Memphis for the National Conference for Media Reform to moan about how journalism in America has suffered in service to Wall Street.

In related news, The New York Times Company recently reached an agreement to sell WREG Channel 3 to a bastion of journalistic integrity, Oak Hill Capital Partners, a New York-based equity firm.

Fake News

The findings of an independent research group appear to suggest that large “state of the art” entertainment venues, especially those intended for gladiatorial events such as football or celebrity boxing, may result in a battery of positive externalities affecting and ultimately slowing the rate of infant mortality in otherwise blighted urban communities.

“It’s weird,” says Randolph Phuddlepuck, Ph.D. of Stadium Science Associates (A.S.S. backward), a not-for-profit research group studying the impact of arena building on mayoral campaigns in America. “But that’s just how these kinds of things seem to work,” he says.

Fly on the Wall: We make things up. You decide.