Fake News Archives - Bookworm Room

[VIDEO] The mainstream media’s Leftist bias means it’s all fake news

June 29, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

Even if the MSM isn’t lying about the facts, it’s still purveying fake news because its Leftist values permeate everything from story placement to language.

PragerU is back with another of its excellent videos, this time about fake news. In it, Andrew Klavan offers his three-point rule of thumb for identifying the fake news that constantly spills from the mainstream media.

He makes an important point about fake news, which is that it’s not always about fake facts, which only occur some of the time. Instead, the real issue is that all of the time, every single time, the overwhelmingly Progressive atmosphere in which the mainstream media exists leaves reporters unable to avoid serious confirmation bias. This confirmation bias leads them to impose values on the facts, and these values are invariably hostile to conservatives and supportive of Progressives, no matter how badly those Progressives behave.

I agree with everything Klavan says. However, after you’ve watched the video, I’ll add one more thing I think he missed:

What Klavan missed is that there is a type of fake news that the media consistently uses that goes beyond what he identified. Klavan identified two primary tactics: (1) assigning relative values to stories (e.g., front or back page status) and (2) using emotionally colored adjectives (e.g., calling Tea Partiers racists or Occupy people heroes). [Read more…]

Media damns itself with reports about Trump leaking classified information

May 16, 2017 by Bookworm 3 Comments

Digging into the known facts about Trump’s alleged leak of classified information, shows media bias and hints that the Deep State is spying on Trump.

I always wait 24 hours before commenting on the Left’s latest bout of hysteria because, since Trump became president, those hysterical outbursts are invariably wrong. In the case of Trump’s alleged spillage of classified information to the Russians, everything reported has been wrong or is highly suspect in that it shows a concerted inside effort to destroy the presidency. Here’s my take on what happened:

President Trump, General McMaster, and Secretary of State Tillerson met in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The Oval Office is supposed to be a secured room, but that’s becoming doubtful.

During the meeting, which covered the two country’s shared concerns about ISIS and other Islamic radicals, Trump told the Russians that there was information on the ground that was favorable to us. Both McMaster and Tillerson, who were present at the meeting, strenuously contend that Trump did not relay any highly classified information.

However, even if Trump had chosen to report classified information, that would have been within his purview as the Chief Executive Officer in charge of America’s intelligence apparatus. That is, the President, not the intelligence agencies (and not a certain former Secretary of State), gets to decide what’s classified information and what’s not.

Within a short time of the meeting’s conclusion, and right in time for the Washington Post’s 5:00 afternoon deadline, people who were not present at the meeting got in touch with the WaPo. These unnamed people are allegedly former intelligence officers, which means that they worked for Obama and probably do not hold current security clearance, and current intelligence officers, who almost certainly were hired during the Obama era and whose status regarding classified material is unknown. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 12/21/16 — the “election that never ends” edition

December 21, 2016 by Bookworm 2 Comments

Yes, the Electoral College has spoken on the election, but the Progressives’ weeping, wailing, beating of breasts, and rending of garments continues unabated. That’s why you’ll find these articles pertinent, interesting, amusing and, sometimes, frightening.

Don’t attack people from whom you want something. Hillary wanted votes from Americans but she couldn’t help herself. Speaking to a sympathetic audience, she had to attack vast swaths of America’s citizens as a “basket of deplorables,” guilty of a variety of moral sins. She may have graduated from Yale Law but she apparently never learned there the first rule of making your case to a jury: “Don’t attack people from whom you want something.”

Hillary’s most ardent followers haven’t learned that lesson either. They’re so busy pointing at Comey (never mind that he got on the case because Hillary broke the law), Russians (never mind that the DNC and Podesta practically gave their information away), and anyone or anything else that attracts their angry, short attention span, that they’re missing the main lesson: You don’t win by hating voters.

Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez looked at the numbers after the election and decided that an entire section of the City is irredeemable — and darn if he isn’t calling them out on it:

[Read more…]

How to respond to Facebook’s plan to label “fake news”

December 15, 2016 by Bookworm 6 Comments

Facebook just announced that it will start cracking down on what it calls “fake news.” We know what that means: It will block anything that does not toe the Democrat party line. To this end, it’s teaming with such hard-Left luminaries as Snopes, the Associated Press, and ABC to identify what constitutes “fake news”:

To combat fake news, Facebook has teamed up with a shortlist of media organizations, including Snopes and ABC News, that are part of an international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit school for journalism in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Starting as a test with a small percentage of its users in the US, Facebook will make it easier to report news stories that are fake or misleading. Once third-party fact-checkers have confirmed that the story is fake, it will be labeled as such and demoted in the News Feed.

Technically speaking, Facebook is a private corporation and can do whatever the heck it wants. In reality, though, Facebook is a major news purveyor, much in the way the big broadcasters are (or used to be). It might be useful to have the FCC investigate whether it can block Facebook’s plan to censor political content it does not support.

Government action is always slow, though. What’s also slow is the lead-time needed for conservatives to build up another social media outlet through which they can disseminate information and news of interest to conservatives. In the meantime, I suggest that everyone start following the reverse “Oprah Rule.”

[Read more…]