Slashdot Mirror
Fake News Stories Probed
An anonymous reader writes "From the article: "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has begun an investigation of the use of video news releases, sometimes called "fake news," at U.S. television stations.
Video news releases are packaged stories paid for by businesses or interest groups. They use actors to portray reporters and use the same format as television news stories.""
Corporations have long been treating consumers like sheep. It's a small wonder that they haven't started publishing fake newspapers yet.
Perhaps they should start at the executive branch of the good 'ol USA. The Bush administration was doing just this to push their Medicare Reform bill a couple years back. They got quite the bad press when it became public. One wonders, have they stopped? Well, certainly *someone* hasn't...
I seem to remember there's a word for this. Uhhh propagation? Proposition? Proletariat? No....
hmmm...
Ah, yes. propaganda!
The Onion is satire and makes itself known as such. As does SNL Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. This is not the same as purposefully misrepresenting news in order to present slanted opinion. That broadcast news organizations have been caught actually peddling this stuff from government and private industry sources shows just how far television news ethics has declined. It's bad. I can both argue for Fox News as a legitimate news organization simply because they're just as bad as CBS as a factual source. IOW: TV news really really sucks.
Read a real newspaper if you want to be informed. Actually, read several.
I'd like to see them getting at it right at the source. After all, wasn't it the infamous Bush administration who started fabricating stories during the Iraqi war? And no, I'm not even targetting the missing WMD's, simply focussing on already proven lies. Like the female soldier who was alledgidly a POW and being tortured in an hospital. Turned out that her injurier were well treated but the campaign needed more goodwill so what better way than to introduce the "damsel in distress".
Or what about the treachery at the Abu Graib prison, events which weren't merely denied but also covered with newsstories than absolutely nothing was going on down there. Or what about the US' private detention centre on Cuba were we only hear news about those dangerous and evil terrorists doing all sorts of naughty things when in fact they're only getting lawyers into gear in order to demand to be treated under international civilion rights which every human should be entitled to.
So... Please go right ahead with the investigation but if you guys don't start right at the top I can't help wonder if this whole deal is in fact fake in itself.
Yes, there are fake newspapers. Just look at free "commuter papers": they've gone to the effort of collecting the latest press releases and printing them out for you (sometimes slightly modified).
They come in different varieties. From my perspective in Ottawa, Canada:
- Dose was created by broadsheet newspapers to squeeze out low-cost tabloid-style newspapers (i.e. the Sun) at a loss to the publisher, and Metro carries on this tradition.
- "The News EMC" is a "community paper" that once took one of my media releases (I volunteer for a non-profit community group) and tried to hack it into a letter to the editor. "EMC", by the way, stands for "Expanded Market Coverage", so it's clear who their market is--advertisers.
- The Epoch Times ("The most widely distributed newspaper in the world") carries lots of interesting news on the latest accusations against the Chinese Communist Party, but everything else in the paper (the stuff that they bury the anti-CCP stuff in) is just the latest press releases or wire stories on Microsoft's and Ford's latest product announcements, or who wore what at the latest celebrity whatsit.
The end effect is that many of these newspapers pretend to provide journalistic output, but really it's just something to reach their goal (respectively, squeeze out competitors, make money from advertisers, and push a political agenda). The latent effect is that real community papers, who actually do pay people to write their stories, lose out. Many student newspapers at campuses across Canada had tremendous challenges keeping advertisers when Dose moved onto their terrain (I was on the publishing board of one at the time).
- RG>
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
You're 100% correct. The problem lies with the idiots who can't differentiate between opinion shows and news shows.
While the left is guilty of this when basing their opinion on flaks like Orilley, the right is equally guilty of it when they consider Daily Show etc to be news.
Which goes to show, not all idiots belong to one party or the other. Idiocy is rampant on both sides.
...except that almost everyone reading this story on Slashdot heard it from a non-network source, with added commentary and direct feedback, and you know there's going to be a lot of fact-checking in the comments below.
Ditto for most of the predigested/fake news we get. Used to, it just went unchallenged, but now it's a lot harder to get newsoids out without someone putting up a site about the Emperor's New Press Release.
On fake government. An investigation into what the hell Congress has been doing the last 10 years. We used to have news outlet that reported on this kind of thing. My best news source now is the Daily Show for National News. For local state news I still read the paper which is probably why I went to dinner recently and was the only one who new that they were planning to build huge privately owned toll roads in our state and that there were plans to build 16 coal fired power plants.
I mean these weren't illiterate people, but they had decided that the local paper was liberal trype, so they quit reading it. I wish it was their land that they were going to take through eminant domain.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
Remember the story of Fox producing a faked story about rBGH where whistlblowers sued them and the courts decided not that Fox hadn't lied, but that it was legal for them to do so? The FCC should have stood up then. If they are going to stand up now, they will have to apply the rules to Fox as well..right?
Riiiight. That's why today, during a live "breaking news" segment about a diverted commercial airliner, a man appeared on camera at Fox News and said "She's probably not an al Qaeda affiliate, probably not a terrorist, could just be a Ned Lamont supporter, we don't know."
This is a bit off the mark. But, personally, I thought one of the major points of 1984 was that it didn't really matter if the government was fascist, communist, or theocratic, the end result was essentially the same. So, the simularities between authoritarian governments aren't really a surprise me.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The fact that all the things politicians try to get away with shoving down our throats are exposed so quickly has not prevented them from trying. Now, however, the people who learn about all this stuff immediately on the internet, an ever-growing but still-small (way less than half the population) group are well-informed.
There's a huge gap between people who try to find out what's true and people who just accept whatever they want to be true. The more lies there are out there, and the more people realize there are lies, the more people will just decide to believe in whatever reality they like. For instance, no matter how much I point out the relentless corruption of the government in office now, my father has settled on the idea that Republicans and Democrats are basically equally corrupt, which means he won't vote on corruption as an issue anymore. He just has no faith in the reliability of any news source that he or I might find, and he is busy with his life, so he doesn't bother finding out what is true.
When we allow a variety of false "truths" (Kerry's more of a flip-flopper than Bush, Gore claims to have invented the internet, there are WMD in Iraq, there's a connection between Iraq and 9-11, etc.) to stick around on TV long after they are show to be false, we decrease the believability of any TV news.
There is meaningful damage done to our society everytime the bar for truth and honesty in news reporting is lowered further.
Yes, the internet has been great for getting news out to some people, but for most people, it's still just as hard to tell whether to trust little green footballs or rawstory as it is to decide between Fox and (if there were a liberal network I would put it here)
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
I certainly will blame the government. There is no valid reason at all for the US government to deceive its own citizens. You can debate the value of dropping propaganda into the media of your enemies. But elected officials should never be permitted to do such a thing to the people they represent.
Developers: We can use your help.
Are we to assume, then, that you've chosen to believe the Democrat version of truth?
How can it be "factually accurate" and "of little factual value" at the same time? Maybe that's what "fair and balanced" means.
Fox News is not a legitimate news organisation by any stretch of the imagination. I've seen Outfoxed , and I recommend it, but I think the reality is even worse than Greenwald has portrayed.
It's virtually impossible to watch Fox News for more than about ten minutes without seeing some conservative bias. You can make examples of non-news-reporters like O'Reilly, Geraldo or Hannity & Other all you want, but for each of those, there's a Brit Hume or a John Gibson who looks and sounds like a newsreader but is really just another right-wing pundit. That's why Fox News is such a dangerous thing to watch: not because it's partisan hackery disguised as news, but moreover because they deliberately make it difficult to tell the difference.
The only reason it's not more obvious is that Fox News is only slightly more ridiculously biased towards the government than the other major US news outlets. It's scary that the other major media outlets have followed in Fox's footsteps towards news-tainment. At least not all of them are so insecure that they need to attack Comedy Central's "news" programming to feel good about themselves.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
How should the US government communicate information to news organizations then? News releases, whether on paper, in audio, or in video, are the preferred means of distribution for all news-disseminating bodies. When a supposed news-gathering organization merely parrots what they've heard in a news release without any further investigation or insight, it is the news-gathering organization that deserves to be chastized for deceiving people.
(Yes, the government does more than just VNRs; I don't defend the use of pundits being paid to stump for the gov't on TV shows, for example. I speak solely of VNRs in the paragraph above.)
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The only way to know that you are watching an infomercial, without consulting the online TV gude, is to wait until the end of the infomercial. At its conclusion, the television station will announce that "The previous broadcast is paid programming."
The obvious way to help the innocent TV viewer is to simply require all infomercials to prominently display the same distinguishing marker on the lower left of the TV screen. Given the content of some of these infomercials, I propose displaying an icon resembling Bozo the Clown.
Next, I hope they tackle ads that dramatically increase the audio volume.
Like banning a Caps lock... these too should be banned.
"Sunday, SUNday... SUNDAY.... ALL FORDS ON SALE... SUNDAY ONLY... BUY BUY..."
There really is nothing worse than watching a documentary and having this happen, especially on a decent home theater system. Why these types of ads still exist, and are deemed successful, eludes my brain.
Maybe it is just like SPAM, it is working for someone.
Sigh.
Oh yea, these and the advertisement-faked-as-news-story ads are, well, terrible.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
What I hate are the "news" stories that promote the airing network's other programming. For example, the local Fox affiliate "reports" ad nauseam about the latest American Idol happenings while that show is running. There are usually pieces about what Jack Bauer is up to during 24's season as well. These aren't presented as if they're just providing programming information (e.g., "Coming up next on Fox...") but rather as legitimate news. I often suspect that other fluff pieces are also supporting the commercial interests of the network's parent company or subsidiaries. For example a story about a new theme park opening, or an artist who has released a new album, or a movie premiere. So much media and entertainment is owned by big business that it doesn't require much imagination to believe that such stories are crafted to be a subtler form of advertising.
Don't watch TV.
Done. End of discussion. Can we move on now?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Nope, always been that way, at least as long as I have been watching TV, since the early 50's. TV news has always been a collection of either governmental press releases or industry press releases, re written or rehashed, mixed in with exciting disaster stuff and hollywood/sports drivel. The only exceptions are the in depth news programs but you have to *really* watch those, half the time they are propoganda pieces as well, just better packaged for a slightly more "interested in the news" crowd.
Here, I'll give you a blatant example you'll see constantly: government spokesmoron states such and such as data, true facts. Later on it is proven to be either a blatant lie or altered so much as to throw a significant slant to the real event. Goofy stuff, say the Iraq war preview, remember the "dangerous mobile biological labs" that turned out to be weather balloon vans? Stuff like that, thousands of examples over the years. More lies than truth, BUT, ALL the broadcast news sources will report it as carved in stone data, even when it is patently ludicrous on first impression, let alone on further inspection.
Big, medium, small, the lie doesn't matter, what matters is they still do it, repeat the blather as pure confirmed data based on chronic serial liars say-so. Over and over again, day after week after year after decade after generations. You will NEVER see a broadcast newsie go to the spokesmoron at the news conference, no matter how wild the claim, and say something like this "Prove it! That sounds damn fishy! Show us the actual proof!". Have you ever seen that? Me neither! Well, I'll give Helen Thomas at least half an "attaboy, girl!" but that's about it. The rest of them? Meh....puppets watching their paycheck first. You don't rock the boat. You can *appear* to rock the boat, but only in an approved at the top levels way.
TV news exists for two reasons, to sell you consumer crap and to sell social conditioning brainwashing. And that's it and it's equally important to "them". It's ok to watch, just remember it is a lot more BS than not, so what you are seing now isn't all that different from the way it has always been. The sound stages are more elaborate, more blinkenlights. Big deal.
If you think of government as a for-profit corporation, which it more or less is for all practical purposes, it makes it a lot easier to see through their scam fake news. And if you realise "the news" is run by around a dozen international "elite" globalist billionaires, you'll understand why they do it this way. It's not to keep you informed, it's too keep you controlled.
Every single time I have ever had direct access to the truth of a news story I have found the reporting to be shoddy - ranging from quotes in a newspaper attributed to me from a company I quit two years earlier and claims that the company I work for is Australian (it was based in the US with no Australian office) or an entire article about my employer's partnership with a competitor (with zero basis in reality), to claims that a recent weightwatcher of the month (a friend of mine) used to eat many hamburgers a day (a complete fabrication). I regularly see my own employers making fabricated press releases that are reported as news with zero attempt at verification by reporters. Whatever level, whether it's business reporting or feel good local news, reporting is a web of lies. God knows how much truth there is in reporting from places like Iraq when they can't tell the truth about their own backyard.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
--Kosh Naranek
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Can you name some examples of Democrats that are doing this? How is it that "democrats are spending every dime we have" when they control neither the White House nor either branch of Congress? Seems to me that one of the few advantages to being completely out of power is that you don't have to take the blame for the actions of the people who are in power...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You are suprised it took this long for the FCC to go after them? I'm not. The FCC is a whore to the highest bidder.
They sold most of the radio spectrum out from under the public. Why do you think you have to pay such outrageous prices for cellphone service? Those are public airwaves you are using--they should be free. Cellphones should cost about as much as a landline to use.
Then there is WiFi. Do you know what part of the spectrum it is on? The same one which microwave ovens interfere. We should have multigigabit wireless networking with a range of kilometers. Where you could essentialy have acess to a citywide LAN just by plugging a networking card into your computer.
I'm suprized the FCC went after them at all. Tomorrow I expect to see someone from the FCC Reading from a corporate letterhead and holding a briefcase with money falling out of it, saying: "We apologize to our corporate spons..I mean friendly companies. Our accusations were unfounded and a mistake. Have a doubleplusgood day. :-)"
I don't know if I would go so far as to say well informed, but maybe better informed, or at least differently informed (i.e., even if half the people are wrong, at least everybody will come to a bunch of different conclusions that cancel each other out, rather than having a collective knee-jerk reaction and doing something stupid, which admittedly still happens).
Unfortunately, ease of communication allows for faster disemination of both truth and falsehood, or, more succinctly: Just because you read it on the web doesn't make it true. The New Media at least allows more informed decision making: when you hear eight different versions of a story instead of just the one on TV, you at least stand a better chance of being able to figure out what actually happened.