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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.""
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.
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. :-)"