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Fake News Stories Probed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the truthiness dept.

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.""

2 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Agitprop by (1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1) · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From FTA:
    "You can't tell anymore the difference between what's propaganda and what's news," Adelstein said.
    “Soviet Russia” jokes aside (who, by the way, had an entire Department for Agitation and Propaganda), we are at that uncanny nexus where Capitalism and Bolshevism meet: where greed, unchecked, vies to overawe and enslave a receptive populace.

    Prescription? Strap in; when the government fears the governed, voting won't get you anywhere.

  2. Zen and the Art of Wikipedia Vandalism by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is an art to Wikipedia abuse. If someone cites a Wikipedia article in some argument they're making, you can always just go to Wikipedia and edit the page so that they're wrong. But that's what a novice Wikipedia vandal does.

    A pro knows to edit the article in a very subtle way, so that it looks like the person has poor reading comprehension. Let's say the person cites a Wikipedia article with a sentence like this, in order to support the argument that Colbert is a Democrat.

    Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Democrat.[12][13]

    A novice might change it to this (correctly preserving footnote superscripts, which thankfully do not need to be relocated here from elsewhere in the article):

    Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Republican.[12][13]

    It makes the person appear to be wrong- and the vandalism is obvious. That's like swapping Eurasia for Eastasia. There's no way he could have misread that.

    But change it to this

    Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert has even been described as a Democrat.[12][13]

    and the person looks not only wrong, but plausibly wrong because it looks like he can't read. That's what makes successful Wikipedia vandalism an art.