Fake News

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the_leander said:
Now, admittedly it's been a while since my children were born, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't take 3 and a bit years for an average woman to bring to term from conception.
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Going off topic, how old are you kids? Names are up to you. I'll understand if you don't want to say their names online.

I have 4 children who are all adults. My youngest Matthew turned 19 today. My only grandkid is 4.
 
redrumloa said:
Going off topic, how old are you kids? Names are up to you. I'll understand if you don't want to say their names online.

I have 4 children who are all adults. My youngest Matthew turned 19 today. My only grandkid is 4.
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Tom is 14 and Ruth 12. By all accounts both are extremely intelligent and doing very well in school, however their mother has made certain that outside of a miracle we will never have a relationship. Such is life I guess.

Hope you and yours are doing okay :)
 
the_leander said:
Tom is 14 and Ruth 12. By all accounts both are extremely intelligent and doing very well in school, however their mother has made certain that outside of a miracle we will never have a relationship. Such is life I guess.

Hope you and yours are doing okay :)
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I am sorry to hear. I won't try to pretend to know your situation, but IMO try to have a relationship with your kids if at all possible. If the mother is blocking it, she can't block it when they hit 18.

My family is doing pretty good thank you. Family dynamics are always difficult. All things considered, we are doing pretty good.
 
OT
My kids:
Jimmy is 26
Lee Ann will be 25 in less than a week
Daniel is 23
Matthew is 19

My grandson Christian turned 4 in Sept.
 
Still OT but on the same vein: I work in a hotel and one of the girls who works here is 17, she mentioned this and I responded that that makes me feel old. She asked how old I was and I told her. She turns around and says, oh, my mum is less than a year older than you!

Not helping!!:wrong:
 
Snopes is fake news.

‘Fact Checkers’ at Snopes Attempt to Bail Out Stacey Abrams from Armed Black Panthers Story

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The so-called “fact checkers” at Snopes have reached out to Breitbart News in an openly partisan attempt to wash away the story of armed members of the New Black Panther Party campaigning for the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, Stacey Abrams.

Over the weekend, Breitbart News–among other media outlets–published explosive photographs of armed Black Panthers campaigning for Abrams, holding up her campaign sign while also holding up various guns. In the story, Breitbart News included a quote from the campaign of her GOP opponent, Brian Kemp, calling on her to denounce the radicals campaigning for her.

The story went viral. Many other national outlets and outlets across Georgia, including a local CBS News affiliate, picked it up and carried the damning images of Abrams’ radical supporters. Since then, President Donald Trump held a rally in Macon, Georgia, for Kemp and the latest polls in the race show Kemp leading Abrams by as many as 12 points.

On Monday, a self-identified “reporter” for Snopes, Bethania Palma, reached out to Breitbart News with a series of questions about the Black Panther report. None of the questions implies anything was inaccurate about the report Facebook relies on Snopes as an official “fact checker” to detect fake news and misinformation on the platform, along with a small group of other primarily left-wing organizations including Politifact.

Here is her email to Breitbart News:

I’m a reporter from the fact checking organization Snopes.com. I had a couple of questions about this story:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/04/armed-black-panthers-lobby-for-democrat-gubernatorial-candidate-stacey-abrams/
The story says Breitbart “obtained” images of the Black Panthers. Where did Breitbart obtain the images from?
– Why does Breitbart quote the Kemp campaign with no obvious effort to get comment from the Abrams campaign?
– Why did Breitbart use the term “lobby” in the headline?
– Breitbart normally takes a pro-gun stance. Does Breitbart maintain that stance when the gun owners are black?
– Did anyone at Breitbart make an effort to contact the New Black Panther Party for comment?​

Who exactly is this reporter? Who is Bethania Palma?

Just a quick glance at Palma’s Twitter account or at her history of writing for radical leftist outlet Alternet shows a hard leftist mentality, one quick to accuse Trump of being “racist” (the latest is a series of tweets attacking the president’s campaign ad on the migrant caravan as such) or linking Trump to the Ku Klux Klan any way she can–a history dating back years, as Breitbart News has reported about Palma before.

Before publishing this story, Breitbart News sent Palma a series of questions of our own about her inquiry to us:

1.) Why can anyone trust Snopes to be an independent authority on fact-checking when you personally are so clearly biased in favor of leftists?
2.) You implied in your questions to us that our story had something to do with race. The story clearly did not. What made you think that? Please be specific.
3.) In your questions to us, you did not indicate that there was anything even close to inaccurate in our story. So, again, please be specific: what exactly are you “fact checking”?
4.) Do you send similar lists of questions to outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and others on their reporting?​

Palma has not replied to our request for comment before publication.
 
redrumloa said:
Snopes is fake news.

‘Fact Checkers’ at Snopes Attempt to Bail Out Stacey Abrams from Armed Black Panthers Story

black-panthers-main-image-640x480.jpg


The so-called “fact checkers” at Snopes have reached out to Breitbart News in an openly partisan attempt to wash away the story of armed members of the New Black Panther Party campaigning for the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, Stacey Abrams.

Over the weekend, Breitbart News–among other media outlets–published explosive photographs of armed Black Panthers campaigning for Abrams, holding up her campaign sign while also holding up various guns. In the story, Breitbart News included a quote from the campaign of her GOP opponent, Brian Kemp, calling on her to denounce the radicals campaigning for her.

The story went viral. Many other national outlets and outlets across Georgia, including a local CBS News affiliate, picked it up and carried the damning images of Abrams’ radical supporters. Since then, President Donald Trump held a rally in Macon, Georgia, for Kemp and the latest polls in the race show Kemp leading Abrams by as many as 12 points.

On Monday, a self-identified “reporter” for Snopes, Bethania Palma, reached out to Breitbart News with a series of questions about the Black Panther report. None of the questions implies anything was inaccurate about the report Facebook relies on Snopes as an official “fact checker” to detect fake news and misinformation on the platform, along with a small group of other primarily left-wing organizations including Politifact.

Here is her email to Breitbart News:

I’m a reporter from the fact checking organization Snopes.com. I had a couple of questions about this story:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/04/armed-black-panthers-lobby-for-democrat-gubernatorial-candidate-stacey-abrams/
The story says Breitbart “obtained” images of the Black Panthers. Where did Breitbart obtain the images from?
– Why does Breitbart quote the Kemp campaign with no obvious effort to get comment from the Abrams campaign?
– Why did Breitbart use the term “lobby” in the headline?
– Breitbart normally takes a pro-gun stance. Does Breitbart maintain that stance when the gun owners are black?
– Did anyone at Breitbart make an effort to contact the New Black Panther Party for comment?​

Who exactly is this reporter? Who is Bethania Palma?

Just a quick glance at Palma’s Twitter account or at her history of writing for radical leftist outlet Alternet shows a hard leftist mentality, one quick to accuse Trump of being “racist” (the latest is a series of tweets attacking the president’s campaign ad on the migrant caravan as such) or linking Trump to the Ku Klux Klan any way she can–a history dating back years, as Breitbart News has reported about Palma before.

Before publishing this story, Breitbart News sent Palma a series of questions of our own about her inquiry to us:

1.) Why can anyone trust Snopes to be an independent authority on fact-checking when you personally are so clearly biased in favor of leftists?
2.) You implied in your questions to us that our story had something to do with race. The story clearly did not. What made you think that? Please be specific.
3.) In your questions to us, you did not indicate that there was anything even close to inaccurate in our story. So, again, please be specific: what exactly are you “fact checking”?
4.) Do you send similar lists of questions to outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and others on their reporting?​

Palma has not replied to our request for comment before publication.
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Well, Snopes is not news. At all. Now, fair disclosure, some of this may have changed since the days I was on there. It's been a while. But as far as I know, this is still the case.

The first thing to remember is that the entire site is based on best-effort. They mostly look at things other "reputable" people have said, and repeat that. The "Fact Checkers" are volunteers, not credentialed reporters. Their qualifications include, and are usually limited to the fact that they volunteered, and they made at least a semi-coherent message to the site admins to get access. Consequently, this also means the site admins can clear or not clear whoever the heck they want for any opaque reason they want. So you have that baked-in bias. Next, basically anyone with an account could claim to be a "Fact Checker" to whoever they please. And that doesn't mean anything, anyhow. Like, for instance, you could claim to be a "Fact Checker" for Whyzzat.com, if you wanted to. And Snopes doesn't really have any structure or assignments. You're free to investigate whatever interests you at that moment, if you choose to do anything, at all.

So, really, some random yahoo was curious. And name-dropped Snopes in the hope it might get a response. That's the start and end of the entire story.
 
Robert said:
The funniest thing about this is that the people who shriek most about 'fake news' won't actually care if this has been deliberately altered. What a wonderful time to be signalling virtues:
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Uh, did you watch the video? It doesn't claim the event never happened, just splitting hairs about 1-2 frames may be out of sync which may be due to video quality. Even the side by side I really can't tell the difference.
 
Robert said:
The funniest thing about this is that the people who shriek most about 'fake news' won't actually care if this has been deliberately altered. What a wonderful time to be signalling virtues:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1060621211414261761
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Several separate issues for me.

The main one would be, is it OK for reporters to push away the hand of an intern who was taking the mic? Does it make a difference if the intern is a woman?

Was the video edited to look slightly worse?

If so, that would be slightly disturbing (but it's also disturbing when the BBC does it).
Then the question would be why bother? If the reporters shouldn't be pushing interns arms out of the way and the original clearly shows this, wouldn't posting a video with three missing frames undermine the case, especially when existing footage is everywhere.

The next question is what caused the video to differ from the original. Was it a deliberate edit? Did someone sit and think about how this could be altered to fit a narrative, and then compressed it down to a tweetable size? Or is it something that happened in compression and transmission. Which are the B frames, which are the I frames? Could it be an interpolation error on transcode, and whose transcoder?

I can see why info wars would have picked it up - even if it was a natural glitch, and maybe especially then. If you see video, pictures or posts that match what you expect and that proves your point, you retweet and repost with a flourish and an "Aha! Told you so!" That's completely normal and I've come to expect that from all sides.

So, it could be as simple as : some people are sharing the CSPAN clip showing that Acosta obviously pushed the intern's arm away and somewhere along the line a transcode glitch lost 3 interpolated frames making the clip accidentally more mimetic causing it to spread in the echo chamber that both Alex Jones and the Trumpets inhabit. That's disturbing in that those two are in the same chamber, but it's different from nefarious - but it's also the difference between making the rather dull claim that the video they posted was defective versus the panic and crowd motivating claim that the administration is deliberately manufacturing evidence.

The latter theory I think is on a par for likelihood with a theory like: infowars and through them, the Trumpets are being pranked by spreading a video that is virtually indistinguishable from the original but which differs on a frame by frame analysis - a bit like the Killian memo that torpedoed Dan Rather, which, if they were truly faked may have been faked as a poison pill to undermine the credibility of the general facts of the story.

If the video has been deliberately altered and released by the Whitehouse knowingly then they either expected it never to be critically examined, or they thought it would be discovered, and if the latter, then it is more likely being used for the smoke, in which case, what is behind the smoke screen?

Whatever the case, having the twittersphere and news caught up in their usual histrionics is not unfamiliar territory for Trump. He seems to thrive on that battlefield so it's probably counter productive to engage him there - but people can't seem to help themselves.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Whatever the case, having the twittersphere and news caught up in their usual histrionics is not unfamiliar territory for Trump. He seems to thrive on that battlefield so it's probably counter productive to engage him there - but people can't seem to help themselves.
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Absolutely. He has that completely nailed down.

But that wasn't the point.

Was the video edited to look slightly worse?
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As far as "fake news" is concerned, that is the question.

What I find funny is that the people who rant most about "fake news" don't actually give the square root of a fuck about fake news, and this episode demonstrates that wonderfully.
 
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