The use of elite media as agents of propaganda

Some media outlets are better than others when it comes to providing news but we should be alert that because of their reputations they are sometimes co-opted to promote propaganda. Max Blumenthal writes about recently leaked documents that claim that Reuters and the BBC seemed to be willing to work covertly with the British government in advancing its propaganda goals.

The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”
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The grubby world of social media influencers

It is fascinating to read about cultures that one is ignorant of and with the arrival of the internet and social media, one hears of many such micro-cultures. I have been vaguely curious about the phenomenon of so-called ‘influencers’ who are, as far as I can see, people who promote themselves via social media and as a result others take their opinions on things seriously, even if they have no credentials whatsoever other than their social media popularity. It seems pretty weird to me but then I am not of the social media world.

This article examines a new documentary that looks into the creation of three such people.
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Sanitizing Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh died earlier this week. Dan Froomkin castigates the media’s downplaying of Limbaugh’s toxic legacy after his death, by portraying his vilest racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic attacks on his political enemies as humor.

Our newsroom leaders still cannot bring themselves to declare that the hysteria and conspiracy theories that once only inhabited the lunatic fringes of our political discourse — until Rush Limbaugh, and then Donald Trump, came along — don’t merit respect, but should be banished, rejected and denied.

And that is why, even with a year to pre-write and edit them, major media outlets on Wednesday published obituaries celebrating Limbaugh’s extraordinary success as a “conservative provocateur.” They whitewashed his once-unimaginably vile and divisive demagoguery as “comic bombast.” They hailed him as “the voice of American conservatism,” when what really matters about Rush Limbaugh is that he spread hatred more effectively and lucratively than any American before him. He didn’t hide his bigotry and, eventually, neither did the Republican Party.
…

“What he did was to bring a paranoia and really mean, nasty rhetoric and hyperpartisanship into the mainstream,” said Martin Kaplan, a University of Southern California professor who is an expert on the intersection of politics and entertainment and a frequent critic of Limbaugh. “The kind of antagonism and vituperativeness that characterized him instantly became acceptable everywhere.”

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The conservative media bind

Conservative media like Fox News, One America News (OAN) and Newsmax are finding themselves in a bind. Since they are competing for the support of the Trump cult, they need to feed them the red meat about how the election was stolen. This requires them to bring on their shows the loonies who are propagating outlandish conspiracy theories.

But now that the two companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are unlashing massive lawsuits against those who they claim are defaming them, these media outlets have to take defensive actions. What they have chosen to do is to give detailed disclaimers before they put on these people, saying that these are not their opinions but purely those of the speaker.
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Why did Giuliani, Powell, and Fox News pick on Smartmatic?

Smartmatic is a software company that works with election systems. They became the target of a systematic campaign by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell and Fox News personalities Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro, who accused the company of rigging the votes in order to enable Joe Biden to win. The puzzling thing is Smartmatic’s only involvement in the election was in Los Angeles county where there was never any need to to fraudulently aid Biden to win since California was assured. So why pick on this company? The answer may be that its founder Antonio Mujica is originally from Venezuela. Aha! There was the smoking gun!

On that flimsy basis this bunch of loonies spun their fantastic yarn of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, George Soros, and the international Communist movement working to steal the election from Trump. Smartmatic has had enough and, like the Dominion Voting Systems company that manufactures voting machines who were also accused by this crew of stealing the election, they have initiated a massive $2.7 billion lawsuit against these five people as well as Fox News and its parent Fox Corporation.
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The bleak future of the Republican party

Jane Mayer is an excellent reporter for the New Yorker magazine who has been following the career of Mitch McConnell for a long time. She has a new article examining his recent moves that seem to involve a distancing from Trump. The headline says that McConnell has dumped Trump but that was written just after he spoke in the Senate on January 6th saying that the election results should not be overturned. Since then, McConnell has edged back to Trump again.

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The purge of those not slavishly loyal to Trump begins

Michigan is a state that has a panel of four people, two Republicans and two Democrats, to certify election results. The Trump camp wanted the board to not certify Michigan’s presidential results even though Jos Biden easily won by a margin of 50.6-47.8% or about 150,000 votes. But one of the Republicans Aaron Van Langevelde voted to certify and the other abstained, resulting in Biden’s victory being confirmed by a 3-0 vote. I wrote about the heated debate back on November 24th..

So now the Michigan Republican party has decided to not renominate Van Langevelde for a second term when his term expires at the end of this month. He is unrepentant.
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Travails of the news headline writer

Writing headlines for news items is an art and I am often impressed at how they manage to capture in a very few words the essence of the story. In the case of the death of a famous person, you have even less discretionary space because you have to give the person’s name and often their age, leaving very little room to describe what they were famous for. It gets even worse when they were famous for two things: one good and one bad. How do you balance the two? While the obituaries themselves are written well in advance of death, the headline may not be and you have very little time to come up with one.

So pity the poor person at the BBC assigned to write a headline for the death of Phil Spector. Spector had an immense impact as a pop music producer but also murdered a woman and died in prison.

The first headline was:

“Talented but flawed producer Phil Spector dies aged 81”

It was quickly realized that being a murderer required stronger language than ‘flawed’.

So the headline was quickly replaced with:

“Pop producer jailed for murder dies at 81.”

The BBC has apologized for the first headline as “Not meeting our editorial standards.”

The Skepticamp talks are now online

The Monterey Skepticamp conference on January 2, 2021 where I gave a talk was enjoyable and informative, covering quite a range of topics. All the talks have been posted online. The full program is can be seen here.

The full video for the day’s program is 7 hours 27 minutes long. I give below the starting times for each talk which we were asked to limit to 20 minutes to allow for 10 minutes of Q/A . After the opening welcome remarks by organizer Susan Gerbic and a small quiz by Arlen Grossman, the rest of the talks were as follows:

35 minutes: András Gábor Pintér – Building Bridges – Why we need to organize to bring skepticism forward

1 hour 14 minutes: Janyce Boynton – Facilitated Communication – I Thought That Died in the 1990s!

1 hour 56 minutes: Stuart Vyse – Do Superstitions Work?

2 hours 27minutes: Kelly Burke – Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia

2 hours 54 minutes: Monica Ashly – Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia

4 hours 12 minutes: Richard Saunders (host of Skeptic Zone) –  So you want to do a Skeptical Podcast?

4 hours 53 minutes: Adrienne Hill – Tourette Syndrome: Stereotypes and CAM treatments

5 hours 29 minutes: Kyle Polich – Data Skeptic: “I don’t know anyone who has COVID-19”

5 hours 59 minutes: Mano Singham – The Copernican Myths

6 hours 30 minutes: Rob Palmer – Belief in Psychics: What’s the Harm and Who’s to Blame?

Trump’s reckless attacks led to this sorry state

Back in 2016, CBS News’s Lesley Stahl asked Trump why he was relentlessly attacking the media and accusing them of being liars and spreaders of fake news. He cynically replied that he wanted to preemptively discredit them in the eyes of his followers so that when they reported anything negative about him, they would not be believed. He steadily ramped up the attacks on the media at every chance he could, even referring to them as enemies of the people and scum. And you have to admit that his strategy worked. His cult following refused to believe anything bad that the media said about him. His enemies became their enemies.

On Wednesday we saw where this could lead when the mob attacked journalists and destroyed their equipment while they were covering the rampage.


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