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Narrative gravity is like confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs.” But with narratives, it’s less about personal beliefs and more of a bandwagon effect, where everyone processes and interprets information through a framework that is both easily digestible and broadly accepted. Narrative gravity is what makes a startup’s story clock tick. Narrative gravity exists beyond tech. It’s why Senator John McCain is still considered a maverick and why Tiger Woods’ big comeback is always right around the corner. The gravitational pull of a prevailing narrative is hard to resist....
Unless you’ve been living completely off the grid, you’re probably sick of all the drama about fake news. But here’s the thing. Fake news isn’t new. And it isn’t limited to news. In fact, it has a special affinity for content marketing. The more we have to compete for eyeballs and dollars, the more likely we are to be tempted to cross the line into…let’s call it “subjective fact,” shall we? Sometimes we do it on purpose, but, more often than not, we just wake up one day and find ourselves writing something that’s total BS. Because “subjective facts” don’t always call attention to themselves with flashing red lights. Sometimes, they’re dull, dented, and scratched — so blah they don’t even attract attention…but they do hold up an argument or claim that would fall apart without them.And that’s a problem. Whether it’s stretching the truth to make the facts fit the argument you’re trying to support, ignoring contradictory facts, or employing logical fallacies, these things undermine your credibility more than you realize. While people who already passionately support you will be nodding their heads in agreement, the people you’re trying to convince will be thinking, “Now, wait a minute…”...
When the organizer of the #NotMyPresident protests refused to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, the Fox News host booked an actor with no ties to its leadership as a replacement. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson had a hard time booking Olga Lexell, the creator and co-organizer of the nationwide Not My President’s Day protests on Monday. So, after repeated refusals, Carlson’s show instead booked Shane Saunders, a Los Angeles-based actor and casting agent, who Lexell said “was not affiliated in any way with our rallies and was not an organizer.” In the five-minute segment, Saunders was referred to as an “organizer” by an on-screen graphic and Carlson himself, who also asked Saunders about why “your protest is going to make a difference.” “It's frustrating because, with the exception of one person, all of the organizers are women,” Lexell told The Daily Beast. “For a man who knows nothing about the protests to go on TV unprepared, misrepresent our message, take credit for our weeks of hard work, and make us look bad—and for Tucker Carlson's team to go along with it—is just disappointing.”...
Wittingly or not, major global corporations are helping fund sites that traffic in fake news by advertising on them.
Take, for instance, a story that falsely claimed former President Barack Obama had banned Christmas cards to overseas military personnel. Despite debunking by The Associated Press and other fact-checking outlets, that article lives on at "Fox News The FB Page," which has no connection to the news channel although its bears a replica of its logo.
And until recently, the story was often flanked by ads from big brands such as the insurer Geico, the business-news outlet Financial Times, and the beauty-products maker Revlon.
This situation isn't remotely an isolated case, although major companies generally say they have no intention of bankrolling purveyors of fake news with their ad dollars. Because many of their ads are placed on websites by computer algorithms, it's not always easy for these companies to steer them away from sites they find objectionable....
This drives journalists nuts. They feel a duty to rebut lies, and in the age of “John Oliver Destroys Something” headlines, there’s an appetite among liberal viewers for plucky correspondents eviscerating right-wing ideologues on-air. We’ve now seen one host after another—Todd, Cuomo, Anderson Cooper—lose his cool or waste a long interview trying to make Conway acknowledge elementary facts.
Of course, presidential flacks have always tried to stretch or shade the truth during on-air interviews. In his first briefings as press secretary to President George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer juggled contrary rationales for tax cuts, that the government could afford them or that a weak economy needed them, using whichever argument seemed to fit the evidence presented. In his first briefings as press secretary to President Obama,
Robert Gibbs used the term “financial stability package” to mask the stench of corporate bailouts. Reporters understood that no matter what they asked, Fleischer would defend tax cuts and Gibbs would defend bailouts. But the president’s spokesman would generally try to reconcile the president’s agenda with the facts. And if he couldn’t, he would at least clarify the agenda. Conway brings none of that. She alters unwelcome questions, disregards the facts presented to her, and clarifies nothing. In part, that’s because Trump has no organized agenda. All he has is ego. So that’s what she fights for. She’s not there to persuade a skittish Republican senator to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She’s there to defend and avenge one man’s wounded pride....
You can count NASA as the third federal agency in the past twenty-four hours to defy Donald Trump by launching unofficial non-government Twitter accounts which Trump can’t control or sensor. First it was the National Park Service, which went rogue on Twitter after Trump forced deletions of factual tweets he didn’t like. Then the EPA went rogue earlier today. And now NASA has launched its own rogue Twitter account in order to make sure its truths are heard against Trump’s will.
The unofficial National Park Service account started six hours ago by reposting the Badlands tweets that had been deleted. It’s since continued posting all the climate change data it can find, and it’s been documenting Trump’s strange attempts at cracking down on the official accounts. This unofficial Twitter account has quickly gained ninety thousand followers (likely a lot more by the time you’re reading this), as Americans are flocking to the account to keep up with the real National Park Service news....
What can this small chapter tell us about what’s to come? That Trump will be what columnist Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald calls “the gaslighter in chief” — that he will pull out all the stops to make people think that they should believe him, not their own eyes. (“Gaslighting” is a reference to the 1940s movie in which a manipulative husband psychologically abuses his wife by denying the reality that the gaslights in their home are growing dimmer and dimmer.) “The techniques,” Ghitis wrote, “include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.”...
When Donald Trump gathered the press at Trump Tower 20 months ago to announce his unlikely candidacy for president, he reportedly paid actors to fill the marble lobby and cheer.
Not much — and everything — has changed since.
On Wednesday morning, when the president-elect once again faced hundreds of reporters from around the globe gathered in his lobby -- this time for his first press conference in seven months — Trump filled the room with paid staffers who clapped and cheered as he blasted members of the media as purveyors of “fake news.”
It was Trump’s method of battling back an extraordinary report that U.S. intelligence officials have presented both Trump and President Barack Obama with unverified allegations that Russia has compromising information about the incoming 45th president, including about a reported salacious encounter in a Moscow hotel room....
As journalists continue to critique their coverage of the presidential election, Nieman Reports is publishing an ongoing series of articles exploring the issues, challenges and opportunities—from newsroom diversity to fake news to community news outlets—that will inform reporting going forward. The full list of articles is below.
Speaking in early December at a ceremony to honor Harry Reid’s retirement from the US Senate, Hillary Clinton took aim at a target that would have been totally unfamiliar to audiences as recently as the summer of 2016: fake news. She spoke of “an epidemic” of the stuff that has “flooded social media” over the past year and “can have real-world consequences.” This was reported largely as commentary on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which had recently led to an alarming armed standoff at DC’s Comet Ping Pong restaurant. But it was also pretty clearly an allusion to her own recently failed presidential campaign, especially because she spoke favorably of the idea of bipartisan legislation to curb foreign propaganda news, arguing that “it is imperative that leaders in both the private and public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.”...
Since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump has reportedly skipped out on the majority of his intelligence briefings; this past Sunday, Trump made headlines after sharing false information blaming his loss of the popular vote on mass voter fraud — a claim previously reported by the conspiracy news site Infowars. It’s been widely reported that Trump is an obsessive consumer of cable news — he has himself admitted to receiving at least a portion of his military advice from “the shows.” But, pundits and chyrons aside, relatively little is known about where the next president will find the news and commentary that might color his time in office. What exactly is Trump’s media diet?
What we know of Trump’s relationship to the modern internet suggests the president-elect rarely browses it himself. Trump campaign press secretary Hope Hicks told GQ he relies largely on Google News printouts from staffers and sparingly reads his own email. And a 2007 deposition suggests that Trump doesn’t use a computer or carry a smartphone during the daytime hours, and often dictates daytime tweets to his assistants.
To better understand Trump’s media consumption, BuzzFeed News turned to the president-elect’s largest source of public proclamations and shared news: Twitter. While Trump’s media consumption and methods appear opaque and unconventional, the stories he chooses to share with his now 16 million–plus followers offer a unique window into the news and commentary that catch his eye...
Our analysis revealed a media ecosystem that appears to largely reinforce and affirm the views publicly expressed by Trump and his closest advisers. The news stories Trump tweets share several characteristics: 1) They often favor sensationalism over facts and reporting; 2) They frequently echo direct quotes from Trump himself or his closest advisers; and 3) They routinely malign his enemies and vindicate his most controversial opinions.... The stories shared by Trump’s account throughout his campaign suggest the president-elect has constructed a powerful online filter bubble that largely flatters and confirms that which he claims to be true....
You may think you are prepared for a post-truth world, in which political appeals to emotion count for more than statements of verifiable fact. But now it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world withoutfacts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit. On live radio Wednesday morning, Scottie Nell Hughes sounded breezy as she drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show.” Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept defending that assertion, although not with much clarity of expression. Rehm had pressed her about Trump’s recent evidence-free assertion on Twitter that he, not Hillary Clinton, would have won the popular vote if millions of immigrants had not voted illegally....
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Dear President Trump, As journalists and founders of a network of media professionals in over 180 countries, we are seriously concerned with your attacks on the news media and your disregard for the truth itself. Your attempt to discredit legitimate media organizations, as well as the barring of media companies from your press conferences last week, are an insult to our esteemed colleagues who risk their lives every day to report the truth, and to the United States Constitution you took an oath to defend. Attacking the news media with a broad brush and attempting to delegitimize media outlets critical of the government is exactly how Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin began their presidencies. It was the first step they took in weakening democracy in Venezuela and Russia. By driving a wedge between the people and the media, and by using the power of the presidency to intimidate journalists, these leaders built corrupt, authoritarian regimes with few checks on their power and limited recourse against human rights violations. Thanks to our Constitution, our deep cultural tradition of press freedom, and the surging desire of the American people to access quality journalism, those tactics will not work in the United States....
This chart shows U.S. voters' attitudes towards the trustworthiness of the media and/or the president (in percent) Never since Richard Nixon was in office more than 40 years ago, has a President had such an antagonistic relationship with the media like Donald Trump has today. He considers himself at war with the media and calls outlets whose reporting he disapproves of “fake news”. There seems to be a corrosion of trust in either the President or the so-called Fourth Estate, depending on your political preferences....
The topic of “fake news” continues to show strong earned media results. In February, “fake news” was the strongest rising topical trend when it came to earned media, according to mediaQuant, an earned media researcher. Overall, discussion around fake news rose 23% -- now scoring a media rating of 94; it had earned a 93 score in January. Over the previous six months, it had been averaging a 71 media rating score. Earned media is defined as press interviews and appearances on all media, including TV, radio, online and print publications.The topic of fake news has produced 42.4 million “mentions” and 64.2 million over the last 12 months. Media value estimated for coverage of “fake news” has amounted to $270.3 million in February. Over the last 12 months, mediaQuant says its media value has been $388.7 million....
You can count the Department of Agriculture as the latest federal agency under attack from Donald Trump who is now actively rebelling against him. After Trump punished the National Park Service for tweeting about his inauguration crowd size, and the Badlands was forced to delete its tweets about climate change, these agencies have begun sticking it to Trump by rolling out secondary non-government Twitter accounts that he can’t control. Lo and behold, the unofficial USDA Twitter account.
The @AltUSDA account on Twitter has been in existence for less than a day but already has tens of thousands of followers, and it’s been posting helpful tweets along the lines of “Read the USDA Climate Change Solutions page while you still can” along with a link to an article on the usda.gov website which, for the moment at least, is still visible. It’s expected that the Trump administration will forcibly remove such information in order to pretend that climate change isn’t real. But @AltUSDA is going further....
I revisit all this now, just six tumultuous days into the Trump presidency, because not since Nixon, perhaps, have White House aides found themselves so plainly caught between loyalty to a boss on one hand and personal integrity on the other. And the questions I have are the same ones they should be asking themselves.
Who here will refuse to keep saying things they know aren’t true? And will anyone tell the boss what he doesn’t want to know?
Let’s face it: Trump’s not someone who puts a ton of value on the truth. That’s always been his way, and it’s worked for him.
EPA employees, whose identities must remain anonymous in order to make sure Trump can’t punish or fire them, are now posting under the Twitter username @ActualEPAFacts — and the account is quickly gaining popularity as the day goes on. The rogue Twitter account was started seven hours ago when it announced that “Donald Trump forced us to remove this page” along with a link to a now-deleted climate change article on the epa.gov website. The account has then since gone on to make the case as to why Trump nominee Scott Pruitt, who pretends climate change isn’t real, is unfit to lead the agency....
FAKE NEWS ISN’T just Macedonian teenagers or internet trolls. A longstanding network of bogus “think tanks” raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies’ pull quotes and flashy stats become the “evidence” driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump’s tweets. These organizations have always existed: They’re old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reach. They’ve been ginning up so-called research for everyone from shady corporations to anti-LGBTQ groups to white supremacists for decades—they’re practiced, and their faux-academic veneer is thick and glossy. Which makes them harder to brush off than your garden-variety liar. “Fake think tanks use a mix of selected truths, half-truths, and downright fabricated stuff in order to manipulate people,” says Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City College of New York and author of Nonsense on Stilts: How To Tell Science from Bunk. “We don’t live in the age of post-truth. We live in the age of internet-enabled bullshit.” So phony think tanks are hard to spot, let alone discredit and combat. Their mix of pseudoscientific camouflage, long-held political connections, and social media gets them influence—and a whole lot of clicks....
We’re only three weeks into the new year, but “fake news” could already be the phrase of the year. After reports suggested that fake news on Twitter and Facebook contributed to Donald Trump’s win in last year’s US Presidential election, the latter is finally clamping down on the issue. The company has announced new tools to curb fake news in Germany, presumably as a measure ahead of the country’s August 2017 elections. “Last month we announced some tests to address the issue of fake news on Facebook,” Aine Kerr, the company’s manager of journalism partnerships, wrote in a press release....
Does anyone really believe that story?” Donald Trump said, at his first press conference in more than five months. He was referring to a dossier that BuzzFeed had published the night before, which contained unproved allegations of material that the Russians had supposedly gathered to blackmail Trump. The press conference might not have gone half as well for Trump if that story hadn’t been out. Trump looked angry, in a way that, as anger sometimes does, left him more rhetorically focussed. The rambling defensiveness that criticisms often provoke in him was not so visible. His grandiosity, his resentments, and, at moments, his crudity were all on full display, but not in a way that is likely to alienate his supporters. The first question asked of Trump was whether he had been briefed by American intelligence about the alleged Russian efforts to compromise him, as CNN had reported. He said that he couldn’t talk about classified intelligence, but he did have something to say about what had been publicly reported. “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” he said. “And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents that got together—sick people—and they put that crap together.”...
More than five years ago, Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach released their guide to helping news consumers sort fact from fiction. “Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload” covers many topics — how to evaluate sources, how to know whether a news account is complete, how to verify questionable claims — that are timely given the avalanche of information that circulated during this election year. One line in the first chapter is particularly prescient given the recent influx of fake news (wholly false stories) and misinformation (false or inaccurate information): “Citizens have more voice, but those who would manipulate the public for political gain or profit — be it corporations or the government — have more direct access to the public as well.” Rosenstiel could never have predicted the details of how this would soon play out: teenagers in Macedonia, among others, profiting off fake news they created about the 2016 presidential election that spread quickly through social media. How would he amend his book given all that’s happened in the last year?...
Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News, and AP will help Facebook make good on four of the six promises Mark Zuckerberg made about fighting fake news without it becoming “the arbiter of truth.” It will make fake news posts less visible, append warnings from fact checkers to fake news in the feed, make reporting hoaxes easier and disrupt the financial incentives of fake news spammers. “We’re not looking to get into the grey area of opinion,” Facebook’s VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri tells me. “What we are focusing on with this work is specifically the worst of the work — clear hoaxes that were shared intentionally, usually by spammers, for financial gain.” Facebook will now refer to fact-checking services that adhere to Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network fact-checkers’ code of principles the most egregious and viral fake news articles flagged by users and algorithms. These include non-partisanship and fairness; transparency of sources, methodology and funding; and a commitment to corrections. Facebook is starting with the five above but hopes to grow that list to dozens to quickly get a consensus on a story’s accuracy. ...
More bad news about fake news: A new survey from Morning Consult finds more than 70% of Americans have heard about the “fake news” controversy, and nearly half (49%) say they have been exposed to fake news at least once a day through Facebook and Twitter.
In addition, 69% of those polled said they have started to read a news story only to realize later that it wasn’t real.
On the question of whether Facebook, Twitter, and Google should be able to censor fake news, a majority of Americans say they are comfortable with tech companies censoring fake news — 71% said it was appropriate for Google, Facebook and Twitter to remove fake news, and 67% said it was appropriate for Web service providers to remove it.
With regard to who is most responsible for policing fake news, Americans think they and social media sites are most responsible for policing fake news, but believe all actors must play a role. For example, 24% of Americans said "the person reading the news" is the most responsible for ensuring they are not exposed, followed by Facebook and Twitter at 17%. The government comes in third with 14% of the vote, followed by Web services providers at 10%, and search engines (such as Google) at 9%.
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Narrative gravity! It's out there and it affects the news we read says Aaron Zamost. Recommended reading! 9/10