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Javier E

Fox News's Election Coverage Followed Journalistic Instincts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-journalistic-instincts.html

propaganda partisan channel election political journalism

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • It has been suggested, here and elsewhere, that Fox News effectively became part of the Republican propaganda apparatus during the presidential campaign by giving pundit slots to many of the Republican candidates and relentlessly advocating for Mitt Romney once he won the nomination. Over many months, Fox lulled its conservative base with agitprop: that President Obama was a clear failure, that a majority of Americans saw Mr. Romney as a good alternative in hard times, and that polls showing otherwise were politically motivated and not to be believed. But on Tuesday night, the people in charge of Fox News were confronted with a stark choice after it became clear that Mr. Romney had fallen short: was Fox, first and foremost, a place for advocacy or a place for news?
Javier E

The Danger of Making Science Political - Puneet Opal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267327

science politics politization us conservatism

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • there seems to be a growing gulf between U.S Republicans and science. Indeed, by some polls only 6 percent of scientists are Republican, and in the recent U.S. Presidential election, 68 science Nobel Prize winners endorsed the Democratic nominee Barack Obama over the Republican candidate Mitt Romney.
  • What are the reasons for this apparent tilt?
  • he backs up his statement by suggesting a precedent: the social sciences, he feels, have already received this treatment at the hands of conservatives in government by making pointed fingers at their funding.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Moreover, when they attempt to give their expert knowledge for policy decisions, conservatives will choose to ignore the evidence, claiming a liberal bias.
  • most of the bad news is the potential impact on scientists. Why? Because scientists, he believes -- once perceived by Republicans to be a Democratic interest group -- will lose bipartisan support for federal science funding.
  • this sort of thinking might well be bad for scientists, but is simply dangerous for the country. As professionals, scientists should not be put into a subservient place by politicians and ideologues. They should never be felt that their advice might well be attached to carrots or sticks.
  • Political choices can be made after the evidence is presented, but the evidence should stand for what it is. If the evidence itself is rejected by politicians -- as is currently going on -- then the ignorance of the political class should indeed be exposed, and all threats resisted.
  • This might seem to be a diatribe against conservatives. But really this criticism is aimed at all unscientific thinking.
  • there are a number on the left who have their own dogmatic beliefs; the most notable are unscientific theories with regard to the dangers of vaccinations, genetically modified produce, or nuclear energy.
Javier E

Drones, Ethics and the Armchair Soldier - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...thics-and-the-armchair-soldier

ethics just war drone war

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the difference between humans and robots is precisely the ability to think and reflect, in Immanuel Kant’s words, to set and pursue ends for themselves. And these ends cannot be set beforehand in some hard and fast way
  • Working one’s way through the complexities of “just war” and moral theory makes it perfectly clear that ethics is not about arriving easily at a single right answer, but rather coming to understand the profound difficulty of doing so. Experiencing this difficulty is what philosophers call existential responsibility.
  • One of the jobs of philosophy, at least as I understand it, is neither to help people to avoid these difficulties nor to exaggerate them, but rather to face them in resolute and creative ways.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • ground troops, unfortunately, had more pressing concerns than existential responsibility. They did not have leisure, unlike their commanders, who also often had the philosophical training to think through the complexities of their jobs.
  • This training was not simply a degree requirement at Officer Candidate School or one of the United States military academies, but a sustained, ongoing, and rigorous engagement with a philosophical tradition. Alexander lived with Aristotle.
  • , Jeff McMahan argued that traditional “just war theory” should be reworked in several important ways. He suggested that the tenets of a revised theory apply not only to governments, traditionally represented by commanders and heads of state, but also to individual soldiers. This is a significant revision since it broadens the scope of responsibility for warfare
  • McMahan believes that individuals are to bear at least some responsibility in upholding “just cause” requirements. McMahan expects more of soldiers and, in this age of drones and leisure, he is right to do so.
  • while drones are to be applauded for keeping these soldiers out of harm’s way physically, we would do well to remember that they do not keep them out of harm’s way morally or psychologically. The high rates of “burnout” should drive this home. Supporting our troops requires ensuring that they are provided not just with training and physical armor, but with the intellectual tools to navigate these new difficulties.
  • Just as was the case in the invasion of Iraq 10 years ago, the most important questions we should be asking should not be directed to armchair soldiers but to those of us in armchairs at home: What wars are being fought in our name? On what grounds are they being fought?
Javier E

Girls Outnumbered in New York's Elite Public Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orks-elite-public-schools.html

gender school admissions elite

shared by Javier E on 23 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the gap at the elite schools could be as elemental as their perception as havens for science, technology, engineering or math, making them a natural magnet for boys, just as girls might gravitate to schools known for humanities.
  • Mr. Finn, who, with Jessica A. Hockett, wrote the recent book, “Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.” “I think you’re looking at habit, culture, perceptions, tradition and curricular emphasis.”
  • enrollment in highly competitive high schools is 55 percent female. “The big gender-related chasm in American education these days is how much worse boys are doing, than girls,”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Of the 3,060 students who applied to his school this year, 44 percent were boys. To help rank the candidates, he said, he simply adjusted the focus of student interviews to more effectively draw boys out in describing their own strengths. This year he offered seats to 136 boys and 134 girls. “Are we worried about getting unqualified boys?” asked Dr. Lerner. “No not at all.”
Javier E

A Great Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...a-great-debate

debate political discourse reason argumentation US

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • our political “debates” seldom deserve the name. For the most part representatives of the rival parties exchange one-liners: “The rich can afford to pay more” is met by “Tax increases kill jobs.” Slightly more sophisticated discussions may cite historical precedents: “There were higher tax rates during the post-war boom” versus “Reagan’s tax cuts increased revenues.”
  • Such volleys still don’t even amount to arguments: they don’t put forward generally accepted premises that support a conclusion.
  • Despite the name, candidates’ pre-election debates are exercises in looking authoritative, imposing their talking points on the questions, avoiding gaffes, and embarrassing their opponents with “zingers”
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  • There is a high level of political discussion in the editorials and op-eds of national newspapers and magazines as well as on a number of blogs, with positions often carefully formulated and supported with argument and evidence. But even here we seldom see a direct and sustained confrontation of rival positions through the dialectic of assertion, critique, response and counter-critique.
  • As a result, partisans typically remain safe in their ideological worlds, convincing themselves that they hold to obvious truths, while their opponents must be either knaves or fools — with no need to think through the strengths of their rivals’ positions or the weaknesses of their own.
  • In the second session, the Republican asks the Democrat a series of questions (no more than one minute per question and three minutes per response) on the debate topic. In the third session, the Democrat questions the Republican. In the fourth session, each side has 15 minutes to present a final argument.
  • A first condition is that the debates be focused on specific points of major disagreement.
  • Another issue is the medium of the debate. Written discussions, in print or online could be easily arranged, but personal encounters are more vivid and will better engage public attention. They should not, however, be merely extemporaneous events, where too much will depend on quick-thinking and an engaging manner. We want remarks to be carefully prepared and open to considered responses
  • Here’s one suggestion for an effective exchange. The debate would consist of a series of four half-hour televised sessions, carried out on successive days. In the first session, the Republican, say, presents a pre-written case for a particular position
  • Is there any way to make genuine debates — sustained back-and-forth exchanges, meeting high intellectual standards but still widely accessible — part of our political culture?
  • they will set much higher standards of discussion, requiring fuller explanations of positions and even modifications to make them more defensible. It’s unlikely that either side would ever simply give up its view, but, politically, they would have to react to a strong public consensus if they had not made a respectable case. Further, the quasi-official status of the participants, as representatives chosen by their parties, would make the parties’ politicians answerable to points the representatives have made.
  • The only major obstacle to implementing this proposal would be getting the parties to participate. Here, I suggest, shame would be a prime motivator.
  • Facts and reasoning will never settle political issues. All of us have fundamental commitments that are impervious to argument
  • But rationality almost always has some role in our decisions, and more rationality in our political discussion will at a minimum help many to better understand what is at stake in our disputes and why their opponents think as they do.
  • So why not give reason a chance?
Javier E

The Real Loser - Truth - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-real-loser-truth.html

truth partisan discourse election politics Romney fact-checking

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Candidates accordingly believed that being caught in an outright lie could damage their careers. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”) They tended only to bend the truth, not break it.
  • At least four factors since the 1970s have lowered the cost for politicians who lie and, more important, repeat their fabrications through their attack ads. First is the overall decline in respect for institutions and professionals of all kinds, from scientists and lawyers to journalists and civil servants.
  • Second are changes in media regulation and ownership
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • For decades, radio and television broadcasters had been required to present multiple viewpoints on contentious public debates on the grounds that they were stewards of the public airwaves. But in 1987, members appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Communications Commission abolished this “fairness doctrine.” The change facilitated the creation of conservative talk radio and cable outlets to combat perceived liberal bias. Liberals followed suit with programming (albeit less effective) of their own.
  • a third trend developed as political operatives realized they had more room to stretch the truth. In 2004, an aide to President George W. Bush dismissed a journalist for being part of a “reality-based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” 
  • A fourth factor: most news organizations (with notable exceptions) abandoned their roles as political referees. Many resorted to an atrophied style that resembled stenography more than journalism, presenting all claims as equally valid. Fact checking, once a foundation for all reporting, was now deemed the province of a specialized few.
  • PolitiFact has chronicled 19 “pants on fire” lies by Mr. Romney and 7 by Mr. Obama since 2007, but Mr. Romney’s whoppers have been qualitatively far worse: the “apology tour,” the “government takeover of health care,” the “$4,000 tax hike on middle class families,” the gutting of welfare-to-work rules, the shipment by Chrysler of jobs from Ohio to China. Said one of his pollsters, Neil Newhouse, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
  • the Obama campaign has certainly had its own share of dissembling and distortion, including about Mr. Romney’s positions on abortion and foreign aid. But nothing in it — or in past campaigns, for that matter — has equaled the efforts of the Romney campaign in this realm. Its fundamental disdain for facts is something wholly new.
Javier E

Why Partisans Can't Explain Their Views - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cant-explain-their-views.html

politics partisan extremism knowledge ignorance discourse

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • we have grown so accustomed to this divide that we no longer flinch at the brazen political attacks on either side — even when the logic underlying these attacks is hard to fathom.
  • attack ads work, in large part, because we don’t understand them. Statements take advantage of a fact about human psychology called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” an idea developed by the Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students. We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work even when our true understanding is superficial.
  • it is not until we are asked to explain how such a system works — whether it’s what’s involved in a trade deal with China or how a toilet flushes — that we realize how little we actually know.
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  • we report on experiments showing that people often believe they understand what is meant by well-worn political terms like the “flat tax,” “sanctions on Iran” or “cap and trade” — even when they don’t.
  • The real surprise is what happens after these same individuals are asked to explain how these policy ideas work: they become more moderate in their political views — either in support of such policies or against them. In fact, not only do their attitudes change, but so does their behavior
  • asking people to justify their position — rather than asking them to explain the mechanisms by which a policy would work — doesn’t tend to soften their political views. When we asked participants to state the reasons they were for or against a policy position, their initial attitudes held firm. (Other researchers have found much the same thing: merely discussing an issue often makes people more extreme, not less.)
  • asking people to “unpack” complex systems — getting them to articulate how something might work in real life — forces them to confront their lack of understanding.
  • rarely is anybody — candidate or voter — asked to explain his or her positions. American political discourse, in short, is not discourse at all.
  • The answer implied by our research is not that we should all become policy wonks. Instead, we voters need to be more mindful that issues are complicated and challenge ourselves to break down the policy proposals on both sides into their component parts. We have to then imagine how these ideas would work in the real world — and then make a choice: to either moderate our positions on policies we don’t really understand, as research suggests we will, or try to improve our understanding. Either way, discourse would then be based on information, not illusion.
  • whether or not we citizens make this effort, our leaders should. We should demand that Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney explain how in addition to why.
  • We have a problem in American politics: an illusion of knowledge that leads to extremism. We can start to fix it by acknowledging that we know a lot less than we think.
katrinaskibicki

April 11th, 2016 - theSkimm - 0 views

www.theskimm.com/...skimm-for-april-12th-2

shared by katrinaskibicki on 12 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • GOLDMAN SACHS THE STORY Yesterday, Goldman Sachs agreed to fork over $5 billion and a 'sorry for the financial crisis' note to the US gov.  EXPLAIN PLEASE. The settlement docs say that leading up to the '08 crisis, Goldman knew of the issues in the mortgage market. But the bank continued to sell bonds packaged with sketchy mortgages to its investors without giving them the heads up. A handful of other Wall St. banks have agreed to similar settlements with the feds over the years.  No individual bankers have ever been punished. theSKIMM More than a few people are annoyed by this. Including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. He's made Wall St. reform THE issue of his campaign, so expect to hear about this during his debate with Hillz later this week.
mcginnisca

Donald Trump Just Called for Ending All Muslim Immigration to the US | VICE | United St... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...muslim-immigration-to-us-vgtrn

donald trump muslim immigration united states language anchoring heuristics bias logic probability

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)
  • "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?
  • Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.
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  • The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.
  • the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump.
proudsa

Hillary Clinton Says A Republican President Would 'Break' The Supreme Court - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...court_568fbb2fe4b0a2b6fb6f9ec5

shared by proudsa on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • "The stakes are clear," Clinton wrote of the slate of cases now pending before the court. "In a single term, conservative justices could undermine virtually every pillar of the progressive movement."
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 09 Jan 16
       
      How one small group can undermine an entire larger one
  • "Those who care about the fairness of elections, the future of unions, racial disparities in universities, the rights of women, or the future of our planet, should care about who appoints the next justices," Clinton wrote.
  • The current demographics of the Supreme Court are what make the coming election such a relevant issue.
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  • In debates and on the trail, various GOP candidates have spent time discussing the merits and demerits of specific justices. 
  • He has vowed to pick "rock-ribbed conservatives" to the court, and has also said that Chief Justice John Roberts -- whom Cruz himself once supported -- is actually a bad choice to lead the court because he lacks a "true conservative record."
  • Clinton's op-ed is also notable in that she argues how Republicans see this election as their chance to "pack the courts with jurists who will turn back the clock" on progress -- apparently an acknowledgement that some of the more controversial cases to go before the justices got their start in lower courts that were willing to hear them.   
  • "After years of accusing liberals of judicial activism, conservatives are wholeheartedly relying on Republican-appointed judges to undo progressive achievements," Clinton wrote. "They’re using radical legal strategies to accomplish through the courts what they’ve failed to do through legislation, like dismembering the Voting Rights Act or attacking unions."
  • they're voting for many things at once.
aliciathompson1

Why we should have seen Trump coming - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...election-us-2016-35662836

trump politics election

shared by aliciathompson1 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Christie's blessing came as a bolt from the blue, and taught us once more to expect the unexpected. But shouldn't the establishment - and us in the media, for that matter - have seen the billionaire coming? After all, for years the Republican standard bearers have been vulnerable to a challenge from an anti-establishment candidate.
  • The most obvious reason for the decline of the Republican establishment has been the rise of anti-establishment adversaries. The Tea Party, an insurgent grassroots movement that emerged after Barack Obama's inauguration, has posed the most serious threat.
  • However, most of us made the mistake of interpreting the results of the congressional mid-term elections as a major setback for insurgents, because they failed to make more breakthroughs.
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  • Revulsion right now of the permanent political class and party elites seems to be a global phenomenon, but in America it is particularly pronounced, on the left as well as the right.
  • But an anti-establishment figure like Donald Trump would not have become so strong had not the party establishment become so weak. The GOP, the Grand Old Party, has been ripe for a takeover for years.
proudsa

Under Fire From G.O.P., Obama Defends Response to Terror Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...l-counterterrorism-center.html

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • explained that his refusal to redeploy large numbers of troops to the region was rooted in the grim assumption that the casualties and costs would rival the worst of the Iraq war.
  • realizes that he was slow to respond to public fears after terrorist attacks in Paris and California, acknowledging that his low-key approach led Americans to worry that he was not doing enough to keep the country safe.
  • defense of his approach came as Republican presidential candidates have been branding him as weak and competing in their calls for more robust action to combat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • especially exasperated with Mr. Trump, who has called for a temporary ban on Muslims’ entering the United States.
  • Mr. Obama said that it was “understandable” that Americans were concerned, but that they should be reassured.
  • Mr. Obama claimed progress in pushing back the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, through a strategy of airstrikes combined with Special Operations raids and support for local forces on the ground.
  • Moreover, he added, part of the group’s strategy is to draw the United States into a broader military entanglement in the region.
Javier E

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-trust-in-real-reporting.html

fake news facebook culture crisis informed citizenry reporting social media

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.
  • During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else.
  • I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump.
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  • The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them.
  • This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.”
  • Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself
  • This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained
  • Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms
  • This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen.
  • This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are.
  • the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway.
  • Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces
  • Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and votin
  • Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy
  • the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force
  • Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns
  • Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.
sissij

Let Women Drive, a Prince in Saudi Arabia Urges - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...audi-arabia-women-driving.html

new york times research bias

shared by sissij on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • he couched his views in economic terms, noting that foreign drivers are typically paid 3,800 riyals, or about $1,000, a month to shuttle women around.
  • The driving ban is enforced by Saudi Arabia’s religious police, and it has been the occasional target of protests. Women were allowed to vote and run in local elections last December for the first time.
  • Ending the ban would allow the kingdom to eventually “dispense with” the services of an estimated one million drivers and would stimulate the economy by allowing women to work by driving other women who did not feel comfortable behind the wheel.
  • sissij on 02 Dec 16
     
    I think this article is very interesting because it shows how religion is conflicted with the modern society. I think religion should be able to adapt with the modern society. It shouldn't be misused for personally considerations and discriminations. It is very hard to make clear the line of proper religion and using it as a reason for our own benefit because religion itself is an invented thing. --Sissi (12/2/2016)
maxwellokolo

Trump news conference takes on new significance - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 11 Jan 17
     
    The news conference, Trump's first since winning the election, was already looming as a significant rite of passage for someone who is undergoing a transformation from rabble-rousing candidate to the next American President. But new allegations involving Russia are sure to inject an extra charge.
sissij

Online and Scared - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...online-and-scared.html

new york times social media bias technology

shared by sissij on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • That is to say, a critical mass of our interactions had moved to a realm where we’re all connected but no one’s in charge.
  • And, I would argue, 2016 will be remembered as the year when we fully grasped just how scary that can be — how easy it was for a presidential candidate to tweet out untruths and half-truths faster than anyone could correct them, how cheap it was for Russia to intervene on Trump’s behalf with hacks of Democratic operatives’ computers and how unnerving it was to hear Yahoo’s chief information security officer, Bob Lord, say that his company still had “not been able to identify” how one billion Yahoo accounts and their sensitive user information were hacked in 2013.
  • Facebook — which wants all the readers and advertisers of the mainstream media but not to be saddled with its human editors and fact-checkers — is now taking more seriously its responsibilities as a news purveyor in cyberspace.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • And that begins with teaching them that the internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information, where they need to bring skepticism and critical thinking to everything they read and basic civic decency to everything they write.
  • One assessment required middle schoolers to explain why they might not trust an article on financial planning that was written by a bank executive and sponsored by a bank.
  • Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite to be true.
  • sissij on 12 Jan 17
     
    Internet has always been a big issue since more and more people, especially teenager spend most of their time on. Internet as a social media deliver information faster and wider than any other traditional media. The mode of information spreading is more of that the internet reveals issue and the traditional media such as television follows up and provide more detailed information. However, as internet develops, we also need to develop some rules and restrictions. We underestimate how dangerous internet can be if it is weaponized. However, there is a dilemma. Since internet is popular because of the unlimited freedom people feel online, as the police and authority gets involved in, people would ultimately lose that freedom. The censorship in China is a good example to see how people will respond to setting rules to the internet. There should some sort of balance that we can strive for in the future. --Sissi (1/11/2017)
sandrine_h

Joe Biden's tears show politics doesn't have to be macho | Angelina Chapin | Opinion | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...acy-tears-politics-masculinity

shared by sandrine_h on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Too many men still think a woman who cries is acting hysterical. For some baffling reason, punching a hole in the wall or another person in the face is a more culturally acceptable way to release pain than sobbing into a pillow. And politics is no different. Anger makes you a strong candidate while sadness makes you frail. The result is that many female politicians swallow their emotions in an effort to appear tough.
  • The stereotype that women are overly emotional, hormonal beings who are unfit to lead still exists. Powerful men like Obama and Biden who embrace their feelings on a public stage help to combat the ridiculous political stigma against sensitivity. Every time these political powerhouses become misty-eyed, they send the message that having human feelings doesn’t equal incompetence.
  • By being the kind of men who are unafraid to openly love one another and cry in public, they have sent a message to aspiring female politicians that being human doesn’t come with a penalty.
Javier E

The post-truth world of the Trump administration is scarier than you think - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-b994-f45a208f7a73_story.html

post-truth illogic facts demagogue

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit.
  • “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 on defending that assertion at length
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  • What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.
  • “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” said Lewandowski, who was another ill-advised CNN hire. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
  • two other Trump surrogates echoed this sentiment.
  • Ousted Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, speaking during an election post-mortem at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, blamed journalists for — yes — believing what his candidate said.
  • “Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”
  • but Trump is not a guy at a bar; he was the Republican nominee for president of the United States and will pretty soon be the leader of the free world
  • When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway about the same election-fraud claim discussed above — specifically, whether disseminating misinformation was “presidential”
  • “He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behavior,” Conway said, using mind-bending pseudo-logic
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

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post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture news trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
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  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
Javier E

The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump - The New Yorker - 0 views

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political culture crisis culture trump lies authoritarian American idea dictator

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.
  • The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump.
  • under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is.
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  • He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses
  • To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
  • If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump.
  • we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
  • The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power.
  • The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger.
  • Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis.
  • Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins
  • The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans.
  • The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak.
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