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katherineharron

Trump and his campaign promote dishonestly edited Biden video - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump and his campaign promoted a dishonestly edited video on Saturday that wrongly made it seem as if Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had accidentally endorsed Trump. The clip, which was viewed more than 5.8 million times and retweeted more than 34,000 times as of Sunday morning at 10 AM, showed Biden struggling with a line in his Saturday speech in Kansas City, Missouri, then saying, "Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump."
  • But the clip was edited to cut out the second part of Biden's sentence. What the former vice president actually said was this: "Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It's gotta be a positive campaign." Biden had called for an end to "negative attacks" in his primary contest with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
tongoscar

Martin Luther King and the 'polite' racism of white liberals - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The year was 1965, and the Voting Rights Act had just passed. Many Californians were shocked by the uprising. Gov. Pat Brown maintained that California was “a state where there is no racial discrimination.”ADBut Martin Luther King Jr. had come to Los Angeles numerous times before to join black Angelenos’ struggles against police brutality and school and housing segregation. In an essay three months after the Watts uprising, King called out the disingenuous surprise, knowing firsthand how Californians, New Yorkers and others had brushed off years of local black movements.
  • “As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied,”
  • Presidential Democratic candidates former vice president Joe Biden, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg have presided over policies that perpetuate racial injustice in law enforcement.
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  • In 1964, some of King’s fellow civil rights leaders called on him to denounce a planned “stall-in” by the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights group protesting job discrimination and housing and school segregation.
  • King was familiar with being welcomed by leaders who saw themselves as liberal and anti-racist only to have them react furiously when attention turned to the need for local change.
  • On this King holiday, in this election year, we need to listen to the King who called out the hypocrisy of liberal allies who praised the struggle in the South while decrying disruptive black activism at home;
tongoscar

As Protests in South America Surged, So Did Russian Trolls on Twitter, U.S. Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In Chile, nearly 10 percent of all tweets supporting protests in late October originated with Twitter accounts that had a high certainty of being linked to Russia.In Bolivia, immediately after President Evo Morales resigned on Nov. 10, the number of tweets associated with those type of accounts spiked to more than 1,000 a day, up from fewer than five.And in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Chile over one 30-day period, Russia-linked accounts posted strikingly similar messages within 90 minutes of one another.
  • The department routinely monitors Twitter traffic worldwide with an eye toward malign activities, like the proliferation of fake pages and user accounts or content that targets the public with divisive messages.
  • “We are noting a thumb on the scales,” said Kevin O’Reilly, the deputy assistant secretary of state overseeing issues in the Western Hemisphere. “It has made the normal dispute resolutions of a democratic society more contentious and more difficult.”
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  • The Russian effort in South America — the details of which have not been previously reported — appears aimed at stirring dissent in states that have demanded the resignation of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, senior diplomats say.
  • The unrest in Latin America this fall cannot be attributed to any single factor, and it is unclear how effective the Russia-linked influence campaign on Twitter was.
manhefnawi

Reaganomics Vs. Obamanomics: Fallacies Offered By The Left - 1 views

  • From watching and participating in debates over the years regarding Reaganomics, patterns of logical fallacies and factual errors repeatedly arise among critics on the Left.  As the troublesome facts demonstrating the failures of Obamanomics accumulate, we find that almost religiously minded supporters of President Barack Obama can't deal with those facts, and exhibit analogous logical fallacies.
  • Some critics falsely argue that Reagan increased payroll taxes which are paid much more by lower and moderate income workers.  The payroll tax rate increases of the 1980s were adopted under President Carter and the Democratic Congress in 1977.  The Greenspan Commission Social Security rescue plan adopted in 1983 only advanced a couple of these already scheduled payroll tax rate increases by a year or two.  But the ultimate plan for payroll taxes is to phase them out entirely in favor of lower cost personal accounts to finance the benefits currently financed by those taxes, as discussed in previous columns in this space.
tongoscar

Donald Trump is the moderate candidate in the 2020 presidential election - Washington Times - 0 views

  • Washington has a way of capturing presidents more than they conquer its bureaucracy — in current parlance, President Trump has become an alligator more than he has drained the swamp.
  • If one of the terribly serious six lands in the Oval Office, don’t look for that to change. With moderate revisions, Nancy Pelosi endorsed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. None of the Democratic aspirants could end the festering confrontation with China without winning fundamental reforms in its socialist market economy, which the Chinese Communist Party simply won’t tolerate, or facing a revolt within their own party in Congress.
  • The economy entered 2020 in reasonably good shape, but thanks to Boeing’s problems and the coronavirus lockdown of China we will be lucky to get 2 GDP percent growth this year. A cooling economy means the improvements in wages and wealth of lower income Americans Mr. Trump bragged about in his State of the Union address will diminish.
sanderk

1.5 degrees Celsius: the sad truth about our boldest climate change target - Vox - 0 views

  • the countries participating in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to a common target: to hold the rise in global average temperature “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The lower end of that range, 1.5˚C, has become a cause célèbre among climate activists.
  • If we had peaked and begun steadily reducing emissions 20 years ago, the necessary pace of reductions would have been around 3 percent a year, which is ... well, “realistic” is too strong — it still would have required rapid, coordinated action of a kind never seen before in human history — but it was at least possible to envision.
  • it is not the job of those of us in the business of observation and analysis to make the public feel or do things. That’s what activists do.
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  • Now, to hit 1.5˚C, emissions would need to fall off a cliff, falling by 15 percent a year every year, starting in 2020, until they hit net zero.
  • Emissions have never fallen at 15 percent annually anywhere, much less everywhere. And what earthly reason do we have to believe that emissions will start plunging this year? Look around! The democratic world is in the grips of a populist authoritarian backlash that shows no sign of resolving itself any time soon
  • In short, there is no “safe” level of global warming
  • All of those impacts become much worse at 2˚C. (The World Resources Institute has a handy chart; see also this graphic from Carbon Brief.) Severe heat events will become 2.6 times worse, plant and vertebrate species loss 2 times worse, insect species loss 3 times worse, and decline in marine fisheries 2 times worse. Rather than 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs dying, 99 percent will die. Many vulnerable and low-lying areas will become uninhabitable and refugee flows will radically increase. And so on. At 2˚C, climate change will be devastating for large swathes of the globe.
  • We’ve waited too long. Practically speaking, we are heading past 1.5˚C as we speak and probably past 2˚C as well.
  • To really grapple with climate change, we have to understand it, and more than that, take it on board emotionally
  • Given the scale of the challenge and the compressed time to act, there is effectively no practical danger of anyone, at any level, doing too much or acting too quickly.
  • Right now, much of Australia is on fire — half a billion animals have likely died since September — and it is barely breaking the news cycle in the US
  • I can’t help but think that the first step in defending and expanding that empathy is reckoning squarely with how much damage we’ve already done and are likely to do, working through the guilt and grief, and resolving to minimize the suffering to come.
katherineharron

Elijah Cummings knew how to walk the tightrope of racial politics - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Perhaps no one so visibly crystallized the dissonance between black Americans and their country than Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who died last Thursday and whose funeral service, at which the Clintons and former President Barack Obama will deliver remarks, is on Friday.
  • "In the Congress, Elijah was considered a north star," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled. "He was a leader of towering character and integrity. He lived the American dream." Pelosi also underscored that Cummings "spoke with unsurpassed clarity and moral integrity" -- that "everyone wanted to hear what Elijah had to say."
  • "Every time we spoke of selecting an individual who can rise to the occasion to be in debate with him, we would look for somebody who was strong, and every time someone was selected, they'd come back to be a very best friend of Elijah Cummings," House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California said.
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  • And yet, those accounts, while surely sincere, are also so simplistically heartwarming that they're misleading -- bowing to America's impulse to see certain black lives as a balm for the bruises of the political moment.
  • Consider the congressman's relationship with President Donald Trump. In March 2017, when the administration was only a few months old, Cummings met with Trump in the Oval Office. The two reportedly spoke openly about race, with the former explaining how the latter's comments about black communities, which he had characterized as poverty-addled hellscapes, were "insulting" and that "probably nobody (had) ever told (him) that."
  • Rather than retreat into defensiveness, Trump replied: "You're right -- nobody has ever told me that."
  • "To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically," Cottom explained. "It is to anticipate white people's emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul."
katherineharron

Trump's language is his tell on Syria -- Meanwhile in America - CNN - 0 views

  • Ever since Donald Trump became president, critics have worried that his rudimentary knowledge of global affairs, erratic decisions and politicized foreign policy would get people killed. It's happening now. "You are leaving us to be slaughtered," Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi, commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces told a senior US official last week. Trump's abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria has triggered a humanitarian crisis, and as Turkey moves in, there are reports of executions and fears that ISIS members could escape in the chaos.
  • The President is trading on a "bring the troops home" mentality that often follows US military entanglements overseas. It's a politically palatable position because the people dying as a result of his decisions are not American. His language is the tell here: He's using stereotypes about war-mongering Middle Easterners to undermine the idea that the Kurds could be real allies deserving of loyalty -- despite the successful, years-long US-Kurdish alliance against ISIS and before that in Iraq.
  • 'They are coming and they will take everything. May God end America'
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  • This was the despairing prediction of a Kurdish man trying to save his family from the Turkish advance, speaking to CNN's Nick Paton Walsh inside Syria.
  • Over the weekend, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan summed up Trump's national security leadership like this: "Foreign-policy decisions in this administration look like the ball in a pinball machine in some garish arcade with flashing lights and some frantic guy pushing the levers ping ping ping and thinking he's winning."
  • Finally, some good news. China and the United States seem to have stepped back from the brink with a trade war truce.
katherineharron

Why Joe Biden will almost certainly pick a black woman as VP - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • It now seems a near-certainty that he will (and should) name a black woman as his vice presidential running mate.
  • Floyd's death has sparked (mostly) peaceful protests around the country, not just about police brutality but also about the deep and abiding racial inequalities present in American society.
  • the former vice president said
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  • "you ain't black" if you were undecided on who to vote for in 2020.
  • Biden helped to write the 1994 crime bill, a law that has been widely panned -- particularly by members of the black community -- for its impact on levels of incarceration, among other reverberations.
  • Biden owes his status as the presumptive presidential nominee almost entirely to black voters -- particularly those in South Carolina. Biden's campaign was faltering badly -- he had finished 4th in Iowa, 5th in New Hampshire and 2nd in Nevada -- prior to the February 29 Palmetto State primary. According to exit polling, black voters made up a majority (56%) of the South Carolina primary electorate and went overwhelmingly (61%) for Biden. His victory in the state propelled him to a series of wins on Super Tuesday -- just three days later -- and, at that point, the nomination was his.
  • It will be a plus to have an African American woman. It will be a plus to have a Latino. It will be a plus to have a woman."
  • non-college educated voters who went with Trump, had Clinton been able to drive black turnout to the level it was during Obama's two victories, she almost certainly would have won.
  • Now, simply putting a person of color on the ticket doesn't mean that you win the votes of black people or ensure they turn out in large numbers. But politics at the presidential level is often about symbolism. And who Biden picks as his vice president will be his best chance to reveal how he views his party, the country and the world -- and what he prioritizes amongst the many, many issues facing the US at the moment.
  • And lucky for Biden, he has a number of African American women who would make excellent choices
  • Even before Biden's "you ain't black" gaffe and the uprising following George Floyd's murder, California Sen. Kamala Harris (age 55), who was both the first African American and Indian American elected to the Senate from California, was at the top of my VP rankings. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (50 years old) and Florida Rep. Val Demings (63 years old) were in the Top 6. Now? It's hard to see three more people more likely to be the pick. (Stay tuned for my new rankings on Thursday!)
Javier E

No, Trump's sister did not publicly back him. He was duped by a fake account. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • That article, on the website of a conservative talk-radio host named Wayne Dupree, quoted a post from a Twitter account named “Betty Trump” that used a photo of Ms. Trump Grau as its profile picture.
  • “This election inspired me to break my silence and speak out on behalf of my family,” the account said in a post on Wednesday. “My brother Don won this election and will fight this to the very end. We’ve always been a family of fighters.”
  • Had the article’s author looked more closely, though, she would have noticed some suspicious details about the account. It was a day old. The photos it used of Ms. Trump Grau were taken from Getty Images and past news articles about her. And since that first post, the account had tweeted increasingly bizarre messages, sharply criticizing Democrats, journalists and Republicans who had questioned the false claim that Mr. Trump was re-elected.
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  • The bizarre episode illustrates how easily misinformation spreads online, often with the help of the president himself. Right-wing websites that seek to support the president’s baseless claims, or simply attract clicks so they can sell more ads, often eschew the traditional principles of journalism, such as simple fact-checking. And the social media companies aid the cycle by making it simple to share misinformation, including via fake accounts, and by training their algorithms to promote material that attracts more attention, as sensational and divisive posts often do.
katherineharron

Lawmakers around the nation are proposing bills for -- and against -- vaccinations - CNN - 0 views

  • At a time when almost everything is politicized, vaccination has planted itself squarely on the national stage.
  • On one side of the debate are parents who are rebelling against settled science and calling on states to broaden vaccine exemptions. They cite their faith or believe vaccines pose danger to their children, even though no major religion opposes them and claims of vaccines' link to autism has been long debunked.
  • "I won't be surprised if we see many pro-vaccine bills this year," said Dr. Sean O'Leary, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. "The measles outbreaks were really a wake-up call, showing legislators that maintaining high vaccination rates is not just a theoretical goal."
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  • An overwhelming majority of American adults (88%) say the benefits of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine outweigh the risks, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.And last year, 14 states proposed eliminating religious exemptions for vaccines -- a marked increase from years past, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
  • "When you choose not to vaccinate, you're putting your child at risk of disease, but you're also putting other people at risk," O'Leary said.
  • "We need to have the ability in our country, if we find a commercial pharmaceutical product is not as safe and effective as we're being told it is, we should have the right to make informed consent to use the product," she said.
  • "When vaccination rates fall, we see disease, and people suffer. Protecting children in schools is a worthy goal of government, regardless of political affiliation," he said. "There's really no good reason to exempt your child from vaccination -- only medical."
  • "Science is really on the side of vaccinations," said O'Leary, who is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "They're one of the best public health interventions in history in terms of the numbers of lives saved. The benefits far outweigh the risk."
  • New York, California and Washington state took action after massive measles outbreaks in 2019, a year that saw the highest reported measles cases since the disease was declared eliminated nationwide in 2000.
  • Many of the religious exemption laws are not new. Several states first passed them in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to an influx of lobbyists from the Christian Science Church, which doesn't ban members from using vaccines but encourages healing through prayer.
  • Supporters of vaccine exemptions see laws like those passed in New York and Washington as "fundamentally a threat to their ability to make informed consent about vaccinations," said Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center.
  • Proponents on both sides of the debate have found allies across the political spectrum. Republican lawmakers have sponsored stricter bills, and Democratic governors have drawn the line at mandating vaccines.
  • "It's a tough balance, but you're using a public -- and private -- resource in conjunction with lots of other kids," Harris told CNN. "There are other venues where they can be educated, they can still have their freedom, but they're not going into a public school and spread their disease."
katherineharron

List: Two more members of Congress test positive for Covid-19 - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina and Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania are the latest members of Congress to test positive for Covid-19, their offices announced Friday.
  • In addition, more than two dozen lawmakers have also self-quarantined or taken other steps to isolate themselves as a precaution after interacting either directly or potentially with an infected individual.
katherineharron

Postal service forced to keep working despite shortages of cash and protection - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • United States Postal Service workers, who are still delivering and sorting mail at distribution centers around the country even as millions of Americans telecommute, are worried that they may not have the protection -- or even the funding -- they will need to keep delivering mail for months longer.
  • Reports have popped up across the country where postal workers say they don't have hand sanitizer, gloves or masks, and are being told to work despite illnesses and are looking to community donations to address supply shortfalls.
  • Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said postal workers in her region have said they don't have hand sanitizer or materials needed to keep post offices disinfected.
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  • For years, USPS has struggled to stay afloat with the emergence of technology threatening their bottom line, but coronavirus has further strained their financial situation as mail volume has declined. The Postal Service has warned that it could be insolvent by June, the House Oversight Committee said this week.
  • "The Postal Service remains concerned that this measure will be insufficient to enable the Postal Service to withstand the significant downturn in our business that could directly result from the pandemic," said USPS spokesman David Partenheimer. "Under a worst case scenario, such downturn could result in the Postal Service having insufficient liquidity to continue operations."
Javier E

What If Fox News Viewers Watched CNN Instead? - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today.
  • the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?
  • Comparing markets that had received Fox to those where it was not yet available, the study concluded that the presence of Fox News was good for a Republican gain of 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It was a decidedly modest effect — but large enough to sway that super-close election.
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  • Only committed conservatives, the theory goes, would bother to tune in to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, so what difference could it make what they say?
  • Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead.
  • Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.
  • The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.
  • Switchers were five percentage points more likely to believe that people suffer from long Covid, for example, and six points more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the U.S. of controlling the virus.
  • They were seven points more likely to support voting by mail. And they were 10 points less likely to believe that supporters of then-candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers get shot, 11 points less likely to say it’s more important for the president to focus on containing violent protesters than on the coronavirus, and 13 points less likely to agree that if Biden were elected, “we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”
  • These are meaningful differences, even if the group that switched to CNN remained very right-wing in their view of the American political landscape.
  • these are reasonably large changes from a one-month experiment. And they occurred despite the long-term effort of then-President Donald Trump to discredit CNN and other mainstream media outlets.
  • one of the things that switchers changed their minds about was Fox News itself: They became more skeptical that Fox would cover a story that reflected poorly on Trump, even if it were true.
  • This mode of political influence, where partisan media can simply ignore stories that are inconvenient, is a potentially powerful challenge to democratic accountability.
  • It’s also probably not symmetrical. Even media outlets that skew liberal in their coverage generally don’t shy away from covering the Covid death toll or the rise in inflation.
  • one lesson they can take from this experiment is that nobody is impossible to reach.
  • Broockman and Kalla’s research indicates that information flows at the margin really do matter. Any opportunity to present new facts to people, and new arguments, is valuable.
Javier E

Opinion | Barack Obama's smart way to change the disinformation debate - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The former president spoke at Stanford University on April 21 to lay out his vision for fighting disinformation on the Internet. His focus on the subject is fitting; the dusk of his administration marked a turning point from techno-optimism to pessimism after election interference revealed how easily malicious actors could exploit the free flow of information.
  • His diagnosis is on target. The Internet has given us access to more people, more opportunities and more knowledge
  • This has helped activists drum up attention for overlooked causes. It has also enabled the nation’s adversaries to play on our preexisting prejudices and divisions to sow discord
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  • Mr. Obama starts where most lawmakers are stuck: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives platforms immunity from legal liability for most third-party posts. He suggested a “higher standard of care” for ads than for so-called organic content that everyday users post. This would strike a sensible balance between eviscerating Section 230, making sites accountable for everything they host, and doing nothing.
  • On top of that, “an instant, 24/7 global information stream,” from which audiences can pick and choose material that confirms their biases, has deepened the social divides that bad actors seek to exploit.
  • Mr. Obama identified another problem with the Section 230 talk: homing in on what material platforms do and don’t take down risks missing how the “very design” of these sites privileges polarizing, inflammatory posts.
  • With this, Mr. Obama adds something vital to the mainstream debate over social media regulation, shifting attention away from a debate about whack-a-mole content removal and toward the sites’ underlying structures. His specific suggestions, while fuzzy, also have promise — from slowing down viral material to imposing transparency obligations that would subject social media companies’ algorithms to scrutiny from researchers and regulators.
  • Mr. Obama calls this “democratic oversight.” But the material companies reveal could be highly technical. Ideally, it would get translated into layman’s terms so that everyday people, too, can understand how decisions so significant in their daily lives and the life of the country are made.
peterconnelly

Criticising the government isn't journalistic bias - it goes with the job - New Statesman - 0 views

  • Instead, with every passing day, the Boris Johnson government, operating within a moral vacuum, chips away further at Britain’s democratic foundations while much of the media, rather than calling foul, goes along with the game and thus normalises – consciously or not – the gradual erosion of fundamental ethical and constitutional norms in the UK – an erosion that may well end in their outright destruction.
  • Those shouting the loudest were British journalists, such as Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times, who accused me of being biased. He went on to prove my point by declaring: “I don’t know a single British journalist who would tweet something like this.”
  • Secondly – and far more absurdly – many of those who joined in seemed to have fundamentally misunderstood my role as a foreign correspondent: it is literally my job to report on Britain.
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  • Commenting on one country does not prevent me from commenting on another; the two are not mutually exclusive.
  • Also, there’s the accusation of bias. When Shipman says that his reporting is wholly impartial because he only goes on information he gets from government sources and is not subject to any pressure from his editor to weight his copy, I understand that is how he works.
  • This false dichotomy between supposedly objective reporting and analysis is intellectually problematic at best: conflating analysis and bias is, in fact, dangerous – especially in times like these, where, to get anywhere near the truth, journalists in Britain have to hack their way through the thicket of lies and obfuscations emanating from the government itself.
  • by criticising the government as a correspondent for a public-service broadcaster (ARD in Germany), I had somehow failed to maintain the necessary “impartiality”.
  • Now, of course, this kind of approach is easier to apply in a podcast than in traditional media work, but what we can take from it is that when you are dealing with an intrinsically dishonest government, the mere reporting of facts is nowhere near adequate anymore. Most journalists have been trained to see themselves as coming from nowhere, but to cover a populist leader and system, they have to go a step further: positioning themselves clearly and critically outside of the system, and reflect on the methods of the populist rather than simply repeating his lines.
peterconnelly

Trump aide Peter Navarro indicted for contempt of Jan. 6 Capitol probe - 0 views

  • Trump White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was arrested at an airport Friday on a federal indictment charging him with two counts of contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
  • The House of Representatives in April voted to ask the U.S. Justice Department to criminally prosecute Navarro and Dan Scavino, another former Trump aide, for failing to comply with their subpoenas.
  • During the proceeding, he railed against prosecutors for alleging colluding with a “partisan Congress” and the White House of Democratic President Joe Biden.
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  • “Who are these people? This is not America,” Navarro said. “I was a distinguished public servant for four years.”
  • A Feb. 9 letter to Navarro from the House committee issued with the subpoena said the panel had reason to believe he had information relevant to the investigation in the riot and invasion of the Capitol, which disrupted for hours the certification by a joint session of Congress of the election of Biden.
  • Navarro called the circumstances of that arrest an example of “prosecutorial misconduct.”
  • Navarro argues in his suit that the committee was improperly created and that its subpoenas, as a result, are unenforceable.
  • Navarro is next due to appear in court on June 17.
peterconnelly

German Chancellor accused of comparing climate activists to Nazis - CNN - 0 views

  • German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was accused Monday of comparing climate activists to Nazis, in allegations that his spokesperson said were "completely absurd."
  • "I'll be honest: These black-clad displays at various events by the same people over and over again remind me of a time that is, thank God, long gone by," he said in an exchange captured on camera.
  • Scholz was speaking about the phase-out of coal-fired power generation and resulting jobs losses in open cast mining when he was interrupted.
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  • Prominent German Climate scientist Friederike Otto commented that "Scholz 'forgets' our worst history, dismisses every generation that comes after him as irrelevant & the audience just applauds."
  • "Where does one begin? In just one half-sentence, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic relativizes the Nazi regime and, in a paradoxical way, also the climate crisis," she wrote on Twitter. "He stylizes climate protection as an ideology with parallels to the Nazi regime. In 2022. Jesus. This is such a scandal."
  • "I have also been to events where five people sat dressed in the same way, each had a well-rehearsed stance, and then they do it again every time," he said. "And that's why I think that is not a discussion, that is not participation in a discussion, but an attempt to manipulate events for one's own purposes. One should not do this."
  • The chancellor leads a three-party coalition with partners the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats, and their pledge to improve climate change action was central to their campaign.
peterconnelly

Covid Vaccine Misinformation Still Fuels Fears Surrounding Pregnancy, a New Study Finds. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A steady bombardment of coronavirus misinformation during the pandemic has left nearly one-third of American women who are pregnant, or who plan to become pregnant, believing at least one falsehood about coronavirus vaccinations and pregnancy, according to a new study. A higher share were unsure whether to believe the myths.
  • “Pregnancy is a time where a lot of women are seeking information on a variety of pregnancy-related topics, but many pregnancy forums are filled with misinformation,” said Tara Kirk Sell
  • The misinformation is so pervasive that it has even sown doubts in segments of the population that generally believe in the coronavirus vaccines’ safety for adults, like Democratic voters and people who have been fully vaccinated.
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  • “There are certain things that increase perception of risks,” Dr. Sell said. “One of these is risks to future generations. So rumors related to pregnancy are particularly gripping.
  • “We know pregnant individuals are at an increased risk when it comes to Covid-19, but they absolutely should not and do not have to die from it,” said Dr. Christopher Zahn
  • 60 percent believed that pregnant women should not get the vaccine, or were unsure if this was true;
  • One reason misinformation about the vaccines and pregnancy may have gained so much traction, experts say, is that the earliest clinical trials of the coronavirus vaccines excluded pregnant women. The lack of trial data led the C.D.C. and World Health Organization to initially give different recommendations to pregnant women, though neither explicitly forbade, nor encouraged, immunizing pregnant women. Other health organizations chose to wait for more safety data from later trials before making an official recommendation for pregnant women to get vaccinated.
  • “At the root of this problem is trust, or really, it’s a lack of trust,” Dr. Sell said.
peterconnelly

How Some States Are Combating Election Misinformation Ahead of Midterms - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway.
  • the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation.
  • With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-ri
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  • ght social networks like Gettr and Rumble, and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information.
  • These states, most of them under Democratic control, have been acting as voter confidence in election integrity has plummeted.
  • In an ABC/Ipsos poll from January, only 20 percent of respondents said they were “very confident” in the integrity of the election system and 39 percent said they felt “somewhat confident.”
  • Some conservatives and civil rights groups are almost certain to complain that the efforts to limit misinformation could restrict free speech.
  • “State and local governments are well situated to reduce harms from dis- and misinformation by providing timely, accurate and trustworthy information,” said Rachel Goodman
  • “Facts still exist, and lies are being used to chip away at our fundamental freedoms,” Ms. Griswold said.
  • Officials said they would prefer candidates fluent in both English and Spanish, to address the spread of misinformation in both languages. The officer would track down viral misinformation posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and look for emerging narratives and memes, especially on fringe social media platforms and the dark web.
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