Two Addendums To Ben Wittes’ “How to Read an Investigation”

/17 Comments/in , , /by

It’s September 4, 2017. I’m going to say something nice about Ben Wittes.

His post, How to Read a News Story About an Investigation: Eight Tips on Who Is Saying What, is a useful primer for how to read all these stories about the investigations into the Russian hacks. As someone who covered the last major Presidential investigation (the CIA Leak Investigation) far more closely than Ben, in large point because the sourcing on those stories was so badly abused, I’ve been thinking about a similar post on how to cover such cases (which would include the advice “don’t do tick tick tick boom tweets because they turn our legal system into a game”). I’d include much of what he wrote here. I have slightly to significantly less faith in the sourcing rigor of journalists than Ben does — a skepticism that served me well even before the time we learned Pulitzer prize winner Judy Miller agreed to refer to the Vice President’s Chief of Staff as a “former Congressional staffer” to hide that leaked classified information (possibly including Plame’s identity) came from the vicinity of PapaDick. But in general this is a useful start.

I’d two more general rules, though. First, while Ben implicitly suggests you need to consider the beat of the journalists in question in this passage, I’d make it an explicit rule. Consider the beat of the journalist writing the story.

The story is attributed “to interviews with a dozen administration officials and others briefed on the matter.” This is a show of strength upfront on the part of reporters Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman (who, as an antecedent matter, both have a great deal of credibility with me). They are signaling that their sourcing is broad and that at least some of it comes from within the executive branch (“administration officials”). Applying Rule No. 5, note that this wording is consistent both with sources attached to the investigation and with sources in the White House or in the Justice Department. Note also that Haberman is a White House reporter famously well-sourced with the group of people immediately around President Trump.

The sources for the triumvirate behind a long string of big WaPo Russian stories — Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Adam Entous — are going be different than the sources for the more recent triumvirate leading the pack on Russia stories — Carol Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman, and it makes a difference on the impartiality of the sources.

In addition, while Ben describes how much lawyers who aren’t prosecutors like to leak (prosecution teams do leak, but very very very carefully), he doesn’t say something else. Leaking to the press is a very good way for co-conspirators to communicate with each other, without risking obstruction charges for doing so. So when you’re trying to understand why a likely legal source is leaking something, it’s worth considering what information that passes on to co-conspirators. For example, such leaks are a good way to compare notes on a false story. Or, in the case of dumb Don Jr who released the emails behind the June 9 meeting, it’s a way to ensure that your co-conspirators know what evidence that might previously have been hidden law enforcement may be looking at. So it’s not just a good idea to remember that lawyers leak a lot (and if those lawyers’ clients just appeared before the grand jury, their information about questions raised would only be second-hand). It’s a good idea to consider what information is not actually intended for you, the dear reader, but rather is intended for co-conspirators, up to and including the pardoner-in-chief.

Can’t Stop/Won’t Stop: CNN Has A New Racist Bigot Apologist

/21 Comments/in , , , /by

You may remember that CNN recently terminated their go to racist bigot Trumpian apologist asshole, Jeffrey Lord.

As Politico succinctly put it:

CNN on Thursday fired contributor and staunch Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord after he tweeted a Nazi salute.

Well, yes. That is literally the least you could say about Jeff Lord’s “contributions” to CNN. He was, from the start, an unnecessary, and in the face of competent journalism and reportage, complete plant by Jeff Zucker into the CNN family and reportage to do NOTHING but assuage the idiot extremist right wing racist assholes who were watching FoxNews to start with. In short it was insane and counterproductive programming to cater to ignorant racist people that hated, and were not watching, CNN to start with.

The presence of Jeff Lord on CNN was an affront on common intelligence, good journalism and root morality. But there he was. Until Lord actually displayed his inner Trumpian Nazism that was clear under the veneer from moment one, and was the exact reason Zucker and CNN hired and paid the jerk to start with. Jeff Lord was exactly who Zucker and CNN bought and paid for from moment one. He was exactly what they cravenly wanted.

So, did Jeff Zucker, and the worthy geniuses at CNN, learn any lessons by having promoted a clear cut immoral asshole racist Nazi like Lord?

Nope. They have simply found and cultivated a new one.

Today’s version (and seen on CNN!) is Trumpalo Michael Caputo, who had these gems to say on CNN’s The State of the Union show today:

“Our Department of Justice under Obama was the most political Department of Justice in modern times”

Well Mike, that is not quite right. In fact, that would have been the DOJ under George Bush, who your boy Trump is making look good at warp speed. Here is thanks to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse back in 2007, is a graph of political appointee communication of the Clinton White House with the Department of Justice:

Here is, again from Senator Whitehouse, an identical chart of the contacts of the contacts from the Bush/Cheney White House:

Ooof, if you want to talk about root politicization of the DOJ, that is pretty telling, even without going into the Monica Goodling/Karl Rove nonsense.

Caputo goes on to belligerently defend Trump

“…against all this talk of racism”

So, eh, no. For Caputo, in the face of what Trump is doing vis a vis the DOJ, whether firing the Director of the FBI for not covering his ass or asking his Attorney General to kill an investigation of his largest racist supporter Arpaio, is just another hired liar.

But having such an immoral liar to balance actual truth and fair reportage with absolute flat earth level racism horse manure from Trumpland, is what Jeff Zucker and CNN demands. They simply cannot fathom presenting the former without salting it with the latter.

Ted Turner must be beside himself somewhere in Montana. The demand of media, in this case CNN, to “both sides” even in the face of grossly immoral and unconscionable racism and bigotry, is insane. It needs to stop. There is no need to put on an apologist like Michael Caputo just to say you did so. It added nothing, but support for rank ignorance and bigotry. That is not what America’s media should be about.

How the “Fake News” Panic Fed Breitbart

/7 Comments/in , /by

In just about every piece I wrote on “fake news” in the last year, I argued that the most influential piece of fake news of the campaign came not from the Russians, but instead from Fox News, in the form of Bret Baier’s early November “scoop” that Hillary Clinton would soon be indicted.

I was partly wrong about that claim. But substantially correct.

That’s the conclusion drawn by a report released by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center last week. The report showed that the key dynamic behind Trump’s win came from the asymmetric polarization of our media sphere, embodied most dramatically in the way that Breitbart not only created a bubble for conservatives, but affected the overall agenda of the press, particularly with immigration (a conclusion that is all the more important given Steve Bannon’s return to Breitbart just as white supremacist protests gather in intensity).

So I was correct that the most important fake news was coming from right wing sites. I just pointed to Fox News, instead of the increasingly dominant Breitbart (notably, while Baier retracted his indictment claim, Breitbart didn’t stop magnifying it).

Here’s what the report had to say about the “fake news” that many liberals instead focused on.

Our data suggest that the “fake news” framing of what happened in the 2016 campaign, which received much post-election attention, is a distraction. Moreover, it appears to reinforce and buy into a major theme of the Trump campaign: that news cannot be trusted. The wave of attention to fake news is grounded in a real phenomenon, but at least in the 2016 election it seems to have played a relatively small role in the overall scheme of things. We do indeed find stories in our data set that come from sites, like Ending the Fed, intended as political clickbait to make a profit from Facebook, often with no real interest in the political outcome. But while individual stories may have succeeded in getting attention, these stories are usually of tertiary significance. In a scan of the 100 most shared stories in our Twitter and Facebook sets, the most widely shared fake news stories (in this sense of profit-driven Facebook clickbait) were ranked 66th and 55th by Twitter and Facebook shares, respectively, and on both Twitter and Facebook only two of the top 100 stories were from such sites. Out of two million stories, that may seem significant, but in the scheme of an election, it seems more likely to have yielded returns to its propagators than to have actually swayed opinions in significant measure. When we look at our data week by week, prominent fake news stories of this “Macedonian” type are rare and were almost never among the most significant 10 or 20 stories of the week, much less the election as a whole. Disinformation and propaganda from dedicated partisan sites on both sides of the political divide played a much greater role in the election. It was more rampant, though, on the right than on the left, as it took root in the dominant partisan media on the right, including Breitbart, Daily Caller, and Fox News. Moreover, the most successful examples of these political clickbait stories are enmeshed in a network of sites that have already created, circulated, and validated a set of narrative lines and tropes familiar within their network. The clickbait sites merely repackage and retransmit these already widely shared stories. We document this dynamic for one of the most successful such political clickbait stories, published by Ending the Fed, in the last chapter of this report, and we put it in the context of the much more important role played by Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Caller in reorienting the public conversation after the Democratic convention around the asserted improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation.

Our observations suggest that fixing the American public sphere may be much harder than we would like. One feature of the more widely circulated explanations of our “post-truth” moment—fake news sites seeking Facebook advertising, Russia engaging in a propaganda war, or information overload leading confused voters to fail to distinguish facts from false or misleading reporting—is that these are clearly inconsistent with democratic values, and the need for interventions to respond to them is more or less indisputable. If profit-driven fake news is the problem, solutions like urging Facebook or Google to use technical mechanisms to identify fake news sites and silence them by denying them advertising revenue or downgrading the visibility of their sites seem, on their face, not to conflict with any democratic values. Similarly, if a foreign power is seeking to influence our democratic process by propagandistic means, then having the intelligence community determine how this is being done and stop it is normatively unproblematic. If readers are simply confused, then developing tools that will feed them fact-checking metrics while they select and read stories might help. These approaches may contribute to solving the disorientation in the public sphere, but our observations suggest that they will be working on the margins of the core challenge.

As the report notes, it would be easy if our news got poisoned chiefly by Russia or Macedonian teenagers, because that would be far easier to deal with than the fact that First Amendment protected free speech instead skewed our political debate so badly as to elect Trump. But addressing Russian propaganda or Facebook algorithms will still leave the underlying structure of a dangerously powerful and unhinged right wing noise machine intact.

Which makes “fake news,” like potential poll tampering even as state after state suppresses the vote of likely Democratic voters, another area where screaming about Russian influence distracts from the more proximate threat.

Or perhaps the focus on “fake news” is even worse. As the Berkman report notes, when rational observers spend inordinate time suggesting that fake news dominated the election when in fact sensational far right news did, it only normalizes the far right (and Trump) claims that the news is fake. Not to mention the way labeling further left, but totally legitimate, outlets as fake news normalized coverage even further to the right than the asymmetric environment already was.

Fake news is a problem — as is the increasing collapse in confidence in US ideology generally. But it’s not a bigger problem than Breitbart. And as Bannon returns to his natural lair, the left needs to turn its attention to the far harder, but far more important, challenge of Breitbart.

The “Liberal” NY Times Focuses on the Next Disastrous GOP Daddy

/12 Comments/in , , , , , , /by

It is never enough for the “liberal” media. Despite how the “liberal media” gets relentlessly dumped on and marginalized by the right wing nut machine, they are ALWAYS there to hand out some candy to the nutters.

Here are the estimable Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in the Only Bunk That’s Fits To Print Gray Lady:

WASHINGTON — Senators Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse have already been to Iowa this year, Gov. John Kasich is eyeing a return visit to New Hampshire, and Mike Pence’s schedule is so full of political events that Republicans joke that he is acting more like a second-term vice president hoping to clear the field than a No. 2 sworn in a little over six months ago.

Well, crikey, good that the paper of record is covering this. What else they got?

It may get worse, said Jay Bergman, an Illinois petroleum executive and a leading Republican donor. Grievous setbacks in the midterm elections of 2018 could bolster challengers in the party.

“If the Republicans have lost a lot of seats in the Congress and they blame Trump for it, then there are going to be people who emerge who are political opportunists,” Mr. Bergman said.

Well, sorry I asked, turned out it was some entitled crap from a “petroleum executive”. Great call guys!

Swell. Excellent follow up to all those “Ignorant average Trump voters still ignorantly averagely love Trump” reports that are rampant in the beloved balanced media.

Today’s GOP, fronted by Trump and his ilk, is NOT an aberration, but rather the culmination of where the Republican party has been headed for decades, since at least Reagan’s bigoted opening salvo in Philadelphia Mississippi. It is the party of nationalism, racism, bigotry, scientific ignorance and revanchism.

But, hey, never underestimate the ability of the national media to keep on singing like they don’t know their actions helped put this country in the lurch it is in (Her Emails!!). And that their continued refusal to unequivocally call out the current President for the blithering dangerous loon he is, may lead to making the lurch far worse.

The answer to America’s ills do NOT come from the discredited daddies in the GOP, whether older like Mike Pence and John Kasich, or younger like Ben Sasse. We have seen this movie before, and it sucks in a very disastrous way.

The Banality Of Evil Access Journalism

/33 Comments/in , , , /by

A tweet from a talented, but maybe Stockholmed, journalist favorite of Mr. Trump:

This reporter is old enough and smart enough to know and understand exactly what Rudy and Trump are, but still evinces this blithe acceptance bullshit?

Please stop, yer killing me. With every passing day, the initial criticisms as to the lameness of Haberman, Baker and Schmidt’s on and off duality of record “interview” of Trump look smarter. Greg Sargent was early with this:

President Trump’s extended, rambling new interview with the New York Times provides perhaps the clearest picture yet of his conviction that he is above the law — a conviction, crucially, that appears to be deeply felt on an instinctual level — and of his total lack of any clear conception of the basic obligations to the public he assumed upon taking office.

There are numerous worrisome moments in this interview, from his incoherence on the health-care debate (“preexisting conditions are a tough deal”) to his odd asides about history (Napoleon “didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death”).

But, frankly, the entire tenor and credulity of the interviewers – and the interview – as a whole is simply beyond belief. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen hit on the latter in a very cogent tweetstorm, as to the interview itself.

But I have to ask the same questions about the journalists conducting this interview. There were a lot of knee jerk defenses, mostly by other journalists, of the manner in which the interview was conducted sans followup questions and factual corrections of Trump’s blatant and rampant absurdity and lying, early on Twitter. The thin skinned “interviewers” of course blanched and professed how much they were just “doing their job”.

At what point does it become journalists’ “job” to stand up for truth, have the guts to speak it to power actually during their access, and not just in seeking it? But, hey, maybe these NYT journalists can deflect it all by comparing the current American crisis to the not even close to analogous bogosity from 20 years ago in the Clinton era. You know, the same misdirection horse manure their access point Donald Trump relentlessly tries to foster.

The United States is not dealing with the same paradigm of politics it was even as recently as seven months ago. Both the citizen public, and the press that supposedly serves them, need to understand the fundamental change and adapt. The presumption of normality still being afforded Trump and his Administration is a disservice to both the people and their democracy. It is, in this critical living breathing moment, the banality of evil.

Trumpnami 2 by Rayne for Emptywheel.net

Trumpnami: Someone Tsurfed the News Tsunami?

/21 Comments/in , /by

It’s a Category 5 hurricane of news when the pros can’t keep up. I laughed when I saw this tweet by Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey this Friday. It looked and felt like everyone in the news industry was flailing, dog paddling as fast as possible to stay afloat of this tick-tock:

Around noon: the news day erupted when Sean Spicer’s exit and Anthony Scaramucci’s entrance as White House Communications Director is announced. Media blew up the internet with all manner of content related to Spicer including Melissa McCarthy skits on Saturday Night Live and Scaramucci’s climate change tweets.

About 4:00-ish or earlier: some outlets reported on former national security adviser Susan Rice meeting with Senate Intel Committee about the Russia probe; Sen. Richard Burr disclosed it was Rep. Devin Nunes who created the “unmasking thing.” Again, media generated more chatter.

After 4:00 p.m.: all hell broke loose when the Washington Post reported on Attorney General Sessions undisclosed and intercepted conversation with Russia’s Kislyak. WaPo has a really annoying habit of removing the original time stamp on their story and leaving only the last updated time under the hed; the last update was 9:49 p.m.

There was another important story published amid all the hubbub, but it didn’t get anywhere near the same level of attention as the change in White House comms staff or Sessions’ perjury. I can’t find the original time the Wall Street Journal published its piece on Jared Kushner’s latest financial disclosures, but it was neatly sandwiched between Spicer’s hand-off to Scaramucci, and the Washington Post’s report on Sessions’ convo with Kislyak.

WASHINGTON— Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, on Friday released a revised version of his personal financial disclosure showing his initial filing omitted dozens of assets, including commercial real estate, bonds issued by the New York water and sewer authority, a personal art collection and a New Jersey liquor license.

According to the disclosure, 77 assets were “inadvertently omitted” from Mr. Kushner’s earlier form and were added during what the form’s footnotes describe as the “ordinary review” process with the government ethics office. Some 60 of those were related to one collection of bonds. The updated form also provides additional information about 77 other assets, offering more detail about the structure of Mr. Kushner’s real estate assets. Mr. Kushner’s initial disclosure, released in March, hadn’t then been certified by the Office of Government Ethics.

How interesting — a Kushner-centric story about yet more inadequate and untimely disclosures, published late on a Friday afternoon, closing the window of availability for comment given the impending Sabbath.

And the same story, appearing in WSJ, wouldn’t appear in the print edition until Saturday morning. It’s DOA by the time folks on Wall Street get the story, including the BILLION in loans the WSJ’s analysis team found Kushner had not previously reported — and WSJ itself had been sitting on this information until OGE certified Kushner’s latest report.

Suspicions run high that the White House leaked the intelligence on Sessions’ to WaPo. We know now WaPo had the story a month ago but didn’t run it; they were likely waiting for corroborating source(s). Presto, one just shows up; who had access to that intelligence besides the Gang of Eight?

The White House also had complete control over the announcement of the communications director change-over.

What’s the chances the Kushner story was likewise nudged to fit inside the news storm so that Jared could surf his way out undeterred by the press? Sourcing on the article appears immaculate; perhaps the reporters call the Office of Ethics in Government every day, perhaps they watch a feed, but the timing is so incredibly perfect to assure this particular story doesn’t get a lot of traction.

And dear Crazy-Tweeter-in-Law did his thing from the can the following Saturday morning — tweeting a spume of crazy, ensuring there’s little afterthought given to a gnarly hang-ten off yesterday’s massive wave.

The nifty little kicker is that it wasn’t just Jared Kushner who released belated financial data.

So did Ivanka.

Ms. Trump received $2.5 million in “salary and severance” from her father’s business operations, according to Friday’s disclosure. She also received a $787,500 advance for her book, “Women Who Work.”

[…]

The disclosure also shows Ms. Trump earned $50,000 for her work overseeing a trust for some of the children of Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of both 21st Century Fox and News Corp . Ms. Trump resigned at the end of last year as a trustee. 21st Century Fox and News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, share common ownership.

There was more, but between the limits of Fair Use and just plain disgust, I won’t excerpt it here.

The question remains: by manipulating media, did Daddy give his girl a little push on her own surfboard, too?

Reminder: this is an open thread. Bring your crazy here in comments but behave.

Sean Hannity Cries Himself A River

/13 Comments/in , , , , /by

There has been a lot of upheaval at Fox News lately. Gretchen Carlson went nuclear on Ailes and the misogynistic rapey culture that Fox cultivated over decades, and nothing has been the same there since.

That is a good thing. It may have been a limited, even if loud start, but Carlson initiated ripples in the Murdoch empire that could not be easily contained, even with the ample crisis suppression talents of hired liar Ted Wells and his firm, Paul Weiss. The once closed barn door was open, and all horses and carts were suddenly out.

The Murdoch cabal, give them an iota of credit, realized the situation….kind of, and cut bait with Ailes in record speed for a bigly man that supposedly was untouchable and was a bff of Trump.

Probably motivated by Rupert’s sons, James and Lachlan, but still correct, even if horribly behind the curve of human decency and sexual harassment law. But so much has happened since Gretchen Carlson cooked the supposed golden goose, Roger Ailes, that common lore held responsible for all the Fox News golden eggs.

Whatever the impetus, Roger Ailes was summarily dismissed when obviously necessary. The Murdochs and Fox News probably thought that might contain the exposure of their decades long belligerent misogyny. But, no, then came the claims against Bill O’Reilly. An odious asshole every bit as despicable as Ailes. And one known as exactly that since the Andrea Makris out of court settlement over O’Reilly’s loofah phone fetishes back in 2004.

Instead, Fox not only kept O’Reilly until they could no longer, they kept Ailes Number Two, Bill Schein and attendant protective underlings in place. Until they no longer could. That started today with Schein’s ouster. And Hannity is floating like an overboard deck chair in the seas away from the Titanic, away from the mothership. (Killer graphic by the one and only Darth – click to enlarge!). But the suddenly disposable Sean Hannity deck chair is drifting away from the ignorant and misogynistic shipwreck he helped perpetuate all these years.

In any normal corporation, especially such a public facing one like Fox News, they would have culled the problems out immediately after the Ailes embarrassment. But not Fox. Oh no. Instead, Fox and Fox News allowed O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to bellow with umbrage about the public admissions of their owners of misogyny and bigotry. Fox, as a company, had not learned their lesson going back to Andrea Makris in 2004, nor insured that their precious bought and paid for “talent” did.

But now the Murdoch sons, James and Lachlan, are protecting the family name by cleaning up their father’s idiocy at warp speed in a way that the gel headed sons in the Trump family can only dream of. Today, the Murdochs the younger have outed Bill Schein. Via Digby, a quote from Andrew Kirell at Daily Beast:

Sean Hannity is looking to leave Fox News, according to sources, following the resignation of Fox News co-president Bill Shine officially on Monday.

Schein was Hannity’s long-time ally whom he personally recommended the network hire two decades ago to produce Hannity & Colmes.

So, cry me a river Sean Hannity you stuporous dolt. In recent days, Hannity warned it would be the “total end” of Fox News should Shine leave, and he rallied conservative activists to back him up.

Initially, insiders said, Hannity’s army of lawyers had hoped to discuss with Fox ways of protecting his 8-year-old primetime show, amid fears that Lachlan and James Murdoch—fresh off the ousting of Bill O’Reilly—were looking to push the network away from hard-right politics.

Yeah, good riddance. See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya, Sean. Go fuck yourself in hell.

[Okay, went with that version of Cry Me a River because it is sooo much better audio and video production wise than the one from Mad Dogs and Englishmen (with Leon Russell, of course) that I really envisioned.]

When “They” Go Low, The WHCA Grovels In The Gutter With Them

/19 Comments/in , , /by

So, Trump accused the American press of being “enemies of the state”:

“A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are — they are the enemy of the people,” Trump told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

Well, golly, what did that mean?? Yes, it is soooo hard, hard, to tell….OH, maybe not!

The White House on Friday barred news outlets — including CNN, the New York Times, Politico and the Los Angeles Times — from attending an off-camera press briefing held by spokesman Sean Spicer, igniting another controversy concerning the relationship between the Trump administration and the media.

Yes, it is so hard to tell, for the press, when all your love is in vain. But it is. From the WaPo:

President Trump will not attend the White House correspondents’ dinner this year.

Trump announced his decision on Twitter late Saturday afternoon. The dinner is scheduled for April 29.

Despite many people long advocating that the White House Correspondents Association get out in front of this, they, via their “leader”, Jeff Mason, remained cluelessly behind the Trumpian Eight Ball. The ostrich like action by Mason and the WHCA is almost comical, if not a total clownshow.

Here is the deal Mr. Mason, if you and the WHCA want to get your collective heads out of your asses, there are a LOT of people that would fund your scholarships at a LOT higher level that you do from your craven “Nerd Prom”.

So, does Jeff Mason and the WHCA continue on in the face of total humiliation, or do they do the right thing, cancel their yearly shitshow, and direct the resultant love to their precious scholarships?

I, personally, will be waiting to hear from the recalcitrant Jeff Mason. America wants to love the press. But not if they are unrepentant stenographer fools. So, Jeff Mason, what kind of leader of the WHCA are you? A stenographer, or a fool? Times have changed. If you cannot, you and the organization you purport to lead are dead fish.

What are you going to be, Mr. Jeff Mason? A toad, or a hero that reacts positively to strife? You could have gotten out in front of this blindingly obvious shitshow, but you diddled and twiddled your thumbs. What are you going to do now Jeff?

Did NYT’s Mandarin Translations Cause Trouble for Apple?

/3 Comments/in , /by

In what was seen as capitulation to Chinese censorship and its own outsourcing interests, yesterday Apple announced it was removing the NYT app from its app store in China, in response to vague “local regulations.”

“For some time now the New York Times app has not been permitted to display content to most users in China and we have been informed that the app is in violation of local regulations,” Fred Sainz, an Apple spokesman, said of the Times apps. “As a result, the app must be taken down off the China App Store. When this situation changes, the App Store will once again offer the New York Times app for download in China.”

Deep in its story on the move, NYT tied the moment China first told Apple to remove the app — December 23 — to a story it would later publish on the subsidies Apple gets in association with the Foxconn iPhone factory in Zhengzhou and to a blog post on “a seven-and-a-half-minute phantasmagoria of the Communist Party’s nightmares of Western subversion.”

In the weeks leading up to the withdrawal of the Times apps, The Times was working on various articles related to the Chinese government. One of them, posted online on Dec. 29, revealed the billions of dollars in hidden perks and subsidies that the Chinese government provides to the world’s biggest iPhone factory. China is also one of Apple’s largest iPhone markets, though sales in that region have slowed.

On Dec. 23, David Barboza, a Times reporter, spoke with members of Apple’s media team about the article. Mr. Barboza had previously been in touch with the iPhone factory owner, Foxconn. He had also contacted the Chinese government as part of his reporting.

Later that day, a separate team from Apple informed The Times that the apps would be removed, Ms. Murphy said.

In another article, published on Dec. 22 as a post on its Sinosphere blog, The Times described an anti-Western internet video that had been widely promoted by Chinese public security offices.

Both of those stories were translated into Mandarin.

Indeed, the more substantive of the two stories — on the Foxconn subsidies — linked to a series of other NYT articles, a number of which were also translated into Mandarin:

Unsurprisingly, the article describing the move was also translated.

I’ve been tracking NYT’s practice of translating select stories into Mandarin since 2015, when a story on what seemed to be retaliation for the OPM hack got translated into Mandarin. While the choice of which stories get translated can seem somewhat arbitrary (which is part of why I’m interested), many of the stories — especially the post on the video, which covers the equivalent of the anti-Russian fever we’re engaging in here — seem focused on highlighting Chinese corruption or counter-propaganda/counter-intelligence efforts.

More recently, I noted that the NYT story on the DNC hack (which was very favorable to the DNC) got translated into Russian.

As the NYT story notes, Apple apps for other major US outlets have not been taken down. But the NYT one has.

As we discuss Apple’s capitulation — and it is that — I want to renew my focus on NYT’s decision-making process on what to translate to make more accessible to the citizens of other countries.

The Bible Still Outperforms Facebook in Delivering Fake News

/23 Comments/in , , , /by

screen-shot-2016-12-07-at-8-30-48-am

We’ve reached the stage where articles about fake news themselves engage in fake news tactics.

Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman — who has written many of the stories on fake news in recent weeks — had Ipsos do a poll querying whether or not people believed some of the real and fake news headlines that got shared around during the election. He presented the results, in both tweets and his BuzzFeed article on the results, this way:

screen-shot-2016-12-07-at-7-25-37-am

But that’s not actually what the poll showed, though a number of people — even some of the people who are the most dedicated serious commentators on fake news — seemed to believe the headline without reading the article closely (that is, they treated it precisely like fake news consumers might, including sharing it before they had evaluated it critically).

Rather, the poll showed that of the people who remember a given headline, 75% believed it. But only about 20% remembered any of these headlines (which had been shared months earlier). For example, 72% of the people who remembered the claim that an FBI Agent had been found dead believed it, but only 22% actually remembered it; so just 16% of those surveyed remembered and believed it. The recall rate is worse for the stories with higher belief rates. Just 12% of respondents remembered and believed the claim that Trump sent his own plane to rescue stranded marines. Just 8% remembered and believed the story that Jim Comey had a Trump sign in his front yard, and that made up just 123 people out of a sample of 1809 surveyed.

Furthermore, with just one exception, people recalled the real news stories tested more than they did the fake and with one laudable exception (that Trump would protect LGBTQ citizens; it is “true” that he said it but likely “false” that he means it), people believed real news at rates higher than they did fake. The most people — 22% — recalled the fake story about the FBI Agent, comparable to the 23% who believed some real story about girl-on-girl pictures involving Melania. But 34% remembered Trump would “absolutely” register Muslims and 57% remembered Trump’s claim he wasn’t going to take a salary.

The exception should be an exception, because Buzzfeed shouldn’t have treated it as news anyway. Just 11% recalled Mike Morell’s endorsement, titled “I ran the CIA. Now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton,” which appeared in NYT’s opinion section. All endorsements should be considered opinion, and this one happens to be from a proven liar with a history of torture apology, so for the rare people who knew anything about Morell, I would hope his opinion would carry limited weight.

What all of this shows is that the fake news headline claims Buzzfeed made last month, that “Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook,” should be revised. What that clickbait story actually showed was that the top fake stories received more “engagement” — shares, reactions, and comments — on Facebook than the top real news. But the last paragraph of the article admitted that might not be the same as actual consumption or even non-Facebook moderated engagement.

It’s important to note that Facebook engagement does not necessarily translate into traffic. This analysis was focused on how the best-performing fake news about the election compared with real news from major outlets on Facebook. It’s entirely possible — and likely — that the mainstream sites received more traffic to their top-performing Facebook content than the fake news sites did. As as the Facebook spokesman noted, large news sites overall see more engagement on Facebook than fake news sites.

What this newly reported poll at least suggests (one would need to do a more scientific study to test this hypothesis) is that even the most shared fake news was not really retained, whereas more of the real news was. And that’s true even in spite of the fact that Buzzfeed/Ipsos did not test the most popular real news (in reality this, too, is an opinion piece), “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” That’s a pity, because it’d be interesting to see how many and what kind of people remembered and believed that one.

Effectively, then, Buzzfeed was testing the most popular fake news (about the Pope endorsing Trump, with 960,000 engagements) against the third ranking real news (the Melania girl-on-girl story, with 531,000 engagements) and real news still performed better overall in terms of recall. Which would seem to suggest these Facebook engagements don’t actually track how much “news” — fake or not — people will consciously retain (I admit unconscious retention is probably an issue too).

Which is how I get to my claim that the Bible outperforms Facebook for spreading false news. After all, as recently as 2014, 42% of Americans believed in creationism, while just 19% believed in evolution. That number is changing quickly (importantly, as more purportedly fake news consuming youngsters who don’t consider themselves religious get asked). Nevertheless, a significantly larger chunk of the country believes that God plunked us down fully-formed into Eden than believe that an FBI Agent involved in the Clinton case died in a murder suicide.

We should expect more people to believe what they read in the Bible, because it is a story that gets reinforced week after week by people with some authority in the community. It also gets reinforced in institutions like the Creation Museum, where I took the picture of white Adam and Eve above. For people who believe in creationism, their religion is fundamentally tied to their self-identity in a way that politics might not be. It is precisely for that reason it provides important counterpoint to these fake news stories. Especially given the way that a preference for religious stories over scientific ones poisons so much of our ability to deal with crises like climate change.

Don’t get me wrong: algorithmically-delivered sensationalism is a problem (as are polls that get shared to make claims about headlines they don’t really support). But it is one of many problems with our politics, and the evidence from this poll actually suggests it isn’t yet the most urgent one.

Update: Pope Francis, who believes the notion of evolution can coexist with that of creation, just issued a statement calling those who spread shit news sinners.

Francis told the Belgian Catholic weekly “Tertio” that spreading disinformation was “probably the greatest damage that the media can do” and using communications for this rather than to educate the public amounted to a sin.

Using precise psychological terms, he said scandal-mongering media risked falling prey to coprophilia, or arousal from excrement, and consumers of these media risked coprophagia, or eating excrement.

[snip]

“I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into – no offence intended – the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true,” he said.

Update: Matthew Ingram covers this issue at Fortune.