Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: The key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret. These…
Image via Teen Vogue. On Saturday morning, Teen Vogue published a sharp piece by the writer Lauren Duca entitled “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Described in the tagline as a “scorched-earth op-ed,” Duca laid out a clear and airtight argument about the way the president-elect used classic gaslighting tactics to secure his voter base and…
Many Times readers have taken issue with two letters in this week’s Travel section, which criticized a Nov. 27 article about National Park sites that address issues of race and ethnicity in America’s history. The letters employed cultural stereotypes to suggest that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was justified, and…
NEW YORK (AP) — Jake Tapper’s verbal tug-of-war with Vice President-elect Mike Pence last week illustrated a persistent style the CNN anchor is making his signature, and one that he hopes his colleagues take up, too. Tapper asked Pence eight times about the son of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the incoming administration’s pick as national…
The CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who pressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Michael G. Flynn’s role in the transition. Credit Lexey Swall for The New York Times Too often television news, especially on cable, serves as a megaphone for politicians who use it to forward lies and propaganda while so effortlessly ignoring questions they’re supposedly…
“The interned Japanese were housed, fed, protected and cared for.” This is some kind of bullshit. On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times published two letters from readers arguing that the forced mass removal and incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II was necessary and justified. The letters, published in the paper’s print…
President-elect Donald Trump is about to inherit a newly empowered Voice of America that some officials fear could serve as an unfettered propaganda arm for the former reality TV star who has flirted for years with launching his own network. Buried on page 1,404 of the National Defense Authorization Act that passed last week is…
.entry-header Jonathan Albright, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina, is an expert in data journalism who has worked for both Google and Yahoo. He specializes in media analytics and social networks, and he has created a network map or topology that describes the landscape of the fake-news ecosystem. Even if Facebook and Google…
In my exploration of “fake news”, I’ve found some troubling things. And it’s not just the rightwing news network that’s worrying. I’ve recently gone back and taken a preliminary look at the leftwing media ecosystem, trying to map the hyperlinks between these sites – so I’m not trying to establish causation or assign blame as…
Combined “left-wing” +“right-wing” news hyperlink network; RED: sites only linked to in right-wing network; BLUE: sites only linked to in left-wing network ; WHITE: sites that are linked to in *both* L & R networks. Finished! Here is a combined (ie, merged) network graph from my left-wing and right-wing news hyperlink “ecosystems”. The graphs were normalized…