Category: Media

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Media

Updated: Vanity Fair demonstrates how to become the most hated publication in America

Vanity Fair decided to do a year-end video dedicated to Hillary Clinton.

It has not gone over well.

I particularly liked pushing the stereotype of women in technology. That was a nice touch.

One of the Hive editors, before she took her Twitter account private, expressed resentment that the video was taken out of context, as it was part of a series. What she and the others don’t seem to realize is that the other targets of a not-especially-funny set of videos are all still public servants. As such, they can expect to be the focus of year-end zingers.

More importantly, it wasn’t all that long ago when Time magazine featured women on its cover, and in a completely different context. How absolutely tone deaf can the Vanity Fair crew be to follow that elegant and profound piece with, at best, a juvenile, snarky piece targeting our country’s first woman Presidential candidate?

Even if you don’t care for Clinton, hell even if you voted for Trump, seeing six smug young people condescendingly telling a former Senator, Secretary of State, and Presidential candidate to take up knitting should piss you off. Not unless you’re the worst misogynist in the nation.

Donald Trump will love it.

Enjoy those magazine cancellations, Vanity Fair. Maybe with all that free time, you can take up crocheting. Or learning humility.

Update:

NYLON’s Sara Beauchamp writes about the backlash to the Vanity Fair video:

So next time you read a headline or watch a video that’s being quote-tweeted like crazy, before you’re quick to react, stop to consider what you’re getting outraged about. Look into the context before you join the pile on, because there are real people on the other end of our internet outrage. And, especially if they’re a woman, it’s important to remember that they’re already going through enough online, so maybe don’t make it worse.

I haven’t seen any tweets reflecting the editor’s weight, which is the backlash NYLON is responding to. If there are, then these need to be deleted.

However, the Vanity Fair people are professionals. They’re also adults. They’re learning about having to accept the consequences of their actions. If they’re feeling hurt about attacks against them, they might want to consider their attack against private citizen Hillary Clinton, particularly after years of Clinton being bashed the the media.

So no, they earned this pile-on. Best they just suck it up.

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Media

Wanting Content, Publications on the Far-Left Easily Duped by Alice Donovan

The Washington Post published an in-depth piece about Putin’s misinformation campaign that impacted on the 2016 Presidential campaign. In it they mentioned a writer going by the name of Alice Donovan. Rather than the ‘beginning freelance writer’ this Donovan claimed to be, the individual was a fake, a contrived persona, and a source of misinformation.

Donovan duped several far-left sites into publishing ‘her’ material. CounterPunch danced all around the issue in its effort to excuse it’s lax vetting. Ultimately, it accepted some blame…after first blaming the FBI.

If the FBI was so worried about the risks posed by Alice Donovan’s false persona, they could have tipped off some of the media outlets she was corresponding with. But in this case they refrained for nearly two years. Perhaps they concluded that Donovan was the hapless and ineffectual persona she appears to be. More likely, they wanted to continue tracking her. But they couldn’t do that without also snooping on American journalists and that represents an icy intrusion on the First Amendment. For a free press to function, journalists need to be free to communicate with whomever they want, without fear that their exchanges are being monitored by federal agencies. A free press needs to be free to make mistakes and learn from them. We did.

No, CounterPunch, you don’t get off that easy. In your effort to continuously publish, you accepted work from a ‘journalist’ whose only qualification seems to be they’ll allow you to publish their work without being paid.

Online writers don’t have to publish under their own name, but if so-called ‘news’ sites want to be treated credibly, they have to know the actual person submitting the work. They have to vet not only the sources of the news they print, but the people writing the stories.

Another far left group, We are Change, also published Donovan’s work. It scrubbed her stories from their site, but you can see them in the Wayback Machine.

By scrubbing Donovan’s stories it would seem as if We Are Change is acknowledging its errors in spreading misinformation. But what’s We Are Change NYC’s lead tweet today? A link to a 2016 piece attacking Hillary Clinton using unproven information that lacked any vetting.

What’s in one of its lead stories? A video claiming that Clinton is in hot water over Uranium One. This, even though this story was debunked. And among the sources for the video is RT, a well known Russian propaganda organization.

For all of our valid criticism of mainstream media—in particular its obsessiveness with ‘both sides’—most of its members flatly acknowledge when they screwed up. And they promise to do better.

Sites like CounterPunch and We Are Change need to do the same.

 

 

 

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Media

Fact-Checking PolitiFact’s Clinton Email Fact-Check

I had an email exchange with Gene Emery of PolitiFact about a couple of its fact-checks related to the Clinton emails. PolitiFact just tweeted that it updated the ratings for one of them.

I have to give PolitiFact a Pants on Fire for its tweet…and for its rating.

First of all, that False rating is what the story had at the time of my and Emery’s email exchange. Checking in with the Wayback Machine, the rating was False when the story was first released.

So, no, PolitiFact, you didn’t re-rate this item. You said False on the 6th, and you still show False.

You did post a note following FBI Director Comey’s testimony in front of Congress when he clarified that none of the emails had a classified header, and only three emails had the insider markup (c) denoting classified material in the body of the email.

As I wrote back to Emery, to the average person, (c) means copyright. And I also expected PolitiFact would upgrade their rating following the Editor’s Note. After all, why insert an Editor’s Note if it wasn’t because PolitiFact needed to modify its rating?

But the rating hasn’t changed, and all PolitiFact has reluctantly done is add the note.

Let’s look at this rating, then. As Clinton has stated, over and over and over again, she did not send email that was marked classified. And none of her email showed a classified header, required for classified material.

At most, at most, three emails had the little (c) marking embedded in the email. Three out of 30,000+ emails. And yet PolitiFact, rated what Hillary Clinton has said as False.

Says she “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified” on her private email server while secretary of state. False.

This following the PolitiFact Editor’s Note:

The day after we published this fact-check, Comey testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on July 7. Comey said he believes three emails on Clinton’s server contained information labeled classified at the time they were sent. This information was not properly marked in that the emails did not have a classification header, even though a “(c)” immediately preceded text in the body of the emails, designating confidential information. Without the clear classification header, it’s reasonable to infer that Clinton did not realize these three emails contained classified information, he said.

Couldn’t we also reasonably infer that PolitiFact would update its rating to Mostly True, or even True, based on this Editor’s Note, and Comey’s statement?

Of course not. Because after all…Clinton…emails…All reason goes out the window. Along with fairness, and perspective, and bluntly, honesty.

Your butt’s on fire, PolitiFact.

Originally published at Crooks & Liars.

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Media

Rethinking our Twitter Twitchy Actions

Cleaning up after the bird

Very interesting piece by Sam Bibble at Gawker on Justine Sacco. Sacco was the PR person who tweeted a bit of satire that blew up in her face, and almost destroyed her career.

The problem with Twitter is every post lacks context. You don’t know the person to know if they’re joking. You haven’t seen the build-up to know if the post is ironic, satirical, or a true belief. And it’s so damn easy to retweet the actions and reactions, and to get caught up in the rush to condemn. That’s the bad, the very horrid part of Twitter.

At the same time, Twitter can be damn useful. Anyone who closely follows the Ferguson events will tell you that you can find more up-to-date information in Twitter than any in any news site. We can find a lot of racist crap, true, but we also found livestream links, breaking news, and even thoughtful insight, 140 characters at a time.

Bibble’s advice for weathering a Twitter storm is good—don’t engage, you’ll only had fuel to the fire. But maybe we should seriously re-think our twitchy actions. There are two kinds of outrageous tweets at the core of these storms. The first is the satirical tweet, taken out of context; if we retweet these, we can be harming an innocent person. The second type of outrageous tweet is from those who want attention; if we retweet what they post, all we’re doing is giving them the attention they want.

I watched this happen with person claiming to be a journalist, who tried to write himself into Ferguson’s history and failed. Every new and outrageous tweet of his that got caught up and magnified resulted in him getting at least a hundred new followers. In our outraged reaction, we gave him exactly what he wanted, and now he’s been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Slate, and the Washington Post. We didn’t create the monster, but we sure gave it juice.

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Media

Ferguson: Media, You are Hurting Us

screenshot of Jon Stewart on Crossfire

The story read that the FBI had arrested two New Black Panther members for buying explosives to bomb Ferguson protests. Not long after, though, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch posted a story that what really happened is the FBI arrested two men for providing false information when buying guns. And that New Black Panther association? Well, that’s implied because a “police source” made the connection. Not the men. Not officially from the FBI. A “police source”.

One of the many sources who have added to the confusion and alarm associated with the Ferguson protests. The same sources that both Twitter users and mainstream press reporters have quoted without fact or verification. There is some excuse for the Twitter users: it’s not their job to fact check what they retweet. The same cannot be said for the media, who have done a piss poor job of covering Ferguson.

Even today, the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post have stories about a $5,000 bounty placed on Darren Wilson’s head by a black militant group. The only problem is, it’s all fake, a fraud. There is no black militant group. There is no $5,000 bounty. It’s all one anonymous Twitter user making the claim among a set of overly fantastic and conflicting claims, in an account that demonstrates glaringly obvious disconnects in linguistic styles. A Twitter account for a group that has absolutely no hint of existence outside of Twitter. Even photos purportedly showing the Twitter user’s hands holding a box of ammo, with dark implications of future mayhem, generated little but doubt from other Twitter users primarily because the hands looked remarkably white, and what most people missed, remarkably feminine. So much for discussions about “fellow warriors”.

[Tweet removed as account no longer exists]

(The only other reference to the group was a pulled Go Fund Me page.)

It was all fake, yet these stalwarts of the press, these icons, dutifully copied each other without any of their journalists once going, “Hey. Maybe we should fact check this or something.”

CNN writes last week about a Grand Jury decision on Friday, and it wasn’t because they had inside information, as the implication might be. No, it was nothing more than a guess. So we end up having a press conference and all sorts of stories on Saturday about no Grand Jury decision happened on Friday. That’s the same as saying, “We didn’t get hit by an asteroid this weekend”, or, “There’s a lot of snow in Buffalo”.

How much confusion has been generated by dutifully quoting Chief Jackson from Ferguson, as he makes assertions in the AM, only to add “clarifications” later that day or the next? By the time the media report the clarifications it’s already too late: the seeds of doubt are sown, and mismatched stories get flung about in Twitter, like stones fired from slingshots.

All these stories do is add to the tension and distrust. They generate unnecessary suspicion, and add fuel to an already volatile situation. It is like members of the media have gotten together over a beer somewhere and said to each other, “You know, riots in Ferguson would be good for ratings. What can we do to make it happen?”

What did Jon Stewart say on Crossfire years ago? Before his appearance on the show signaled its impending doom?

Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.

Media, you are hurting us.