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| Fact-Checkers Are Used To Confuse The Public: Sharyl Attkisson |
| 2022-01-27 |
| [ZeroHedge] Five-time Emmy award-winning journalist Sharyl Attkisson said she has seen an increased effort to manipulate the public to appreciate censorship and disapprove of journalism. One of the strategies that has been employed is the use of third-party fact-checkers, she said. “Nearly every mode of information has been co-opted, if it can be co-opted by some group, [and] fact-checkers are no different,” Attkisson told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.” “Either they’ve been co-opted, in many instances, or created for the purpose of distributing narratives and propaganda,” said Attkisson. “This is all part of a very well-funded, well-organized landscape that dictates and slants the information they want us to have.” Attkisson said she first started to notice news being controlled in the early 2000s when the media company she was working for was actively trying to suppress certain stories. “The pushback came to be more about keeping a story from airing or keeping a study from being reported on the news, not just giving the other side, not just making sure it was accurately reported,” she said of pharmaceutical company stories she was covering at the time. In 2016 Attkisson heard former President Barack Obama say news needed to be curated, after which mainstream media outlets started to consistently use the term fake news to describe mostly conservative news stories that they deemed untrue. “And I remember thinking that was such a strange thing to say, because there was no big movement among the public, that people needed to have their information curated, that someone needed to step in and tell us what to think, curate what was online. But … after that, if you look at the media, day after day, there were headlines about fake news and curation of what should and shouldn’t be reported.” Attkisson was referring to Obama’s comment at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2016. “It’s relevant to our democracy, citizenship. We’re going to have to rebuild, within this wild, wild west of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” Obama said. Because Attkisson was curious about this idea of curating news, she researched the topic of misinformation, which led her to a non-profit called First Draft, which was funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “And if you looked at the nonprofit’s website when they said fake news, they meant entirely conservative-base fake news and their viewpoint; there was no liberal version of fake news. And then within a matter of weeks, President Obama gives the speech, the media takes off and runs with it.” Attkisson said the fake news phrase was actually started by the left but was effectively turned on its head by former President Donald Trump and now most people think he coined the phrase. “But it’s actually well documented as an invention of political activists on the left during the time period I described,” Attkisson said. For her book “Smear” she interviewed people who work to spread misinformation and propaganda with the goal of confusing the public. “And they explained to me that, if they do nothing more than confuse the information landscape, maybe you don’t totally buy what they say, but they’ve done enough to make you not sure of anything.” CENSORSHIP DURING THE PANDEMIC Attkisson criticized large news outlets for being a “mouthpiece” of the government or other special interest groups instead of challenging them or holding them accountable, particularly as it relates to the pandemic. She said that soon after the pandemic began, she spoke to many scientists, government as well as private, about the virus and the course it was taking before she formed an opinion. She asked some of the scientists to speak out but they were afraid. “They said they dare not speak out for fear of being controversial, and for fear of being called coronavirus deniers, because that phrase was starting to be used in the media. And secondly, they feared contradicting Dr. Fauci, who they said had been kind of lionized or canonized in the press for reasons that they couldn’t understand.” |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #5 if you need a fifth of whiskey as opposed to a keg of whiskey. EH? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2022-01-27 13:51 |
| #4 Middlemen are great if you need a fifth of whiskey as opposed to a keg of whiskey. Or a dozen candles as opposed to a gross. Past that, they are not an advantage to the consumer. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2022-01-27 11:21 |
| #3 With COVIDianism, this backdoor censorship has gone off the rails. Here's Dr. Robert W. Malone on the media's Orwellian "Trusted News Initiative": The scientific process requires constant external challenge and criticism to reach a working approximation of truth. Such (typically autocratic, paternalistic) people lose the ability to maintain objectivity and typically transition to functioning as an enforcer of their version of reality. These people often resort to a form of crude binary thought – their version of the truth versus all alternatives. In contrast, the modern scientific practitioner approaches the effort to draw truth out of the unknown as something closer to mathematical calculus, a process of serial approximation which gradually approaches an asymptote hypothesized to be scientific truth. Enter the "Trusted News Initiative." Here is the official BBC justification for this intrinsically anti-science, pro-censorship insult to the free exchange of ideas, and an alternative interpretation of this Orwellian bureaucracy. This intellectual obscenity purports to be able to discern and enforce scientific “truth” by defining truth as that which established public health bureaucracies (and singularly autocratic public health “leaders”) say it is. The Trusted News Initiative aggressively employs both globally coordinated media and the tools of modern big technology to censor, demean, de-platform, delegitimize and de-license all others who seek to document, advance or discuss alternative versions of officially endorsed reality. The "Trusted News Initiative" has functionally morphed into Orwell’s predicted ministry of truth. Backed by the combined power of national and international governmental structures, massive transnational investment funds the likes of which the world has never seen before, and the commercial assets (Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Tech) over which the funds exert horizontally integrated control through access to investment capital and structural leadership ties. This is the most intrinsically anti-science global organization ever implemented in the history of modern man. The closest historical approximation to this monstrosity is the Catholic Church during the Spanish inquisition. |
| Posted by: Merrick Ferret 2022-01-27 11:18 |
| #2 I'm not confused. I know which media brands I can ignore out of hand. I assume ones I used to trust could join the "ignore list" any day (looking at you, FauxNews). As soon as I see the phrase "fact check," my BS detector redlines. Same thing goes for pols. You can make a mis-step or mis-speak any time. But only once and I tune out your "walk-back" immediately and permanently. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2022-01-27 11:01 |
| #1 The bigger problem is the public happiness with being confused. I think it was Cicero's brother who said (way back in 55 BC) "The people wish to be deceived; let them be deceived." Or for the Latin purists, "Populus vult decipi; decipiatur!" |
| Posted by: Tom 2022-01-27 10:56 |