Social media has gone utterly insane about fires in the Amazon region of Brazil-virtually all of them contain false information. NASA points out that over their 15 year satellite-based observing history, the fire situation in the Amazon is average. But the falsehoods have blown up to the point that internationally known politicians are calling for action!
Social media is a bonfire of idiocy.
A pseudo news story – one of many – proclaims not enough women are in “STEM” fields. This conclusion depends on how you define “STEM” fields. By leaving out many fields of “science”, they are looking primarly at “TE” – technology and engineering only. When all “S” (science) and “M” (math) are included, the discrepancies are not nearly as large. The root issue, though, is that many fields have a dominant gender – but this issue is ignored in favor of focusing exclusively on women in “TE” fields (while pretending this group is “STEM”). For example, about 90% of nurses, which employs millions of workers, are women – yet “health science” is typically excluded from the charts and data tables used to show us that women are not studying “STEM” – because they mean “TE”.
Their third paragraph contradicts the headline: “Even the $15 hourly wage touted by labor activists would not be enough to make housing affordable in the overwhelming majority of states, the coalition found.” — but in other words, it can afford housing in some states. But the story’s errors are worse than that …
Answer: His mother in law died and left them a very large inheritance. There is no conspiracy theory or grand mystery or element of corruption involved.
A minor school yard tussle, not even worthy of a local news story becomes a national news report. This is not a national news story. This is “pseudo news” reporting that wastes our time with click-bait emotional content.
And for what its worth, its identical to something that happened to me at age 11. Then I was recovering from a skull fracture when a boy threw a football that hit me in the head, right along the fracture line. This was not local news. This was not national news. In fact, it wasn’t even news with in my school. But today, we’d be on cable news 24 x 7 …
NY Daily News writes about the Apollo 11 mission and landing on the moon and gets nearly everything about it wrong.
While researching overuse of the “crisis” label (literally everything is now a crisis), I ran across a Google News linked web site whose own description largely labels itself as a propaganda mill. Yet this is what passes for “news”?
It’s propaganda all the time now: “The only way to hold a viewer’s attention is to continually ratchet up the emotional stakes. It’s not enough to connect passionately to a picture or a video clip; the audience also expects a fierce attachment to news anchors and reporters — they want to see journalists emote, which is embraced as a more reliable truth than the facts and figures being reported.”
Snopes goes off the rails with a recent “fact check” of violence in Portland. What was Snopes thinking by writing this bizarre fact check? Mind boggling.
The Daily Beast makes up a completely false claim for their pretend news report. The media desperately needs to stop engaging in this self destructive behavior.
The story about cell phones causing young people to grown “horns” was fake, with those claims made up by the reporter.
Three glaring errors seen in main stream media over about a 24 hour span. Embarrassing. None of these examples should have occurred.
Journalism today: “If you want your story to be well placed and if you want to be professionally rewarded, you have to generate page views — you have to incite social media. The way to do that is to reinforce the prejudices of your readers.”
Social media is the new battleground. It’s being used to push people over the edge, to threaten violence against others, and in some cases, leading to actual violence. A controversial video clip that spread online in the past day was pushed by what appears to have been a fake account.