See how a WSJ report skews your views of the subject of a news article by diminishing the impressive background of the primary individual in the story. This is a common technique to spin a news story. Ultimately, rather than blame some for asking odd questions, we should ask why were they confused in the first place? The answer comes down to poor public messaging surrounding public health – from the public health practitioners themselves.
Forbes publishes a fake news column about “Walmart insulin”, deletes it later the same day. No editor’s note explains the deletion.
Reports of a polar bear spray painted with “T-34” on its side were greatly exaggerated. The tagging was done by scientists, not pranksters. The bear had been rummaging a garbage dump and scientists wanted to see if it was returning. They tagged it with a short duration ink; this was not graffiti by pranksters as initially reported. Typical of this type of report, the original source for the video was unknown, the back story was unknown, and the video was shared on social media by an environmental activist. Media then used social media as a primary source. What could possibly go wrong?
With Michael Bloomberg running for President, Bloomberg News says it will only do investigative reports on non-Democratic Party candidates, due to its conflict of interests. What? Bloomberg News is delivering an in-kind public relations/propaganda donation to Bloomberg and his party. The proper response would be to refrain from covering any aspects of the Presidential campaigns.
Study finds that “science communications” has routinely devolved into propaganda messaging intended to persuade targets to adopt someone’s agenda.
Facebook’s head of PR admits to developing a program to slime others with negative propaganda messaging. He had already submitted his resignation.
Facebook’s COO hired external firms to smear those who questioned or criticized the company. Facebook itself engaged in the propaganda behavior made famous by Russia-based Internet Research Agency while simultaneously lying to its user community.
Facebook deploys propaganda campaigns to tarnish its competitors and to discredit FB critics by associating them with those who may have unsavory public reputations. Facebook adopts the same methods used by the Internet Research Agency of Russia but for the benefit of Facebook. None of this is a surprise considering that Facebook is the world’s leading propaganda platform.
Boeing has planted an opinion column in multiple newspapers around the country – a column intended to cast doubt on SpaceX, a competitor. Are you feeling manipulated yet?
Code.org is a lobbying organization funded by high tech industrial giants. They are lobbying to have more kids K-12 studying computer science and less time spent studying other subjects in school. One of their methods is to straight up lie about the size of the job market, as you’ll see on the attached post. And its not a little lie, but being off by a factor of ten. This is a great example of corporate funded propaganda that turns into “facts” quoted in media news stories and then likely gets quoted by politicians.