#credibility
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
When the New York Times lost its way
By James Bennet
..."Whether or not American #democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald #Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news #media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because #journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their #credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
I hope those historians will also be able to tell the story of how journalism found its footing again – how editors, reporters and readers, too, came to recognise that journalism needed to change to fulfil its potential in restoring the health of American politics. As Trump’s nomination and possible re-election loom, that work could not be more urgent.
...
leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.
...
As everyone knows, the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes. As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred. This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified. When I was at the Times, the newsroom editors worked hardest to keep Washington coverage open and unbiased, no easy task in the Trump era. And there are still people, in the Washington bureau and across the Times, doing work as fine as can be found in American journalism. But as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters."...
remembering conversations had in 2020, (in which someone (of identical iq to me) was reflexively scoffing at an idea and dismissing it without any apparent further investigation, and my, knowing i do not know, exploring at least some surface claims/hypothesis of (for want of better terminology) method of action (e.g. receptor site attenuation)), i did a little websearch for 5G and COVID19 correlation...
a plethora of corporate news websites simply stating outright there's no correlation, and using the scrutiny-disuading adhominem terminology of "conspiracy theories" / "conspiracy theorists" and the even more orwellianised "conspiracy" redefined as meaning some kind of laughable falsehood.
so then i took a different tact, and separately looked up maps of 5G deployment, and then also maps of covid19...
... then the claims, from those news corporations (who, incidentally, get their advertising funding from those who profit from the uptake of the so called vaccines under terror), starts to look undermining of their credibility, to have stated it so absolutely.
similar to how those news sites would state things in absolute certainty, contrary to all prior established best practices in science, where known margin of error and uncertainty would also be presented, back at the start of the scare. ... which, even if one knew nothing of event201, nor operation lockstep, should in itself have been enough to raise alarm bells of something being seriously wrong. but then, once terror is induced, rational cognition is impared and ocluded, with the survival brain's fright-mode activated loudly to the fore.
now i dont kow if there's a causal relationship between 5G deployments and the "COVID19" (which appeared, by that name, on government documents listing diseases of concern, at least as early as 2015), but there does seem to be a temporal and geographic correlation, far more pronounced than is claimed in the corporate news propaganda [(which i think is fair to call it propaganda, rather than journalistic service)]. and as such, it gets one wondering again about the assertions of some doctors, researchers, historians, of the correlations (even aledged causations) from past new electro-magnetic frequency technology deployments and widespread breakouts of disease. various radio and flu correlations for example.
but i do know you're not in the realm of science if you just bark adhominems dismissively at ideas. science requires an enquiring open mind. if you're presuming to already know, and shout down any who utter an idea that conflicts with your convictions, on the basis of their character, without entertaining the idea and exploring it further, then perhaps you're opperating from a more limbic place, than a more considerate contemplative explorative cognitive curious place. more scientism's dogma, than science. more identification with convictions, than curiousity to explore evidence. more presumption, stubbornly clung to, than ideas put to the test. more hate, than education. more official doctrine of the doubleplus goodthink to be obeyed, than true egalitarian pedagogy.
i considered adding various versions of the maps here, so you could see the correlations yourself, but then realised, if you're already habituated to being spoonfed out of your active curiousity, i might not be helping, by becoming the next truthsayer for you to unquestioningly lap up the new truth from. lool. so... i'll leave it for you to go explore some websearches on that yourself. see how much you think, from the results you find after even a couple minutes websearching, that the assertions of the corporate media and its conflicts of interest, are rightly absolute in their certainty of no correlation, or, if a correlation vividly jumps out at you, or somewhere in between, more inconclusive (which still would undermine the assertive absolute certainty of no correlation).
and then doesnt it get you wondering about all the s.m.a.r.t. technology, the patents for "warfare" and population control, and the various announced plans of the billionaire clique...
i dont know. but it seems the certainty presented is not only unfounded, but in error, from what i see when looking outside their well curated overton window.
#overtonwindow #conflictofinterest #patents #lookup #correlation #causation #certainty #unfounded #overcertainty #thecorporation #forprofitmedicine #deskillers #eugenics #thebillionaireclique #covid19 #5G #curious #consider #claims #corporations #credibility #contrary #science #scare #terror #terrorism #event201 #operationlockstep #cognition #causal #convinced #claimed #claims #convictions #contradictions #maps #journalism #epistemology #logic #adhominem #doubleplusgoodthink #hourofhate #obey #censorship #smart #control #controlgrid #iq #inteligence #arrogance #presumption #identification #conviction #arewelearningyet #counterargument #covidiacy #complicity #concentrationcamps #cowards #complicit #corruption #catastrophecapitalism #catastrophecuration #catastrophecreation #corporatism #culls #curiousity #Cwords
. . .
not to mention they have patents on the viral lines, and a string of aledged frauds on those virus patents at least as early as 2002, and there being leaked quips from middling insiders asserting things like "when the terrorist thing wears off, we're going to have people running scared of a disease without symptoms", and all this being outlined in the #ProjectforaNewAmericanCentury ( #PNAC ) and surrounding planning documents... just may be enough to consider, maybe it's not like the corporate news propaganda hymn sheet sings over and over to us. #cuibono just may be, maybe, worth consideration...
but, i dont know. i can imagine ways of error in this, and can imagine there are ways of error beyond my imagining. seems healthy to keep an #openmind.
as to do otherwise,
is to #totalitarianise.
it's just people.
we can still mend this.
#itsjustpeople #wecanstillmendthis #restorescience #restoredemocracy #endcensorship #freespeech
Wikipedia: NaturalNews
Natural News (formerly NewsTarget, which is now a separate sister site) is a far-right, anti-vaccination conspiracy theory and fake news website known for promoting alternative medicine, pseudoscience, and far-right extremism.[1][2][3][4]
The site's founder, Michael Allen "Mike" Adams, gained attention after posting a blog entry implying a call for violence against proponents of GMO foods, and then allegedly creating another website with a list of names of alleged supporters. He has been accused of using "pseudoscience to sell his lies".[5] Adams has described vaccines as "medical child abuse".[6]
The website sells various dietary supplements, promotes alternative medicine and climate change denial, makes tendentious nutrition and health claims,[7] disseminates fake news,[8][9][10] and espouses various conspiracy theories and pro-Donald Trump propaganda.[11][12] These conspiracy theories include chemophobic claims about the purported dangers of "chemtrails",[1] fluoridated drinking water,[13] anti-perspirants, laundry detergent, monosodium glutamate, aspartame, and vaccines.[1][7][14] It has also spread conspiracy theories about the Zika virus allegedly being spread by genetically modified mosquitoes[15] and purported adverse effects of genetically modified crops, as well as the farming practices associated with and foods derived from them.[16]
As of 2014, Natural News had approximately 7 million unique visitors per month.[4]
In May 2020, Facebook banned Natural News content from its platform after discovering that the site was boosting its popularity using content farms in North Macedonia and the Philippines, a form of spamming.[17] Natural News bypassed the ban by republishing its content on a large number of topic-specific domain names, including trump.news, extinction.news, mind.control.news, and veggie.news.[17][18] The Institute for Strategic Dialogue found 496 domain names associated with Natural News as of June 2020.[18][19]
There is a NaturalNews pod on Diaspora (share.naturalnews.com), and members of that pod are without exception in my experience dedicated to spreading disinformation and propaganda, which is why I strongly advocate a block-on-sight policy for them.
The Wikipedia link has considerable additional background.
On the Wikipedia Reliable Sources page, Natural News is one of only 18 blacklisted sites of 351 entries. (The page is a useful guide to site reputation for numerous frequently-used sites, including many which appear in Diaspora posts.)
#NaturalNews #Wikipedia #media #credibility #propaganda #disinformation #MichaelAllenAdams #MikeAdams
Further empty Glenn Greenwald apologia for Parler proving entirely false
Gizmodo put paid Greenwald's unfounded assertions.
Greenwald tweeted:
Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?
Zero.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293
Noting his highly-conditioned and narrowly-scoped criteria (arrests are ongoing, and few to date), data obtained directly from Parler puts multiple members directly at the scene of the coup:
At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the horde of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside the U.S. Capitol building and into areas normally restricted to the public, according to GPS metadata linked to videos posted to the platform the day of the insurrection in Washington.
The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody.
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-capitol-building-1846042905/
Greenwald is simply fabulating at this point.
Get this boy an editor. Or mental help.
h/t: https://twitter.com/hannahgais/status/1349082704424427520
Image: Gizmodo.
#Jan6Coup #Parler #GlennGreenwald #Fabulists #credibility #Gizmodo #DataAreLiability
On Heartbleed, free software, security, and trust
@Will Hill is among those sharing a post suggesting that adopting free software is the way to keep national-actor surveillance operators out of your systems. This is grossly oversimplified and incomplete in multiple ways.
First off: OpenSSL is a free software project. It's not as if that status avoided the problem in the first place, and it's not the first time that similarly bone-headed mistakes have been made in open-source code. Take the Debian project's SSH key entropy error which resulted in a very small number of distinct keys being possible due to reliance on the time-of-day-in-seconds being a determinant of the key value. If I recall, this meant rather than astronomically large numbers of possible keys, only 86,400 were possible (a sufficiently small value that brute-forcing could happen in seconds to hours, depending on server configurations and rate-limiting).
Secondly: I'm not contesting that this being open source didn't help the problem become widely reported and rapidly fixed after the fact. And there's no telling what problems lurk deep within proprietary software. But even free-software but embedded appliances could remain vulnerable to the OpenSSL but for years to come if they can't be, or aren't, updated.
Thirdly: I've argued since the beginning of the heroic disclosures by Edward Snowden of NSA domestic surveillance and related tactics, that the main victim would be trust: trust of the NSA with its own operators and contractors, trust of users with network / "cloud"-based services, trust in hardware with known "lawful intercept" capabilities (virtually all networking hardware), with unknown surveillance capabilities (either Chinese government or NSA-introduced vulnerabilities, say, in Chinese products), in proprietary software, and among free software developers, and in online commerce and service offerings. Pretty much all of these scenarios have born out.
And finally: the NSA have denied use or knowledge of this exploit, though its record in full and truthful public disclosure is markedly less than perfect. I'm not aware of anyone who's come forward with conclusive evidence that the NSA had knowledge of or used the Heartbleed vulnerability, though the FSF have posted evidence that attacks using the exploit were made from an east-European IP in at least one case, in 2013. Definitive claims that the NSA (or other agencies) did make use of such mechanisms require a high level of proof. Those claiming so without it are hurting their own credibility. Yes, you, @Will Hill and Roy Schestowitz.
While I do feel that free software options tend to be the better choice, it's very, very, VERY clear that it is not, of itself, sufficient for true security.
#nsa #heartbleed #security #credibility #fsf #freesoftware #opensource
