The godfather of fake news
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
What made their fake news worse, is that it was propagated by supposedly trustworthy sources, in a serious tone. This guy seems like such a clown that you'd only "believe" him, if you're already predisposed to think these things anyway.
Media not doing good enough job to scrutinize public figures and officials are fundamentally different from media that creates content that is intentionally misleading or fake. One is screw up and the other one is fraud.
Are you going to be equally mad to a friend of yours who hears that your SO is cheating on you and tells you what he heard(and the story turns out to be incorrect) and a friend who makes up a story about your SO cheating on you?
The notion that the media had no clue the official claims were thin seems extremely dubious to me. They knew. Even the fact that they didn't make a big deal out of not getting UN approval, or dismissing any doubters as unpatriotic suggests otherwise. It was simply a case of not wanting to upset their owners who in many cases stood to make a profit off the war, not wanting to seem unpatriotic, wanting to maintain "access" to high-level officials and going to the same parties as many of the officials they are supposedly watching over, (a room full of reporters was laughing even as Bush was making "jokes" about not being able to find WMDs), so there was simply no incentive to report the truth.
You can see it to this day, it's not like oopps, the media has learned from Iraq. They've been as gushy over military adventurism in Libya, Syria etc.
Luckily, the debate around Yemen is changing somewhat, if very slowly.
It reminds me of two Czech cinematographers who made a "documentary" - Cesky sen - where the premise was that they made fake advertising for a new fake supermarket chain with things like large TVs for 5$ and so on, and then they "exposed the consumerism" of people "stupid enough to believe it" to come in droves for the mock opening.
I find this type of moralizing elitist and wrong. Garbage in, garbage out is true for humans too. If you deliberately feed people misinformation, then you have no right to complain (or feel morally superior) about bad decisions they make.
We have had, what, maybe a few critical thinkers in the past couple thousand years. On a good day, maybe.
If anything, what typifies the human experience is that we are gullible, easily bored, lazy, impatient, selfish, greedy, stubborn, emotional, blunt, bossy, aggressive, critical, passive, fearful, close-minded, and disorganised.
Would it be fair to gaslight then blame the victim?
https://politics.theonion.com/congress-threatens-to-leave-d-...
From their About Us page:
"DISCLAIMER: America’s Last Line of Defense is a satirical publication that uses the imagination of liberals to expose the extreme bigotry and hate and subsequent blind gullibility that festers in right-wing nutjobs. We present fiction as fact and our sources don’t actually exist. Names that represent actual people and places are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and do not in any way depict reality.
In other words, if you believe this crap you’re a real dumbass."
Where it doesn't work is to show how people are stupid, while feeding them wrong (but plausible from their POV) information. Yes, people are sometimes stupid, but if you want to showcase that, I think there is plenty of material to work with, you don't have to make things up.
It's like when police makes up a crime by entraping somebody, who wouldn't do the crime otherwise. It is not helping society in any positive way.
The Onion was wrong to publish that article. Now the poor people who are not able to recognize satire will be left with an impression that America's crumbling infrastructure is a bigger threat to American way of life than Al-Qaeda. This threatens the funding for important counter-terrorism activities of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
Even the onion has the responsibility. If they would create articles and people started to believe them, they would have to tell them that it is 'just' satire.
I don't even get it that this 'fuckedup' behaviour is justified by a mental model of yours which decides in your opinion what is 'over the top' and what not.
I love satire, dark humor etc. but i'm only expressing those things in an environment, which understands it AND which is not hurt by it.
And even when i'm very irritated that someone just not get it, IT still doesn't give me the right to laugh about them.
Whom i to judge? As long as it doesn't affect me?
I think Americans should do the same thing as Germans did. They burned the old building so they had a reason to modernize it. It looks real snappy now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_dome
Wait. Are you trying to imply that Christopher Blair wrote that article for The Onion? I don't think that's right, is it?
If that wasn't your intention, why not link to an article actually by Christopher Blair and we can judge his writing on it's own merits, or lack thereof.
Particularly damning is the "The birth of the term" infobox, where authors complain >The term's meaning becomes fuzzy - it's also used to criticise opinion, spin and propaganda - while further adding to the fuzziness of term "fake news" by mis-using it for satirical website.
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[1] https://realorsatire.com/thelastlineofdefense-org/ and other.
people are even less able to recognize fake-news which were put forward by their own governments. In the West there are many puppet masters too that pose as investigative journalists (e.g. @pwnallthethings) but are most certainly in the pocket of intelligence community.
Some noteworthy fake news to remember:
- Saddam's Bombs? We'll Find Them (2003): https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/opinion/saddam-s-bombs-we-ll-find-them.html
- Why We Know Iraq Is Lying (2003): https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/opinion/why-we-know-iraq-is-lying.htmlIt's like with any other prank. If it does a real harm, it is not funny anymore.