Poynter doesn't ask about CNN
Facebook execs recently held a little "on-the-record shindig for media and tech reporters in New York City" in which they discussed the technical and policy changes they've made to combat what the elites and once-and-future gatekeepers perceive as fake news.
During a question-and-answer session, CNN reporter Oliver Darcy asked a question: "Why does Facebook allow InfoWars, a regular purveyor of hateful and damaging conspiracy theories, to use the platform as a channel to disseminate its odious misinformation?"
"I guess just for being false that doesn't violate the community standards," was one answer from the recently appointed head of News Feed John Hegeman.
Well that answer seems to have set off The Poynter Institute's Alexios Mantzarlis, a former UN propagandist who heads up Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network. It prompted him to ask some questions of his own in a piece in which he notes that InfoWars has been flagged by fact-checkers — of which Poynter is one — as distributing "false content" and suggesting that InfoWars should be banned from advertising and monetizing on Facebook.
Who is Poynter, you might ask. We've written about them before. It is the world's leading journalism "instructor, convener and resource for anyone who aspires to engage and inform citizens." As such, Poynter touches every American journalist in mainstream media — and most of the world's — in various ways. It happens through its control over the standard curriculum, school instruction and influence on journalism schools and within the industry. On its website, Poynter claims:
| We teach leadership, ethical decision-making and fact-checking; we teach editing, writing, reporting and digital media skills; we teach those in broadcast, print, online and mobile; we teach those trying to remake their organizations and those trying to remake their journalistic skills set. |
What it doesn't teach, apparently, are the concepts of liberty enshrined in the 1st Amendment or how to really spot bias. If it did, Mantzarlis would point out the hypocrisy in Darcy's question.
Without even trying we've caught CNN lying as many as 2,000 times a month, by our very unscientific analysis. The network spends all day every day promoting the false notion that Russia colluded with President Donald Trump to get him elected. And its hosts and guests utter the most hateful and vile things imaginable about him. The completely unhinged CNN contributor John Brennan— spymaster under Barack Obama, admitted communist during the Cold War and likely one of the instigators of the phony "Trump dossier" — called Trump a traitor just this week and suggested the GOP should expel him from office. CNN treats Trump even worse than the mainstream media treated Ronald Reagan, and that's saying something.
Aside from the fact that if Facebook is a neutral platform — as it claims — it should "allow" anyone to post their information whether the muckity-mucks at Poynter like it or not, one would think that an organization that purports to support journalism would want as many viewpoints as possible to be "allowed" in the public sphere.
There are really three questions that need to be asked:
- Why does Facebook allow CNN, a regular purveyor of hateful and damaging conspiracy theories, to use the platform as a channel to disseminate its odious misinformation?"
- Why does Poynter hold people in such low esteem that it thinks they aren't smart enough to discern for themselves what is fake and what is not and thus have need of some nanny organizations deciding what they should see and hear?
- And why does Poynter (and CNN) so fear InfoWars, a website with only 3.1 million unique visitors a month in a world of 7.6 billion people?
A lot of sound and fury erupted after Trump's appearance alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, so some little gems got overlooked. Like this one, from Trump on the indictments of 12 Russians for hacking the DNC server:
| Let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server; why haven't' they taken the server. Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that. I've been asking that for months and months and I've been Tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying? |
Those fine folks at Politifact didn't miss it, however, and labeled Trump's claim that the FBI never saw the server as false. Politico called the statement "unmoored from reality." So what's the truth?
The truth is the DNC denied the FBI access to the servers, so Trump is correct. Former FBI Director James Comey admitted as much in Congressional testimony, though it should be noted that Comey has been caught, shall we say, stretching the truth in some of his testimony. But here's what he said under questioning:
| Well we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system. |
Later he said:
| [A]though we got the forensics from the pros that they hired which — again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this — my folks tell me was appropriate substitute. |
So Politifact was wrong again. Trump's statement was the opposite of false. It was true, and Politifact — used as one of Facebook's fact-checkers — is once again publishing fake news.
And speaking of those "pros" working on the DNC's servers…
Crowdstrike, the "pros" hired by the DNC to clean its servers of the effects of Russian hackers, claimed more than year ago in a blog post that after the DNC retained its services it "immediately identified" and took action against the Russian intruders.
As The Daily Caller notes:
| DNC officials and security experts told The Washington Post in June 2016 that all hackers were expelled from the DNC's network in a "major computer cleanup campaign" earlier that month. "When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network," Wasserman Schultz told The Post. The New York Times expanded on CrowdStrike's cleanup campaign in a December 2016 article, saying the security firm replaced the DNC's entire computer system "in total secrecy" within six weeks of being retained in April 2016. "All laptops were turned in and the hard drives wiped clean, with the uninfected information on them imaged to new drives," The Times reported. |
But the indictment of 12 Russian hackers handed down by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tells a different story.
Again from TDC:
| The indictment, filed by the office of Special Council Robert Mueller, reveals that CrowdStrike was unsuccessful in expelling intruders from the DNC's networks in June and that a malicious program "remained on the DNC network until in or around October 2016." The hackers also gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service around September 2016, which enabled them to steal data from the DNC by creating backups, or snapshots, of the DNC's cloud-based systems. |
The boss told you a little about Crowdstrike more than a year ago.
And this is the company the FBI is relying on to provide it with prosecutable evidence on the DNC hack?
Hillary Clinton claims Brett Kavanaugh's nomination will bring back slavery
In a speech before the American Federation of Teachers last week, twice-failed and likely future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — or as we've come to fondly know her, the Witch from Chappaqua — warned of dire consequencesshould Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's pick for associate justice of the Supreme Court, be confirmed to the bench:
| "Let me say a word about the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court," Clinton said in her speech. "This nomination holds out the threat of devastating consequences for workers rights, civil rights, LGBT rights, women's rights — including those to make our own health decisions." "It is a blatant attempt by this administration to shift the balance of the Court for decades and to reverse decades of progress," Clinton continued. "I used to worry that they [the Republicans] wanted to turn the clock back to the 1950s. Now I worry they want to turn it back to the 1850s," Clinton said. |
What was going on in the 1850s? Well, women couldn't vote and black people were enslaved. There was also no income tax, Abraham Lincoln hadn't yet started a war that would kill 650,000 people, there was no social media or CNN and there was no Hillary Clinton, so it wasn't all bad. But I digress.
Hillary, being a former lawyer and all, certainly knows that Kavanaugh cannot roll us back to the 1850s because he can't roll back the 13th and 14thAmendments — even if they were ratified under dubious circumstances. Besides, the social justice warriors on Twitter would never let us even propose a plan to bring back slavery, much less create a plan, even if we wanted to. We don't, by the way, though we'd probably be better off if most women didn't vote.
All Kavanaugh wants to do — ostensibly, at least — is return the Supreme Court to a time when it sought to restrain government to its enumerated powers and cease its practice of the last 100 years or so of legislating from the bench.
The left has used the courts to create laws that could not be passed by Congress or the states because they went against the will of the electorate. Hillary — and all of the left — sees that practice ending if Kavanaugh is confirmed. That's what they fear most.
I think they're overreacting. The court has been activist almost since its inception. It's practice of judicial review – something not granted it under the Constitution — is judicial activism.
Recall that ominous warning from Thomas Jefferson:
"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one."
Finally a leftist understands the 10th Amendment
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is threatening to sue if the Supreme Court rolls back Roe v. Wade. From his statement:
| For years, what the Republicans in the Senate have said, "well, we don't need New York law because we have Roe v. Wade and nobody's crazy enough to try to roll back Roe v. Wade." Yeah, accept the man they nominated for President of the United States who wound up winning the election. But that was always the answer, you don't need a New York law. We have Roe v. Wade. Well now we know we're not guaranteed Roe v. Wade. And the New York law, my friends does not currently go as far as Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wadehas the protections that we now rely on in New York. We never passed the New York State law because we relied on Roe v. Wade and everyone assumed it would always be there and because the Republicans wouldn't pass it, using that as an excuse. We now need to codify Roe v. Wade, which will actually increase the protections in New York. God forbid they do what they intend to do. I want to get it done before the Supreme Court does that because I don't want any gaps in a woman's right to protection and we have a better legal case when the Supreme Court acts because I will sue when the Supreme Court acts and I want the New York State law in place. |
Before the Supremes fabricated a national right to murder babies, such topics were considered to be a state issue, where it belonged. Abortion would currently be illegal in many, if not most, states if not for Roe v. Wade. That means that hundreds of thousands of babies never given a chance would still be with us.
But I'm quite curious who it is that Cuomo thinks he's going to sue in order to overcome a SCOTUS decision.
— Jay Baker
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