Twitter and AP are fake news

Twitter and AP are fake news

If you've ever wondered why it is that all coverage by the mainstream seems essentially the same, all you have to do is take a look at Twitter.

Twitter has become a mainstream press echo chamber in which the self-important journalists with blue check marks beside their names decide what stories are important and what is the proper politically-correct slant to put on them. Independent journalism in the mainstream media — that journalism where editors in the newsrooms were driving the journalists to do their best work and "scoop" the other media outlets rather than conspire with them — has long gone.




Twitter has become the lifeblood of professional journalists. Researchers Shannon McGregor of the University of Utah and Logan Molyneux of Temple University engaged in a study to find out whether that's a bad thing.

As the Columbia Journalism Review points out:

"Our results indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment," the researchers write. "For journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications." Among those implications, they argue, is that journalists can get caught up in a kind of pack mentality in which a story is seen as important because other journalists on Twitter are talking about it, rather than because it is newsworthy. The researchers argue it can also distort the way a story is reported. For example, when the photo of Chris Christie looking uncomfortable while standing behind Donald Trump in 2016 was published by the AP, Twitter exploded with jokes, and multiple news outlets wrote about it, but those familiar with Christie said there was nothing unusual about his expression.

But one aspect of the study was interesting. Two-hundred Twitter-using journalists used as subjects for the research were given tweets with headlines from the Associated Press website and what they supposed were random tweets that contained AP headlines but were designed to look like tweets from anonymous sources. When asked to rate the newsworthiness of the tweets, journalists who spend a lot of time on Twitter ranked the "anonymous" tweets as more newsworthy than the AP stories; indicating even mainstream journalists recognize that AP is fake news.

Russian bots still at work

Despite Twitter's efforts to crack down of fake accounts — in which Twitter is purging conservatives and alternative media from its platform — the researchers found that more than 80 percent of the users and accounts alleged to have spread "misinformation" during the 2016 election are still active.

"Twitter has absolutely taken some measures to take some sites down, but they have not taken the vast majority of what we looked at down," one of the researchers told Politico.

The study also noted that more 30 mainstream news outlets — including NPR, The Washington Post and BuzzFeed — had posted stories with embedded tweets from the Russian "troll farm," Internet Research Agency.

Fake Dead Sea Scrolls

The Museum of the Bible opened to much fanfare in Washington, D.C.,last year It is the largest privately-funded museum in the city. Its funding comes from 51,000 donors, the largest of which is Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts chain founded by the conservative Christian Green family.

Among the Green family's donations are about 1,000 biblical artifacts from its collection of 40,000 ancient artifacts, which is said to be among the world's largest biblical collection in the world. The Green's donations include items from Dead Sea scrolls to ancient copies of the Bible thought to be more than 1,000 years old.

But it turns out some of them are fakes. Last week the museum revealed that five of its most highly-coveted Dead Sea scrolls are forgeries, and other scroll relics from its collection may also be phonies.

As ScienceAlert.com reports:

According to the museum, independent tests by researchers in Germany indicate five of the institution's 16 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments "show characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin". "Though we had hoped the testing would render different results, this is an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artefacts," explains the museum's chief curatorial officer, Jeffrey Kloha.

It's not known how much the Museum of the Bible paid for its forged fragments, but estimates run into the millions.

The five identified forgeries have been removed from display and replaced with three others. But the authenticity of those has also been questioned.

This is not the first controversy surrounding the Green family's collection. Last year Hobby Lobby agreed to pay a $3 million fine and forfeit thousands of ancient Iraqi artifacts that federal prosecutors claim were smuggled illegally from the Middle East.

Who's really in that "migrant caravan"

To hear the mainstream media tell it, the migrants currently marching northward in anticipation of picking vegetables, waiting tables in Mexican restaurants, making up hotel room beds and roofing houses in the United States are simply everyday Honduran/El Salvadoran/Guatemalan moms, pops and kids — but mostly moms and kids — eager to march 1,400 miles for a better life. And while there are some of those in the group who, as Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández described it, were fooled into joining the northward trek, many more of them are men with criminal histories and past deportations who are aggressively demanding the U.S. take them in.

Judicial Watch found some of them in the Guatemalan town of Chiquimula. The men were aged 17 to 40 and some of them were chanting "vamos para allá Trump!" (We're coming Trump) as they clenched their fists in the air while marching.

"We need money and food," said a 29-year-old man who made the trek with his 21-year-old brother.

Another man in his 30s contradicted media reports that caravan participants are fleeing violence and fear for their life. "We're not scared," he said waving his index finger as others around him nodded in agreement. "We're going to the United States to get jobs."

Guatemalan intelligence officials confirmed that the caravan that originated in the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula includes a multitude of Special Interest Aliens (SIA) from Africa, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India, as well as other criminal elements and gang members.

The fake news AP is reporting that about 1,700 of the original group of migrants have given up, turned around and gone home, but many vowed to drag their kids all the way to the U.S. despite the obstacles.