Thursday, December 19, 2019
Manipulating Public Opinion:
Priyanjana Bengani (Columbia Journalism Review) - Hundreds of ‘pink slime’ local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories and conservative talking points
"In increasingly popular tactic challenges conventional wisdom on the spread of electoral disinformation: the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations. An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School has discovered at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories. Of the 450 sites we discovered, at least 189 were set up as local news networks across ten states within the last twelve months by an organization called Metric Media.
Titles like the East Michigan News, Hickory Sun, and Grand Canyon Times have appeared on the web ahead of the 2020 election. These networks of sites can be used in a variety of ways: as ‘stage setting’ for events, focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can then be used for political targeting.
On October 20, the Lansing State Journal first broke the story of the network’s existence. About three dozen local news sites, owned by Metric Media, had appeared in Michigan. Further reporting by the Michigan Daily, the Guardian and the New York Times identified yet more sites. Ultimately, previous reporting has identified around 200 of these sites. Our analysis suggests that there are at least twice that number of publications across a number of related networks, of which Metric Media is just one component.
Over a two-week period starting November 26, we tapped into the RSS feeds of these 189 Metric Media sites, all of which were created this year, and found over fifteen thousand unique stories had been published (over fifty thousand when aggregated across the sites), but only about a hundred titles had the bylines of human reporters. The rest cited automated services or press releases.
Many of the stories attributed to automated services (Metric Media News Service, Local Labs News Service, etc.) relied on data releases from federal programs like the Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, Congressional Research Service, the Federal Election Commission, and the Census Bureau. Another frequently used data sources in Metric Media’s automated stories is GasBuddy, a Boston-based startup that monitors gas station prices in North America and Australia. Some of the pieces attributed to human writers also rely on public data, from a Tax Foundation study that established the cents per gallon each state collected in wine taxes, in one instance, or a builders association study that rated structural deficiencies in bridges in another.
Interspersed between stories about real estate prices and the best place to purchase premium gas based on zip code, newsier pieces appear, sometimes to quote a state senator about how the federal government should not play a role in education. Others quoted various exclusively Republican officials like US senators, chairpeople, or communications staff of the state GOP, about the impeachment process being a witch hunt or abuse of power..."
Cody Fenwick: Bill Barr finally revealed the real reason he’s such an aggressive Trump defender
"Attorney General Bill Barr has become a lightning rod of sorts in administration, standing out front and taking public hits as he does President Donald Trump’s dirty work at the Justice Department. Far from being the institutionalist even many critics of Trump hoped Barr would be, the attorney general showed his true colors when he spun Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the conclusions of the Russia investigation. Mueller and his team so objected to that presentation that they sent Barr a letter arguing that the report had been distorted to the public. Barr later said that the letter was “snitty.” Since the end of the Mueller investigation, Barr has repeatedly and consistently proven himself to be a fierce defender of the president’s interests, regardless of the consequence of U.S. institutions. So what, exactly, does Barr think he’s doing? Why is the attorney general acting like the personal attorney of the president? In a new interview this week, Barr finally gave a clear reason why, from his perspective, he acts the way he does. NBC News’ Pete Williams asked Barr about why he is so aggressively pursuing Trump’s “investigation of the investigators” — now a criminal probe of the Russia investigation run by U.S. Attorney John Durham — even after the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a lengthy report on the subject. The answer, like the whole interview, was revealing. Williams noted that critics say: “‘Well, that’s just Bill Barr defending Trump.’ Your concern about the investigation is… what? Civil libertarian?” “I think our nation was turned on its head for three years I think based on a completely bogus narrative, that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press,” Barr said, referencing the Mueller probe and the resulting press coverage. “And I think that there were gross abuses of FISA and inexplicable behavior that was intolerable in the FBI. And the attorney general’s primary responsibility is to protect against the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and make sure that it doesn’t play an improper role in our political life. That’s my responsibility, and I’m going to carry it out.” In this answer, Barr revealed that the animating force behind his crusade is the media coverage of Trump, not the law. He was particularly incensed the media coverage of the Russia investigation. He’s clearly angry, like Trump is, that it dominated so much of the president’s first term in office. He is, it seems, seeking to get retribution and to set things right.."
Priyanjana Bengani (Columbia Journalism Review) - Hundreds of ‘pink slime’ local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories and conservative talking points
"In increasingly popular tactic challenges conventional wisdom on the spread of electoral disinformation: the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations. An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School has discovered at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories. Of the 450 sites we discovered, at least 189 were set up as local news networks across ten states within the last twelve months by an organization called Metric Media.
Titles like the East Michigan News, Hickory Sun, and Grand Canyon Times have appeared on the web ahead of the 2020 election. These networks of sites can be used in a variety of ways: as ‘stage setting’ for events, focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can then be used for political targeting.
On October 20, the Lansing State Journal first broke the story of the network’s existence. About three dozen local news sites, owned by Metric Media, had appeared in Michigan. Further reporting by the Michigan Daily, the Guardian and the New York Times identified yet more sites. Ultimately, previous reporting has identified around 200 of these sites. Our analysis suggests that there are at least twice that number of publications across a number of related networks, of which Metric Media is just one component.
Over a two-week period starting November 26, we tapped into the RSS feeds of these 189 Metric Media sites, all of which were created this year, and found over fifteen thousand unique stories had been published (over fifty thousand when aggregated across the sites), but only about a hundred titles had the bylines of human reporters. The rest cited automated services or press releases.
Many of the stories attributed to automated services (Metric Media News Service, Local Labs News Service, etc.) relied on data releases from federal programs like the Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, Congressional Research Service, the Federal Election Commission, and the Census Bureau. Another frequently used data sources in Metric Media’s automated stories is GasBuddy, a Boston-based startup that monitors gas station prices in North America and Australia. Some of the pieces attributed to human writers also rely on public data, from a Tax Foundation study that established the cents per gallon each state collected in wine taxes, in one instance, or a builders association study that rated structural deficiencies in bridges in another.
Interspersed between stories about real estate prices and the best place to purchase premium gas based on zip code, newsier pieces appear, sometimes to quote a state senator about how the federal government should not play a role in education. Others quoted various exclusively Republican officials like US senators, chairpeople, or communications staff of the state GOP, about the impeachment process being a witch hunt or abuse of power..."
Cody Fenwick: Bill Barr finally revealed the real reason he’s such an aggressive Trump defender
"Attorney General Bill Barr has become a lightning rod of sorts in administration, standing out front and taking public hits as he does President Donald Trump’s dirty work at the Justice Department. Far from being the institutionalist even many critics of Trump hoped Barr would be, the attorney general showed his true colors when he spun Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the conclusions of the Russia investigation. Mueller and his team so objected to that presentation that they sent Barr a letter arguing that the report had been distorted to the public. Barr later said that the letter was “snitty.” Since the end of the Mueller investigation, Barr has repeatedly and consistently proven himself to be a fierce defender of the president’s interests, regardless of the consequence of U.S. institutions. So what, exactly, does Barr think he’s doing? Why is the attorney general acting like the personal attorney of the president? In a new interview this week, Barr finally gave a clear reason why, from his perspective, he acts the way he does. NBC News’ Pete Williams asked Barr about why he is so aggressively pursuing Trump’s “investigation of the investigators” — now a criminal probe of the Russia investigation run by U.S. Attorney John Durham — even after the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a lengthy report on the subject. The answer, like the whole interview, was revealing. Williams noted that critics say: “‘Well, that’s just Bill Barr defending Trump.’ Your concern about the investigation is… what? Civil libertarian?” “I think our nation was turned on its head for three years I think based on a completely bogus narrative, that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press,” Barr said, referencing the Mueller probe and the resulting press coverage. “And I think that there were gross abuses of FISA and inexplicable behavior that was intolerable in the FBI. And the attorney general’s primary responsibility is to protect against the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and make sure that it doesn’t play an improper role in our political life. That’s my responsibility, and I’m going to carry it out.” In this answer, Barr revealed that the animating force behind his crusade is the media coverage of Trump, not the law. He was particularly incensed the media coverage of the Russia investigation. He’s clearly angry, like Trump is, that it dominated so much of the president’s first term in office. He is, it seems, seeking to get retribution and to set things right.."
Saturday, December 07, 2019
Politics Outweigh Constitutional Duty?
Fresno Bee Editorial: Devin Nunes’ blind allegiance to Trump is the real danger to the republic
"“There are no words to describe how dangerous a slope this is for our republic.” So said Rep. Devin Nunes Wednesday on Ray Appleton’s radio talk show in Fresno. Nunes spoke about the impeachment proceedings now occurring in the House of Representatives that are focused on President Trump. Nunes, the Republican from Tulare, spent several minutes denigrating the proceedings as the “impeachment hoax.” Appleton gave him carte blanche with no challenge. But danger to the nation equally applies to Nunes’ obsession to further Trump’s re-election next year. As has been true for nearly all of Trump’s first term, Nunes has relinquished his proper role as an independent representative of Congress and has instead acted like a member of the Trump 2020 re-election team. The latest revelation deals with Ukraine, the focus of the impeachment hearings, and phone calls Nunes made." On Tuesday, House Democrats released phone records that show Nunes made multiple calls to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani and one of his associates, the now-indicted Lev Parnas. The calls came last April during a period when Giuliani was leading a pressure campaign to remove the American ambassador to Ukraine. That campaign was ultimately successful. Nunes did not immediately say what the calls were about. But the fact he had them led some top Democrats to consider formal discipline against him. The attorney for Parnas has also said Nunes had meetings with a Ukrainian prosecutor to get political dirt on Democrat Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who was once on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Nunes has said that report, first aired by CNN, is false, and he has reportedly sued the cable news channel over it. For months, Nunes has badmouthed Democrat efforts to uncover whether Trump tried to get Ukraine’s president to launch a corruption investigation into the Bidens. Doing so would inflict political damage on Joe Biden, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...As the ranking Republican on the powerful House Intelligence Committee, Nunes holds one of the top posts in Congress. Nunes should have disclosed to his committee colleagues that he had those phone calls last spring. One expert on government ethics took it a step further and said Nunes should have recused himself from the impeachment hearings, rather than acting as No. 1 Trump defender.
Fraud that is Donald Trump:
Jonathan Greenberg: Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
"In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was. The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire. At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump’s assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research. But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had enacted to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later...
...Malcolm Forbes came up with the idea of the Forbes 400 in 1981 and assigned me to spend a year traveling around the country and interviewing wealthy people and those who worked with them about one another. The most challenging sector was private real estate wealth. My grandfather had been an accountant to a number of major New York developers, so I had the advantage of knowing many of the players there. But the reporting was opaque, because so few of the relevant financial documents were public; we relied disproportionately on what people told us. As the project progressed, other experienced reporters and editors joined what would become the most successful annual special issue in Forbes history. From the beginning, Trump was obsessed. The project could offer a clear, supposedly authoritative declaration of his status as a player, and while many of the super-rich wanted to keep their names off the ranking, Trump was desperate to scale it...
...It would be decades before I learned that Forbes had been conned: In the early 1980s, Trump had zero equity in his father’s company. According to Fred’s will (portions of which appeared in a lawsuit), the father retained legal ownership of his residential empire until his death in 1999, at which point he left it to be divided between his four surviving children and some of his grandchildren. That explains why, after Trump’s companies went bankrupt in the early 1990s, he borrowed $30 million from his siblings, secured by an estimated $35 million share of his future inheritance, according to three sources in Tim O’Brien’s 2005 biography, “TrumpNation.” He could have used his own assets as collateral if he’d had any worth that amount, but he didn’t.
Fresno Bee Editorial: Devin Nunes’ blind allegiance to Trump is the real danger to the republic
"“There are no words to describe how dangerous a slope this is for our republic.” So said Rep. Devin Nunes Wednesday on Ray Appleton’s radio talk show in Fresno. Nunes spoke about the impeachment proceedings now occurring in the House of Representatives that are focused on President Trump. Nunes, the Republican from Tulare, spent several minutes denigrating the proceedings as the “impeachment hoax.” Appleton gave him carte blanche with no challenge. But danger to the nation equally applies to Nunes’ obsession to further Trump’s re-election next year. As has been true for nearly all of Trump’s first term, Nunes has relinquished his proper role as an independent representative of Congress and has instead acted like a member of the Trump 2020 re-election team. The latest revelation deals with Ukraine, the focus of the impeachment hearings, and phone calls Nunes made." On Tuesday, House Democrats released phone records that show Nunes made multiple calls to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani and one of his associates, the now-indicted Lev Parnas. The calls came last April during a period when Giuliani was leading a pressure campaign to remove the American ambassador to Ukraine. That campaign was ultimately successful. Nunes did not immediately say what the calls were about. But the fact he had them led some top Democrats to consider formal discipline against him. The attorney for Parnas has also said Nunes had meetings with a Ukrainian prosecutor to get political dirt on Democrat Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who was once on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Nunes has said that report, first aired by CNN, is false, and he has reportedly sued the cable news channel over it. For months, Nunes has badmouthed Democrat efforts to uncover whether Trump tried to get Ukraine’s president to launch a corruption investigation into the Bidens. Doing so would inflict political damage on Joe Biden, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...As the ranking Republican on the powerful House Intelligence Committee, Nunes holds one of the top posts in Congress. Nunes should have disclosed to his committee colleagues that he had those phone calls last spring. One expert on government ethics took it a step further and said Nunes should have recused himself from the impeachment hearings, rather than acting as No. 1 Trump defender.
To advance the cause of getting at the truth, Nunes should come clean on the phone calls and tell the House what was discussed. He should also provide travel records to debunk the charge that he met in Vienna last December with the Ukrainian to get information that might hurt Biden; Nunes says he was in Libya and Malta.Short of that, his actions continue to reduce him to being a mere partisan — the label with which he loves to tarnish his Democrat colleagues. Meanwhile, his 22nd District has critical needs, like easing the trade war challenges with China for farmers and helping those struggling in poverty. On such issues, Nunes has been absent; he’s been traveling to Europe."
Fraud that is Donald Trump:
Jonathan Greenberg: Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
"In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was. The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire. At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump’s assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research. But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had enacted to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later...
...Malcolm Forbes came up with the idea of the Forbes 400 in 1981 and assigned me to spend a year traveling around the country and interviewing wealthy people and those who worked with them about one another. The most challenging sector was private real estate wealth. My grandfather had been an accountant to a number of major New York developers, so I had the advantage of knowing many of the players there. But the reporting was opaque, because so few of the relevant financial documents were public; we relied disproportionately on what people told us. As the project progressed, other experienced reporters and editors joined what would become the most successful annual special issue in Forbes history. From the beginning, Trump was obsessed. The project could offer a clear, supposedly authoritative declaration of his status as a player, and while many of the super-rich wanted to keep their names off the ranking, Trump was desperate to scale it...
...It would be decades before I learned that Forbes had been conned: In the early 1980s, Trump had zero equity in his father’s company. According to Fred’s will (portions of which appeared in a lawsuit), the father retained legal ownership of his residential empire until his death in 1999, at which point he left it to be divided between his four surviving children and some of his grandchildren. That explains why, after Trump’s companies went bankrupt in the early 1990s, he borrowed $30 million from his siblings, secured by an estimated $35 million share of his future inheritance, according to three sources in Tim O’Brien’s 2005 biography, “TrumpNation.” He could have used his own assets as collateral if he’d had any worth that amount, but he didn’t.
The most revelatory document describing Trump’s true net worth in the early ’80s was a 1981 report from the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. O’Brien obtained a copy for his book. Trump had applied for an Atlantic City casino license, and regulators were able to review his tax returns and personal and corporate debt, giving them the most accurate picture of his finances. They found that he had an income of about $100,000 a year, while his 1979 tax returns showed a $3.4 million taxable loss. Trump’s personal assets consisted of a $1 million trust fund that Fred Trump provided to each of his children and grandchildren, a few checking accounts with about $400,000 in them and a 1977 Mercedes 450SL. Nowhere did the report list an ownership stake in the Trump Organization’s residential apartments. Trump also possessed a few parcels of valuable but highly leveraged real estate, financed with $22.5 million in debt, all of it secured by his father’s assets. He did not own a safe deposit box or stocks in publicly traded companies. In sum, Trump was worth less than $5 million, not the $100 million that I reported in the first Forbes 400.... "
