Fake News
January 9, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The Washington Post, today: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning. The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics
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December 17, 2022 — John Hinderaker
For many years I have followed, off and on, the New York Times Corrections section. In years past, there were some doozies. You could search our site for many, many instances. This is a personal favorite from 2002, when Power Line was new: An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea
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December 7, 2022 — Steven Hayward
There’s been a lot of news in the last few weeks about how artificial intelligence bots are on the cusp of being able to write prose, poetry, and music as well as or better than humans. Color me skeptical—art is not chess—but there’s one instance I can think of where even a primitive AI system would be better than the current human being attempting the job: President Biden’s press secretary
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October 8, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Earlier this week Axios reported on the Democrats’ real fake news gambit: “Writers for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states[.]” It’s an interesting and well-researched story written up in the dumbed down Axios form by Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley. They found that David Brock was a key
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August 24, 2022 — Steven Hayward
One popular theory about the left’s obsession with racism is that they are the largest practitioners of it themselves. To wit, this report from National Public Radio: People of color at ‘New York Times’ get lower ratings in job reviews, union says An analysis of comprehensive data for roughly 1,000 The New York Times employees conducted by members of the union that represents its newsroom found that Black and Latino
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August 22, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Remember how the Washington Post described in a headline one of the Islamic radical terrorists we killed as an “austere religious scholar”? Well, some geniuses on Twitter have imagined how the Post, CNN, and other mainstream media would report on Darth Vader, and it’s fantastic: You know this is true.
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August 12, 2022 — Steven Hayward
By now I expect everyone has heard of the attack on Salman Rushdie. Andy Ngo notes: And yet here’s how the New York Times reports it:
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July 12, 2022 — John Hinderaker
It seems increasingly clear that the tale of the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim who had to travel across the border to Indiana for an abortion is fiction, notwithstanding its retelling by Joe Biden. Ohio’s Attorney General now comes forward to say that there is no evidence of such a rape–punishable by life imprisonment in Ohio–being committed. Yost also apparently said that it would be legal for a 10-year-old rape victim
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July 10, 2022 — John Hinderaker
We wrote here and here about the story of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who had to travel to Indiana to terminate her presidency pregnancy. No one has been able to verify the tale, and at this point it seems pretty clear that it was made up by an abortionist who spends much of her time lobbying the press in favor of abortion. Megan Fox has done the work
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July 9, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Babylon Bee has competition. The Bee is famous for having its satirical posts “fact-checked,” and has even been banned from Twitter from time to time. Here, it is the Associated Press that brings its big fact-checking guns to bear on a joke, this time not from the Bee: Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan who was assassinated on Friday, did not tweet about Hillary Clinton the day
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July 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here about the sensational story of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion. The story, phoned into an Indiana newspaper by an abortionist who seems to spend most of her time promulgating pro-abortion propaganda in the press, spread around the world almost instantaneously. But there is little reason to believe it is true. No one, including Snopes, has been able
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July 7, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Over the last week, we have been barraged with stories about a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was unable to obtain an abortion in that state and had to cross the line into Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. If you Google “10 year old abortion Ohio,” you get 33,100,000 results. The story is everywhere, internationally. But did it happen? It turns out that the story originated with an abortionist
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June 21, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Recalling C.S. Lewis’s remark that people should only read the sports pages in newspapers because at least half of the news in the sports page would be true, let’s look at the latest in news fakery. No sooner does Biden fall off his bike than some wisenheimer creates this fake headline: Fortunately, as RedState reports, we had the all-self-important “fact checkers” on the job to make sure no one was
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June 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Only hours away from the start of the prime time televised Watergate January 6 Committee hearings (drinking game to come in a separate post) under the chairmanship of Sam Ervin Bennie Thompson (who?), we have news out of the Washington Post about the latest episode from the Millennial Power Struggle. This requires a preface. One of my favorite Monty Python sketches from 50 years ago ran with the idea of
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June 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday we pondered the thesis that radical prosecutor Chesa Boudin was recalled because San Francisco is just too darned conservative, dontchaknow. Today’s bubble-headed leftists are mad at the media, for saying that the recall is a “message to national Democrats.” Behold New York University law professor Noah Rosenblum: I’m worried about Rosenblum. He just might stumble on our greatest plot, which is our infiltration of the New York Times with
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May 18, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Today is offering a surfeit of feel-good news, but this one came in too late for the pervious post. The Washington Post is just up with the breaking story that the Biden Administration has decided to “pause” (but almost certainly shut down) the mis-named “Disinformation Governance Board”: Just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being “paused,” according to multiple employees at DHS, capping a back-and-forth week
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May 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
This much: Rasmussen finds that “[e]ighty percent (80%) of voters believe ‘fake news’ is a serious problem in the media, including 56% who say the ‘fake news’ problem is Very Serious.” Not surprisingly, 89% of Republicans think fake news in the media is a serious problem, but 75% of Democrats also say that fake news in the media is at least a “somewhat serious” problem. Did Donald Trump ever say
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