Slow News Day posted:

Going back a bit, in response to the "WaPo is owned by an oligarch" thing, interestingly enough Washington Post actually does quite a remarkable job of not giving Bezos preferential treatment.

Josef bugman posted:

Do you think that stuff like the below opinion piece is an example of "not giving our owner preferential treatment"?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/09/think-twice-before-changing-tax-rules-soak-billionaires/

Do you also believe that "oh I have no actual say in what happens, I merely own a controlling stake and have no idea what is occurring" is accurate? If you do believe this, if you honest to God believe that there is more context or a greater understanding or something else I would dearly love to hear it. I'd love to live in a world where the person who owns the newspaper doesn't, even indirectly, have influence over what it publishes.

I get the feeling that "this is a larger organisation" interacts a lot with "and hence is more trustworthy". I am not sure that this is an accurate read, not least because different aspects of a thing can be wrong and create problems.

Josef bugman posted:

Do you think that stuff like the below opinion piece is an example of "not giving our owner preferential treatment"?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/09/think-twice-before-changing-tax-rules-soak-billionaires/

Josef bugman posted:

Do you also believe that "oh I have no actual say in what happens, I merely own a controlling stake and have no idea what is occurring" is accurate? If you do believe this, if you honest to God believe that there is more context or a greater understanding or something else I would dearly love to hear it. I'd love to live in a world where the person who owns the newspaper doesn't, even indirectly, have influence over what it publishes.

I get the feeling that "this is a larger organisation" interacts a lot with "and hence is more trustworthy". I am not sure that this is an accurate read, not least because different aspects of a thing can be wrong and create problems.

fool of sound posted:

It's not really possible to discuss or analyze stories are that are not written about events that dubiously might have occurred. That way madness lies; the justification can be used as evidence for literally anything.

fool of sound posted:

evidence of media outlets denying conspiracy theories that were later vindicated

ram dass in hell posted:

David Byler and Yan Wu posted:

Some of these theories are transparently absurd: The Holocaust was not exaggerated, mass shootings were not faked, and Satan worshippers don’t control the government.

But the least believable conspiracy theories can have the biggest consequences. Holocaust deniers and believers in “false flag” theories often support political violence and exhibit sociopathic personality traits. Many of the rioters involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol showed some allegiance to QAnon — a belief system built on conspiracy theories about Satanists.

Most Americans aren’t drawn to these dark ideas — instead, they more casually rely on false theories to explain tragedies including terrorist attacks or presidential deaths; or they enjoy nasty rumors about their political opponents. The belief in one false theory does not necessarily mean the belief in an alternate reality. But it sometimes can.

As Enders told us: "The political and psychological and social motivations that fuel beliefs in conspiracy theories are shared among all people.”

quote:

quote:

Some conspiracy theories are like astrology — entertaining nonsense that ultimately doesn’t hurt anyone. But some are bizarre, sinister or downright offensive. Which of these statements, if any, is correct?

A) School shootings, such as those in Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla., are “false flag” attacks perpetrated by the government.
B) The number of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been exaggerated on purpose.
C) Satanic sex traffickers control the government.
D) None of the above

The "correct" answer is D. The cheap shot at astrology accomplishes nothing. There is no more proof for the existence of a graviton particle than there is for the Zodiac, and its inclusion here is another example of the authors true purpose for creating the article: to make the reader feel smart and elevated over the deluded fools who believe "nonsense".

A) is false
B) doesn't say who it's been exaggerated by or for what purpose.
C) is true, depending on your definitions of satanic, sex traffickers, and control. Feels like a gotcha question, as in, "there's no proof that the sex traffickers that control the government are practicing members of the church of satan!"
...
Can you spot the re-wording of the holocaust question and who it leaves out? And it's telling that now we're no longer just talking about satanic sex traffickers, it's now satanic pedophiles. These little shifts in wording occur throughout the quiz and the statistics presented, as part of the opinion-shaping efforts of the authors and their publisher.

fool of sound posted:

We're not debating the secret histories of 9/11 here stop.

fool of sound posted:

I'd rather we focus on media coverage rather than the fundamental truth of 9/11 or whatever. I'm doing some light skimming of media coverage (among other, less in-depth pieces) surrounding revealed conspiracies, and I'm not finding evidence of media outlets denying conspiracy theories that were later vindicated tbh. Actual exposed conspiracies are, at best, tangentially related to fairly generalized conspiracy theories. Can anyone find a case of media outlets denying a conspiracy that turned out to be provably true?

quote:

In short, two things can be true simultaneously: The DNC tried to help Clinton’s campaign, but this did not have much impact on whether Clinton won the nomination.

Slow News Day posted:

You linked to an opinion piece, which anyone can write. Wapo also publishes opinion pieces from Republican authors and politicians. That does not make WaPo a conservative news outlet.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Your evidence that they did either, please.

quote:

That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed. Tenet picked up the white phone to Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you,’” Tenet remembers. “It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now. We have to get there.’”

Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. (George W. Bush was on a trip to Boston.) “Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

“What happened?” I ask Cofer Black. “Yeah. What did happen?” he replies. “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.” Remarkably, in her memoir, Condi Rice writes of the July 10 warnings: “My recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day.” Having raised threat levels for U.S. personnel overseas, she adds: “I thought we were doing what needed to be done.” (When I asked whether she had any further response to the comments that Tenet, Black and others made to me, her chief of staff said she stands by the account in her memoir.) Inexplicably, although Tenet brought up this meeting in his closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commission, it was never mentioned in the committee’s final report.

And there was one more chilling warning to come. At the end of July, Tenet and his deputies gathered in the director’s conference room at CIA headquarters. “We were just thinking about all of this and trying to figure out how this attack might occur,” he recalls. “And I’ll never forget this until the day I die. Rich Blee looked at everybody and said, ‘They’re coming here.’ And the silence that followed was deafening. You could feel the oxygen come out of the room. ‘They’re coming here.’”

Tenet, who is perhaps the agency’s most embattled director ever, can barely contain himself when talking about the unheeded warnings he says he gave the White House. Twirling an unlit cigar and fidgeting in his chair at our studio in downtown Washington, D.C., he says with resignation: “I can only tell you what we did and what we said.” And when asked about his own responsibility for the attacks on 9/11, he is visibly distraught. “There was never a moment in all this time when you blamed yourself?” I ask him. He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, look, there … I still look at the ceiling at night about a lot of things. And I’ll keep them to myself forever. But we’re all human beings.

Main Paineframe posted:

It's actually a lot of work to go through a massive amount of documents, comparing each and every one side by side to make sure that there aren't any differences or manipulations whatsoever.

Harik posted:

This was dropped in this thread as a given fact but it's completely and unequivocally false.

You can verify documents are byte-identical if they're uploaded in their entirety and text-identical if they've been reformatted. If even a single word has been changed it will show up instantly and now you can conclusively state the documents have been tampered with.

This can be done in seconds by anyone remotely competent, and can be batched over a large document trove/email server with minimal effort.

Nix Panicus posted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...?outputType=amp

Even the WaPo article that tries its best to continue to discredit the 'conspiracy theory' that the DNC had its thumb on the scales is forced to conclude with the following:

fool of sound posted:

That's not really what I'm asking for here. It certainly reads as damage control, but I'm referring to ram dass' defense of belief in conspiracy theories because of the existence of actual exposed conspiracies, and my inability to find media outlets denying conspiracies that were later exposed.

Also, that article is an opinion piece, published via a program in which academics volunteer to write articles. It's not even subject to their normal editorial board. It's definitely a bad article, in which the author is equating "Clinton's victory is entirely based on debate timings" with "The primary was unfair".

fool of sound posted:

That's not really what I'm asking for here. I'm referring to ram dass' defense of belief in conspiracy theories because of the existence of actual exposed conspiracies, and my inability to find media outlets denying conspiracies that were later exposed.

Nix Panicus posted:

Here's an open source tool if anyone is interested

https://winmerge.org/?lang=en

A Buttery Pastry posted:

What do you think about the fact that true conspiracy theories, by their very nature, are like the least likely thing to get any sort of coverage at all? As I mentioned in an earlier post, a true conspiracy of the sort covered under the blanket term "conspiracy theory" means you have an actual powerful group of people who do not want the truth to come out, and it is in no way in their interest to have ANY coverage of those conspiracy theories. The media coming out with "this story is absolutely not true" is like a last ditch effort in a world where traditional media has lost its hold on people (see: "Epstein didn't kill himself), not something it would ever have had a reason to do while traditional media still had a firm hold on the narrative.

Nix Panicus posted:

Once again, the Fox News defense in action. Sure WaPo used their platform to promote this guy's opinions, but nobody would confuse opinion piece reporting with actual news reporting, right?

fool of sound posted:

Confusing opinion pieces for actual reporting is indicative of poor media literacy and is one of the things that this thread specifically discusses.

fool of sound posted:

I would say that "there's no evidence for my theory because it's being covered up" is conspiracy 101 and isn't a worldview that leads to people believing true things. This isn't to say that conspiracies do not exist. Clearly they do, they get exposed every so often. Suspecting things can be valid.

fool of sound posted:

Supposing that the absense of evidence is itself evidence is not.

Nix Panicus posted:

Oh wait, I thought of a thing the media (or at least the 'respectable' part of it) decried as an idiot conspiracy theory that later turned out to be true. Hunter Biden's laptop. Its not a major conspiracy, sure, but it is something the media strenuously claimed was fake and made up and only right wing sources reported it.

https://www.yahoo.com/now/york-times-quietly-deletes-claim-021800355.html

Perhaps unsurprisingly its hard to find any 'respectable' sources reporting on the validity of the laptop story in the sea of right wing publications crowing about their vindication

Also, remember the Russian bounties story?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...?outputType=amp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...?outputType=amp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/01/only-people-who-are-dismissing-russia-bounties-intel-taliban-russia-trump/?outputType=amp < I like this story the best

Yeah that probably was completely made up

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/remember-those-russian-bounties-dead-u-s-troops-biden-admin-n1264215

But don't worry, the Times has both sides of the story covered. It was just a report taken out of context that then became a national news story that nobody really followed up on

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/politics/russian-bounties-nsc.html

socialsecurity posted:

What about your link proves Hunters laptop was real?

quote:

In March, U.S. intelligence agencies issued a report concluding that Russian intelligence proxies worked to push anti-Biden narratives during the campaign that included “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations.” In some quarters, this created the impression that the intelligence agencies have concluded that the laptop is a fake, but the report does not state such a conclusion.

In researching the book, I spoke to a person who had had independent access to Hunter Biden’s emails. This person was not in a position to compare the leaked emails word-for-word with the originals, but they said Hunter Biden had in fact received an email containing the “10 held by H for the big guy?” language and another from a Burisma representative thanking him for the opportunity to meet Joe Biden.
I also obtained a cache of the purported laptop files from people working with the right-wing operative Steve Bannon, one of the people behind the original leak. I was able to confirm that some other parts of the material are genuine. Two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden in the months leading up to his father’s 2019 campaign launch confirmed to me the authenticity of emails in the cache. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of being embroiled in a global controversy.

Finally, emails in the cache matched emails released to me by the National Property Board of Sweden, a Swedish government agency, under the country’s freedom of information law. (For a time, Hunter Biden had an office inside the complex that houses the Swedish embassy.)

While at least some of the laptop material is genuine, it remains possible that fake material is mixed in.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Sure, but that doesn't address my point. You're asking about media coverage of actual conspiracies that were treated as "conspiracy theories", but the basic requirement of those is a powerful organization of sorts suppressing the knowledge of the conspiracy. If the conspiracy theory is true, then the conspiracy has the power to suppress stories about it. You're asking for something that is close to definitionally impossible to provide.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

This is not at all what I'm doing, and if you're getting that from my posts I would encourage you to reread them. I am not saying the absence of evidence is evidence of anything, I am saying you're asking for evidence of something that should not exist within the framework of conspiracy theories. At least not under a near-hegemonic traditional media system. The current breakdown of that system does open up the possibility, but then we have to contend with the fact that it is relatively recent and any conspiracies revealed are unlikely to have been confirmed. We might very well have had stories in the media that actively deny conspiracies that will be confirmed in the future, but it is too early to tell.

Nix Panicus posted:

Not understanding that what get published and who gets platformed is more important than the platform's curated distinction between reporting and opinion is also indicative of poor media literacy. Nothing exists in a vacuum.

Nix Panicus posted:

Ok, if a former senator, secretary of state, and future candidate for president gives an hour long speech to a room full of bankers and industrialists in exchange for a quarter of a million dollars, is that just a perfectly normal transaction for her time and experience, or is that a bribe for past and future consideration? Do you ascribe to the literal meaning of the transaction, or are you considering the context of the transaction?

Harik posted:

This was dropped in this thread as a given fact but it's completely and unequivocally false.

You can verify documents are byte-identical if they're uploaded in their entirety and text-identical if they've been reformatted. If even a single word has been changed it will show up instantly and now you can conclusively state the documents have been tampered with.

This can be done in seconds by anyone remotely competent, and can be batched over a large document trove/email server with minimal effort.

fool of sound posted:

Yet again and again conspiracies are exposed, and the exposure is covered in these ostensibly suppressed mainstream outlets. Often mainstream outlets platform the whistleblower in the first place because it serves their interest to do so.

fool of sound posted:

I don't think it's what you're intending, but it is where that that train of thought leads. How should I process the information that no articles have been written examining the infiltration of the FBI by Luxembourgish interests or whatever else? The only thing that can be applied here is "why were there no articles about Iran-Contra prior to its exposure?" which can reasonably be explained without resorting to the silencing of the media.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Can you name conspiracies current to the time they were exposed? There's Watergate, though it is relatively minor, but what else? Iran-Contra was revealed by part of the conspiracy itself.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Such as the leadership of a media organization deciding to not even pursue a story in the first place because pursuing the leads risks upsetting powerful people.

quote:

The interviewers at the company told Willis that "everything was to be built with security in mind—at extreme levels."

Should he get the job, his primary role would be to rapidly expand a single, popular website already owned by Koala Media. For this, they needed someone with Willis' diverse skill set.

Then the interview took a political turn. "They told me that they were against big companies and big government because they are basically the same thing," Willis said. They said they had readers on the right and the left. They said they were about "freedom." That sounded OK to Willis, who describes himself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative—"very punk rock, borderline anarchist."

Then the interviewers told him, "If you work for us, you can help stop Hillary Clinton."

quote:

The owners of Koala Media reeled in good money at the time. Koala's main site covered "health" topics and hawked supplements and alternative cures. A tiny front-page ad would bring in $30,000 a month, Willis tells me, with mailing lists enriching the Koala Media empire further.

"Getting highly targeted individuals to sign up was huge for financial gain," he said. "[Koala] would advertise products directly to individuals and sell thousands of them at a time."

Emails were sent out twice a week, one promoting a sale and the other some new product. Additionally, affiliate links and virtual event promotions garnered further income in the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" range for a single opportunity.

quote:

But as Willis came on board, Koala's stories got more controversial.

A former Koala Media writer who has worked with Willis told Ars, "In the beginning, the job was fine, writing regular AP-style news articles. Then, it went toward goofy stuff, like 'lemon curing cancer.' And eventually, it went to super-inaccurate stuff." That is when the writer knew it was time to call it quits. But Willis stayed on, even as one of the site owners personally contributed content that made him uncomfortable.

"That was the problem," Willis told me. "We were trying to build a more legitimate network and were reaching more and more millions weekly, but then the owner—who contributed a story once a day, during the best time for reach—would write crazy stuff.

quote:

Toward the end of 2015, more and more pro-Trump stories started emerging on Koala. But after Trump won the Republican primary in 2016, the focus shifted heavily toward anti-Clinton stories. During this time, Koala's already-loose editorial standards relaxed even further. Stories became increasingly bizarre or opinionated. Citations that did exist were often placed in a misleading manner, misconstruing the linked stories or pointing to existing stories in the Koala webring, making it hard for readers to fact-check the material. The "search bar" on these news sites even took users to a search engine created by Koala; it showed stories from "independent media," i.e., sites from the webring. Pieces that ran during this crucial period claimed, among other things, that Clinton had plans to "criminalize" gun owners, to kill the free press, to forcefully "drug" conservatives, to vaccinate people against their wills, to euthanize some adults, and to ban the US flag.

Yet Facebook, which directed plenty of traffic to Koala, never cut the site off. In the two years of the operation that Willis oversaw, Facebook banned only one of Koala's posts, Willis said.

quote:

The basic approach involved the creation of a massive syndication network of hundreds of specialty "news" websites, where articles from the main Koala website could be linked to or syndicated. But these additional websites were engineered so that they looked independent of each other. They were "a web ring where the websites didn't look like they had any real associations with each other from a technical standpoint and couldn't be traced," said Willis.

Each fake news website was on a separate server and had a unique IP address. Each day's stories were syndicated out to the fake news sites through a multistep sync operation involving "multiple VPNs" with "multiple layers of security." Eventually, each public-facing fake news site received its daily content payload, and the stories would go live at scheduled times. In addition to Americans, Willis' team also comprised outsourced web developers working from Mexico, Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Taiwan.

"I oversaw everything and even had stacks of SIM cards purchased with cash to activate different sites on Facebook since it was needed at that point in time," admitted Willis. "Every website had a fake identity I made up. I had them in a sheet where I put the name, address, and the SIM card phone number. When I accessed their account I created on Facebook, I would VPN into the city I put them in as living in. Everything attached to a website followed these procedures because you needed to have a 'real' person to create a Facebook page for the websites. We wanted no attachment, no trace of the original source. If anyone were to investigate who owned a page, they would be investigating a fake person."

Eventually, carriers started asking for Social Security numbers (SSNs) prior to issuing and activating SIM cards. But "they took anything resembling an SSN, even ones generated from dead people," Willis said. As a test, Willis once provided Elvis Presley's SSN, which he had found on Google Images. The number worked.

Independent studies, seen by Ars, have confirmed that in 2015, shortly after Willis had started at Koala, hundreds of fake news domains sprang up. A British think tank has also linked this network of hundreds of domains to Koala Media.

quote:

After carefully studying the Facebook pages maintained by Koala staff, which were reaching about 3 million people weekly, Willis began using information-warfare tactics, some inspired by young Macedonians. Willis studied the connection between Koala headlines and the emotions they triggered among readers. The next time Koala Media's owners came into the office, Willis showed them a carefully outlined posting schedule.

"I surprised them by holding up a large poster board with what became the schedule and deep explanations from a psychological standpoint on what articles to put at what times," he said. "Early morning was positive articles—people will interact with positive things when they first wake up, they had the big story of the day at 11 am already, which they previously noticed was the most powerful slot of the day, afternoon prior to 2 pm was articles to really push hard, late night (11 pm to the early morning) was fringe content."

These claims have been corroborated to Ars by former Koala Media staff who prefer to remain anonymous.

The new publishing strategy, along with the additional fake news sites, caused a rapid spike in traffic. As Willis puts it, this all felt "like playing a video game and getting new high scores to me. I did not think of the readers as people but more like background characters in a video game. I am neurodiverse and have major issues with understanding empathy due to my condition. Crunching numbers is something I love to do; these were numbers I wanted to go up, and I would do it with no emotional attachment to the material or people."

Soon enough, Koala's published "news" pieces reached over 30 million people a week.

Main Paineframe posted:

If they're uploaded in their entirety, and if they have the same filename so that the dumped files can easily be compared against the originals. Wikileaks never made the original email files available, only a searchable database of web pages containing the text content of the emails. Can't just open up a folder comparison in a merge tool and scroll through the list - it takes real work to get all that set up properly. And besides, merge tools often aren't particularly friendly to text that's been reformatted. At least at the free consumer level, anyway.

I can't speak to the capabilities of bespoke tools for professional document comparers with money to burn, and I can see how there might be room for professional data scraping experts to smooth parts of the process some. But that still goes back to the basic point of "it's the middle of election season, this is not the time to be putting money or manpower into a fight over stolen documents". There's no way enterprise-level professional document forensics is cheap.

Harik posted:

This is just you wanting it to be difficult because the alternative - that it's a trivial process - leads to conclusions you don't want to reach. In fact I pointed out to nix that a naïve folder compare isn't what's needed here since it's not guaranteed the structure is going to be retained.

I've done this kind of search before, scanning for duplicate/near duplicate documents that may be in different formats on a scale larger than we're talking about here and it's not difficult at all. Even if they did it manually we're only talking about a few really incendiary documents among a pile of mundane day-to-day poo poo nobody cared about and didn't need checking.

"It's too hard" wasn't the reason, however it is entirely possible they had nobody competent that could do it. That explanation certainly rings true for multiple incidents in various state and federal political organizations.

The Kingfish posted:

If it is as easy as you say, it’s much more likely that the did perform the search (likely after making statements regarding their possible inauthenticity to ensure plausible deniability) and found there were no forgeries.

Killer robot posted:

Trying to figure out which scenario is being proposed here, in the case where there was some example of a forged document to point out.

1. DNC says, "That one there's fake, I mean we don't have copies of it at all" and all the people clamoring for proof say "all right then, sounds believable" and look at Wikileaks with newfound suspicion.
2. DNC comes up with some sort of positive proof that an example document was fabricated, and all of their critics apologize for doubting them like the birthers did when the long form birth certificate came out.

Nix Panicus posted:

3. The democrats spend years saying the 2016 election was illegitimate and the Russians interfered and produce evidence of such from one of the most notable scandals of the election instead of having to pretend facebook ads and twitter bots are substantive.

fool of sound posted:

Holy poo poo this conversation is not actually part of media criticism except in regard to coverage of election interference and political scandals. Stop trying to guide the thread back to it unless you're going to discuss how the media covered it.

fool of sound posted:

Nix you're not responding to arguments that people are actually making, and clearly trying to lay performative zingers on people. Don't post in this thread again.

goethe.cx posted:

I think Killer robot's point was: would you even believe such evidence if the democrats had produced it?

fool of sound posted:

Holy poo poo this conversation is not actually part of media criticism except in regard to coverage of election interference and political scandals. Stop trying to guide the thread back to it unless you're going to discuss how the media covered it.

Nix Panicus posted:

I can confidently say yes because that claim will never be put to the test.

Epinephrine posted:

That's not an answer to the question.

Nix Panicus posted:

I feel its very illustrative of how party loyalists will assert the leaks were forgeries based on nothing more than belief and suspicion of the source. In this, the Media Analysis thread, it seems pretty consistent that some things just aren't subject to in depth analysis, they're just taken on faith. Not being aware of your own biases seems pretty bad for trying to analyze the validity of stories. The DNC leaks and Russiagate conspiracies seem like pretty good issues to train your own perceptions on

Nix Panicus posted:

Yes. I would 100% unequivocally trust the democrat party in the matter of the DNC leaks if there was definitive proof the documents were forged.

Nix Panicus posted:

Yes. I would 100% unequivocally trust the democrat party in the matter of the DNC leaks if there was definitive proof the documents were forged.