With journalists like this...
Who needs fake news when "mainstream" reporters promote conspiracy nonsense?
However bad your year is going so far, keep in mind that some people have it much worse:
Just so we’re clear, I mean Boeing, not the astronauts. I’m sure they’ll be fine, and if they’ve seen Nate Silver’s election model they might want to stay where they are until 2029.
I heard an interesting BBC podcast yesterday, about the latest Russian disinformation trick: creating fake American “news” websites, some with the names of real newspapers which folded years ago, spreading propaganda stories about Ukraine and the Biden Administration.
Many of the websites have AI-generated stories, and honestly it shows. One story actually included someone’s instructions to rewrite the story “from a conservative perspective.” But at first glance some readers might be fooled.
And it’s not just the Russians. Right- and left-wing organizations in America are creating and promoting such scam sites, to the point where there are more of them than there are actual local news websites:
Hundreds of sites mimicking news outlets –- many of them powered by artificial intelligence -- have cropped up in recent months, fueling an explosion of polarizing or false narratives that are stoking alarm as the race for the White House intensifies.
At least 1,265 "pink slime" outlets -- politically motivated websites that present themselves as independent local news outlets -- have been identified, the US-based research group NewsGuard said in a report.
By comparison, 1,213 websites of local newspapers were operating in the United States last year, according to Northwestern University's "local news initiative" project.
"The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it's fake," the NewsGuard report said.
Nearly half of the partisan sites were targeted at swing states, according to an analysis by the news site Axios, in what appears to be an effort to sway political beliefs ahead of the November election expected to be between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Those sites include a network of 167 Russian disinformation sites that NewsGuard said were linked to John Mark Dougan, a US former law enforcement officer who fled to Moscow.
The other sites are backed by conservative as well as influential left-leaning groups such as Metric Media, Courier Newsroom and States Newsroom, the report said.
The rise of pink slime comes amid a rapid decline of local newspapers, many of which have either shut down or suffered extensive layoffs due to economic headwinds.
Now more than ever, with so much disinformation and misinformation and propaganda out there - and with AI poised to make it that much worse - we desperately need real journalists providing real journalism at real news sites.
Real journalists like Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post who [record scratch]
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