Guest post by David Middleton
There has recently been an uproar about “fake news stories.” Since the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of these nominally United States many have called for the censorship of fake news stories…
The war on ‘fake news’ is all about censoring real news
By Karol Markowicz December 4, 2016
Scrambling for an explanation for Donald Trump’s victory, many in the media and on the left have settled on the idea that his supporters were consumers of “fake news” — gullible rubes living in an alternate reality made Trump president.
To be sure, there is such a thing as actual fake news: made-up stories built to get Facebook traction before they can be debunked. But that’s not what’s really going on here.
What the left is trying to do is designate anything outside its ideological bubble as suspect on its face.
In October, President Obama complained that we need a “curating function” to deal with the “wild-wild-west-of-information flow.” Who would be doing this “curating” is unclear — but we can guess: “Obviously,” Noah Feldman writes at Bloomberg View, “it would be better if the market would fix the problem on its own . . . But if they can’t reliably do it — and that seems possible, since algorithms aren’t (yet) fact-checkers — there might be a need for the state to step in.”
In other words, censorship.
[…]
“In October, President Obama complained that we need a ‘curating function’ to deal with the ‘wild-wild-west-of-information flow.’ Well, Mr. Soon-to-be-ex-President, we already have an entire cottage industry of “curators.” One of these curators is a website called “FactCheck.org” and they have an amazing ability to get facts wrong and routinely deliver logically fallacious dissertations. Here is their latest example:
The chairman of the Senate environment committee falsely claimed that a new report “confirms” that “hydraulic fracturing has not impacted drinking water” in Wyoming. The report said a lack of water quality data predating oil and gas exploration prevented it from reaching “firm conclusions.”
Sen. James Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, made his remarks in a statement issued Nov. 10 — the day that the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality issued a report on water-supply wells in Pavillion, a small town southeast of Yellowstone National Park.
The industry-funded state report specifically looked at the “likelihood of impacts from oil and gas operations” on 14 water-supply wells used by residents living near Pavillion. Since the 1990s, residents in the area have “complained of physical ailments and said their drinking water was black and tasted of chemicals,” ProPublica reported.
Inhofe, Nov. 10: The Wyoming DEQ’s thorough investigation over the past several years has come to a close and confirms what we’ve known all along: hydraulic fracturing has not impacted drinking water resources.
But that’s not what the report said.
The “fact sheet” for the Wyoming report said it’s “unlikely” that hydraulic fracturing had “any impacts” on these water-supply wells, but “[l]imited baseline water quality data, predating development of the Pavillion Gas Field hinders reaching firm conclusions on causes and effects of reported water quality changes.”
[…]
The burden of proof is on those who assert that fracking pollutes groundwater. FactCheck.org is shifting the burden of proof and employing a “distinction without a difference” fallacy in order to falsely claim that Senator Inhofe’s statement was a “false claim.”
Unless evidence is presented that fracking has polluted groundwater, this statement is 100% correct, if not elegantly worded:
The Wyoming DEQ’s thorough investigation over the past several years has come to a close and confirms what we’ve known all along: hydraulic fracturing has not impacted drinking water resources.
In 2011, the EPA issued a preliminary report that fracking was the likely cause of groundwater pollution in the Pavillion WY area. The API shredded this report in 2012. In 2013, the EPA cast doubt on their own report. And now, the Wyoming DEQ has issued a report which “contradicts” the EPA’s 2011 junk science…
Wyoming study: Fracking likely not behind well water problem
A final state report released on foul-smelling well water in Wyoming contradicts an EPA report from five years ago that ignited a national backlash when it suggested hydraulic fracturing was the cause of the contamination
Nov. 10, 2016
By MEAD GRUVER, Associated Press
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A final state report released Thursday on foul-smelling well water in Wyoming contradicts an EPA report from five years ago that ignited a national backlash when it suggested hydraulic fracturing was the cause of the contamination.
Bacteria were more likely to blame for the problem in Pavillion than the oil and gas drilling process known as fracking, officials with the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality said after a two-year study that was hailed by fracking advocates.
“Today’s announcement from the Wyoming DEQ doesn’t just close the case on Pavillion, it’s a knockout blow for activists who have tried to use Pavillion as a key talking point for their ban-fracking agenda,” said Randy Hildreth, Colorado director of Energy in Depth, an advocacy arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.[…]
Other EPA investigations into whether fracking caused groundwater pollution in Texas and Pennsylvania also failed to yield conclusive links.
The industry continues to assert the safety of fracking, which occurs in the drilling of almost every new oil and gas well.
Wyoming officials also called on the EPA in the report released Thursday to fill in and cap two wells it drilled to study groundwater in the Pavillion area.
The request underscores Wyoming officials’ position that the EPA’s science was bad and the chemistry of the well pipes probably led to its key findings, said Kevin Frederick, water quality administrator for the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.
“EPA installed the monitoring wells. We believe it’s their responsibility to plug and abandon them,” Frederick said.
The irony is the fact that the groundwater pollutants identified by the EPA were likely the result of their own monitoring wells.
Media fact checkers like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact routinely employ “distinction without a difference” arguments to generate fake news stories.
In addition to the burden of proof and distinction without a difference fallacy, this statement was misleading and probably “unnecessary fear mongering”…
Pavillion, a small town southeast of Yellowstone National Park.
This was clearly to imply that any water pollution in Pavillion would imperil the pristine wilderness of nearby Yellowstone National Park. It is a meaningless geographical reference. The entire State of Wyoming is southeast of Yellowstone National Park. Pavillion is 170 miles southeast of the park.
Logic Referee from Flag on the Argument.
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I have thrown these same flags on just about every fact check article I’ve read. Doubly so on the Washington Post’s Pinocchio ratings. Some people can not accept that others may have a different opinion on the nature of an article. I can disagree with conclusions and opinions, but not on facts that are facts. Data doesn’t lie, but the interpretation of the data has loads of room for creative interpretation.
Its not just fake news, its the omissions from the msm that is as big a problem.
A lie by omission is still a lie !!
It’s even worse than that. All too often, the mainstream media take an outright partisan stand on these issues. And in Australia, they’re allowed to get away with blue murder.
Very true. My constant complaint with the BBC in the UK is not so much their stories (though there are problems there too) but the stories they do not run.
Thus any heatwave gets massive coverage, but any abnormally cold weather is ignored. Good news on the economy when there’s a Tory government is limited, but bad news about the NHS is always front page. Any damaging comment by a Leftie or Alarmist is given prominence, no space is given to opposing views.
What is generated is the impression of false consensus of opinion, and false sense of what is happening.
Absolutely, and half a lie is all lie. The MSM have no credibility. It would be understandable if once in awhile they got it wrong or missed the point, and quickly offered a correction; however, this is no longer the case. Ninety-five percent of the whores are unabashedly espousing liberal, leftist ideology as evidenced by the presidential campaign coverage. For example, the MSM used the Democrat Party talking points as their daily outline for news coverage. In one edition, the WaPo ran two editorials and one news story all three trashing some aspect President elect, Trump’s personality- no hard news or facts. I followed the WaPo election coverage for awhile and I counted forty-nine Trump slam pieces and zero positive, at the same time candidate Billary(the Mother of Lies) had nine total articles and/or editorials written, and every one was a glowing endorsement. Total lies, distortions and even fabrications are presented or printed with impunity.Truth in the media is now relative.
As well as the Washington Post, they should also fact check the BBC they just called Scott Pruitt a “climate change denier” both verbally and with a caption! So blatantly biased, I mean who denies that the climate changes? Also, with the amount of coverage they gave it I think the BBC was more upset than China that Taiwan’s President telephoned Trump!
“The request underscores Wyoming officials’ position that the EPA’s science was bad and the chemistry of the well pipes probably led to its key findings,”
Sloppy science on the EPA’s part.
Expecting good science from the EPA is a triumph of hope over reality.
Bingo! That needs to be said in extra-large capital letters.
Trump names Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general suing EPA on …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/trump-names-scott-pruitt-oklahoma-att…
22 mins ago – In a move signaling an intention to dismantle President Obama’s climate change and environmental legacy, President-elect Trump will nominate Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of the oil and gas intensive state of Oklahoma, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sounds like a promising EPA leader, for once in my lifetime.
I hope the EPA is de-fanged, and re-named ~ the EAA, Environmental Advisory Agency.
It has effectively become the EPR ~Envionmental Protection Racket, to a great extent, it seems to me.
Let us not forget that this is same EPA that ignored experts and their own procedures when they busted open the Gold King mine and polluted hundreds of mile of rivers. The EPA is composed of more lawyers than engineers and scientists, thus I take EPA “science” with a grain of salt.
Good point. Perhaps we should count the number of lawyers in a agency and budget in inverse proportion. (Sorry Ristvan!)
similarly, the fake scientists surveying the ozone hole frog killing UV deaths were going around killing the frogs by infecting them with chitrid fungus.
similarly, the fencing off of land to protect butterflies broke their life cycle and killed them off.
and their motto is ‘if it ain’t broke- fix it till it is’
‘if it ain’t broke- fix it till it is”
Painfully true.
The EPA practices scientism.
The MSM’s attack on “Fake News” is going to backfire on them because the MSM is the purveyor of most of the fake news circulating around. These “fact checkers” are just one example of the fake news.
What was it Dan Rather said in an attempt to justify his attempt to manufacture a memo that proved Bush was AWOL from the National Guard?
Fake but accurate.
“Fake but accurate”…
Can you imagine what would have happened regarding “fake news” if HRC had been elected? Ministry of Truth, perhaps. We really dodged a bullet this election.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/06/journalists-struggle-to-define-fake-news-even-as-they-declare-war-on-it/
Almost every “official” fact checker that I have been able to locate has turned out to be nothing more than another leftist trying to discredit any information that doesn’t support the left wing world view.
Now we have the Pope warning us about fake news
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/12/07/world/europe/ap-eu-rel-vatican-fake-news.html?ref=aponline
Pope Warns About Fake News-From Experience
Hey Pope, your outfit invented fake news.
https://ehrmanblog.org/forgeries-in-the-name-of-paul/
That is PRECISELY why they are upset. They want a monopoly..
Popes had their chance to run things. It was a time we call the Dark Ages. This guy should tend to his flock, and leave the rest of us alone.
It was the Dark Ages because the Church was running things?
Not that the Church was running anything during that time, but what the hey. If you are going to be wrong, by wrong in style.
Sure it’s a guy? Interesting Papal stuff:
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vatican/esp_vatican39.htm
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/imagenes_vaticano/vatican39_01.jpg
Please don’t spread that “dark ages” myth.
This just in: Pope Francis is really Katy Perry in just another costume!
I don’t know how that logo got there. I just entered the url of the article and the logo showed up.
Here’s the study from Stanford University, which uses the same datasets, which definitively says that fracking has contaminated the water, and which wasn’t used in the DEQ report. http://news.stanford.edu/2016/03/29/pavillion-fracking-water-032916/
And here’s where the larger EPA study was altered at the last minute to remove references to say (inaccurately) that no widespread, systemic pollution issues that were found, under political pressure to avoid blowback from oil and gas producers. http://www.marketplace.org/2016/11/29/world/epa-s-late-changes-fracking-study-portray-lower-pollution-risk
The fact-checkers are right. Once again big money walks over the little guy.
Too fracking funny!!!
The Stanford “scientists” apparently don’t know what fracking is!
How do you figure?
The EPA’s revision to the Executive Summary of their report was probably due to the fact that the report itself didn’t document any fracking-related contamination of drinking water.
1. I know what fracking is.
2. I can read.
Even if the above is accurate (highly doubtful), it’s not fracking.
This language indicates that the well water contamination was from surface contaminates that leached into the water table. Therefore, it could apply to any drill site, fracking or not. It fact, it could apply to any industry that did not properly manage process and waste fluids. It does not indicate that the hydraulic fracturing process directly impacted water quality, which is what the Stanford study was trying to prove.
Considering that the “well field has gone through several corporate hands since the 1960s” did Stanford attempt to determine how much of the contamination was from a period when the US didn’t regulate drill sites.
Also, I’m always interested in knowing who paid for the research because it’s amazing how may times the results just happen to deliver what the customer is paying for.
Yeah. They basically confirmed that the EPA polluted its own monitoring wells and that there is some evidence of leakage from old disposal pits…
The organic compounds and “diesel range organics” aren’t unique to fracking and appear to have been the result of the EPA’s abysmal drilling practices of their monitoring wells.
The authors pontificate that solutes, primarily from acid stimulation jobs, have had time to migrate up to the lowest reaches of groundwater reservoirs. Nothing in the paper provides any evidence that fracking polluted any groundwater in the Pavillion area.
They dont seem to know what bunding is either
HI, Stanford report on frack pollution reads like the stuff on global warming.
The 2016 Stanford study was simply a repackaging of the EPA’s flawed 2011 preliminary report…
Well said, David M. Whatever is being described in the article is not fracking. Production fluids don’t contain diesel fuel, high concentations of chemicals and are not disposed of in pits. Fracking occurs all over the place. If ground water contamination was a high probability, there’d be far more instances claimed out there. The technology is over 50 years old. It’s just that no one really knew about it until the greens decided to vilify it.
Just to inject (unintended pun) a bit of reality to all this abstract debate, I’ve spent some time in Pavilion. Over a decade, twice a year every year moving livestock between Lincoln county WY and Riverton. It’s not a big place and about the only reason most people go there is on the way to somewhere else (Lander and Thermopolis come to mind).
Wyoming is pretty lax about what happens on Native American land, it’s not hard to believe surface contamination of a well, and it’s happened intentionally more than once. I personally walked away from a ranch in Duboise over contested water rights. Unless you were born on the reservation its best not to consider living there. Fracking doesn’t make sense anyway, it’s too deep.
Last census has about 200 people in Pavilion, that matches my recollection. Pavilion is a wide spot in the road south of Crowheart. It has a gas station and a bar, I’ve never been there when the bar looked like it was open.
Sir Harry, I hope you don’t vote. You lack reading comprehension. Dumping drilling and production fluids into unlined pits is not fracking. It is waste disposal.
And it’s not monitored at all out there. You really have to go to Pavilion to understand that.
Sir Harry, the only thing you have proven is that you don’t know how to read the sources that you cite as proving you right.
imgur??
One of us…. one of us… 🙂
There is no way fracking can contaminate the water.
If you set out to intentionally frack into a groundwater reservoir, you could pump frack fluid into it… Only the EPA is that incompetent…
Oh, come on, give the EPA the credit they are due. They are more incompetent than that.
“In other words, WYDEQ believes that EPA may have contaminated its own monitoring wells with hydrocarbons.”
Makes one wonder about the reason for this mistake. I know, I’m too suspicious sometimes.
From reading it, I find the whole thing quite bizarre.
The only agency that is not required to live up to EPA standards is apparently the EPA.
TA, it’s impossible to be TOO suspicious when it comes to the EPA and other alphabet-soup agencies.
Organizations like Jon Podesta’s ThinkProgress (where dishonest Joe Romm plies his deceit-craft) and Ceres.org are charging headlong into the fake news business to promote a political agenda of Big Government control over every facet of modern life.
What is now popularly referred to as Fake news is really just plain old propaganda. The best way to write propaganda is to first make a true statement, and then wrap the deception in it. Climate change is the ultimate propaganda deception, because it begins with the truth that the climate has warmed over the last 160 years, about the time mankind starting burning fossils fuels and CO2 began rising.
Obama’s desire to push FCC title II regulations and controls onto the internet is part of the larger hidden agenda of censorship. The freeing of ICANN from the US Dept of Commerce, where First Amendment protections were enforcable, is also part of that agenda to bring censorship to the domestic US internet.
This is a big deal and it remains to be seen how President Trump will behave. Will he come to embrace the idea of a censored internet (the path the Progressives are on)? Or will he and his appointtees roll back the march to censorship? The first indications as to his direction will be what he and the GOP Congress do about the new FCC’s internet regs under the Democrat FCC chairman Tom Wheeler at the moment.
“because it begins with the truth that the climate has warmed over the last 160 years”
Warmed *and* cooled over the last 160 years (over the entire history of the Earth, for that matter). I know you are aware of this, I just wanted to emphasize the point.
“Obama’s desire to push FCC title II regulations and controls onto the internet is part of the larger hidden agenda of censorship. The freeing of ICANN from the US Dept of Commerce, where First Amendment protections were enforcable, is also part of that agenda to bring censorship to the domestic US internet.”
The Left is intent on silencing their political opposition. The more political power they acquire, the more they try to silence people.
We got lucky on Nov. 8. If Hillary Clinton were elected she would have doubled down on all these measures to shut others up.
All Totalitarian organizations try to shut down the opposition by punshing them if they don’t go along with the totalitarian program. Every dictator does it, and some religious leaders do it, and that’s what the Democrat Party and the Left are trying to do in the United States, and what the Left in Europe has been even more successful at doing.
This last election has really harmed the nasty MSM. It’s probably not fatal, but their influence may not now be what it once was. That’s a very good thing. Trump prefers to ignore them and communicate directly to the people. That’s a very good thing.
There is a new world taking shape. Very interesting.
Why do lefties think and believe the way they do?
I usually don’t comment on things political. There is, however, an increasingly clear progression of events that suggest that Obama and his crew are fully engaged in two aspects of strategy and tactics. You will recognize both. First, Cloward and Piven (Columbia U) promote disruption of society by over-loading systems and creating chaos. Second, Alinski tactics are obvious in all Democratic Party actions. Wouldn’t it be instructive to open Obama’s Columbia University records!
Today on AOL they had this article:
http://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/12/07/the-most-and-least-trusted-news-sources-in-america/21622738/
“ABC had the highest credibility rating of any news source included in the poll, with 67% of people calling it “credible” or “very credible.””
Are you kidding me? Who in the heck did they survey?
It only goes to show they don’t have a clue.
How on earth did they come up with a sample group where 42% had never heard of Breitbart? After all the leftist hyperventilation over Bannon and his tenure at Breitbart?
I’m more amazed that there’s still an AOL.
Tanks for writing that explanation of “fake news” before I had to Joel, yu covered all the important dirt.
I’m not concerned about ICANN, it was never more than a kludge anyway. If it gets out of line we just stop using it. DNS is distributed for a reason.
Glomar Explorer
Do you have a point?
It’s just code for “covert operations”.
That was my guess, though why anyone thinks the two subjects are at all related is beyond me.
Catching people spreading fake news and embarrassing them I think is the only solution to that problem. There are many both left and right who fabricate “color” for whatever meme it is they are promoting. The fact checking that goes on on this sight is far more useful even if the process is a messy discussion that involves hauling out graphs and links to specific papers and commentary by knowledgeable observers. People have been complaining about “yellow journalism” for a long time and the only solution is a news organization that establishes itself as a promoter of solid journalism that leaves political opinion to the editorial page.
“Catching people spreading fake news and embarrassing them I think is the only solution to that problem.”
I agree. Don’t shut them up, shame them with the real facts.
Most of the ones I have seen, are only embarrassed that they got caught.
Unfortunately, this leads to a long game of whack-a-mole, where the propagandist starts to push a story line, which takes on significant buy-in from the ignorant before it can be hammered down with the facts. By the time you have whacked that mole, another one pops up pushing a completely different line.
You are quickly exhausted and the moles keep popping up.
There is no such thing as a news source that leaves politics to the opinion page.
Some are less explicit than others, but it is always there.
People just aren’t built that way. You are looking for something that never has and never will happen.
The only solution is to get information from a number of sources and spend time validating stories that are important to you.
Yes, it’s a lot of work. But it’s the only sure way.
(You can rely on someone that you trust to do some of this verification for you, however you still have to spot check them from time to time to see if they are letting their own biases seep into their work.)
Good advice, MarkW.
The New York Times is to the Democrat Religion what the Watchtower is to Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Agreed Mark. The price of truth is constant vigilance. There’s no way to legislate it, in fact any attempt should be treated with the utmost suspicion. Open communication is the only defense against lies.
Bartelby…I agree the rumbling around the political circles that “something should be done about fake news” is just the harbinger to censorship of “politically incorrect” views. The internet is the new press and congress should pass no law to regulate content perhaps it should investigate a way to apply libel law and have courts assess monetary damages for false malicious claims. Otherwise it should be noted that the height of hypocrisy on this issue is displayed every single time a piece of climate change alarmism blaming CO2 is published below a picture of a steam cooling tower or a smoggy cityscape or a poor starving polar bear is represented as anything but recovering as a population.
“Only one industry is allowed to inject toxic chemicals into underground sources of drinking water – hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
This is so bogus. The rules for getting any well permit are specifically designed to protect underground sources of drinking water. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY is allowed to contaminate drinking water.
I can’t read the actual study because it is paywalled, so the person writing the article either misinterpreted the study or the study is wrong.
The paper doesn’t live up to the press release… Or stoop to the level of the press release… As usual…
https://jacksonlab.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/digiulio_jackson_est_2016.pdf
Does anyone know of someone ….. or ever heard of anyone, …. in the US of A, ….. that had to pay a water-well driller to drill farther than 5,000 feet into the ground in order to acquire a reliable supply of drinking water ….. only to have their water-well contaminated by those nasty gas-well “frackers”?
http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/OCD/images/wellPic.png
Read more @ur momisugly http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/OCD/education.html
Thanks, Samuel. A picture is worth a thousand words. 🙂
Thanks for the great visual! And although it isn’t widely known outside the industry, just about every sand deeper than 1000′ from surface is loaded with unpotable salt water, with a few notable exceptions, mostly in the Rockies.
The deepest water well I’ve ever used was in Lincoln County WY; 755 feet and it was drilled by an idiot back in 1976 (not me, I acquired it with the ranch). It delivered a bare 10 gpm. After buying the ranch it was on I drilled a 250′ well about a hundred yards from it and hit 100+ gpm on an ancient aquifer that was visible to the naked eye (dried up creek bed following diversion by a irrigation project in 1959).
Water wells, even in Wyoming, aren’t deep. There also not all that hard to find, but don’t get me started on that.
@ur momisugly wws – December 7, 2016 at 1:56 pm
OH, my, my, ….. wws, …… it had done slipped my mind bout my High School learnin of State History and the historical reason for the founding of the City of Charleston, WV, ….. to wit:
Excerpted from “OUR HISTORY”
Enviro-activists of course would never ever contaminate drinking water themselves and then blame it on someone else, would they?
Nor would they ever plant hairs from an endangered species in order to justify closing an area to development.
But they did.
The EPA’s fracking hypocrisy can be shown with a simple search; keywords: ‘EPA, Animas’.
And no surprise to some of us, Snopes is caught manufacturing its own fake news:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/28/snopes-caught-lying-about-lack-of-american-flags-at-democratic-convention
Snopes: ‘Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.’
Snopes’ classic is it’s claim that Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet…
Snopes is the poster child for distinction without a difference fallacies.
David,
Snopes is a left wing spinner of extremely high velocity. Some of there distictions without a difference, such as the one you have pointed out, are quite beyond the pale. I still check them once in a while to get a chuckle. Many times they simply do not cover issues which their spinning cannot deal with. Which is another tool in the lefties’ bag of tricks, simply ignore issues which they cannot lie into oblivion.
David –
That part is actually true; Gore did participate very heavily in the commercial creation of the internet. He was one of many politicians who paved the way through protectionist red tape created my the telcos and guarded by the FCC. is efforts were significant. I speak from personal experience. He was there and you can be quite sure he made money on the deal. Look up “Smart Valley” for connections.
Ha, beat me to it on Snopes being right there alongside Factcheck and Politifact, although, sometimes Snopes is correct on non-political items.
Most of the purported “fact check” operations are about as nonpartisan and reasonable as Alex Jones (and that may be libeling Alex Jones).
Fake news.
Too funny.
When hillary spread fake news about a youtube video…
Her defense was..
What difference does it make.
Steven Mosher,
One of her “fake news” claims was featured in the video below. Fake news comes in at least 2 forms: 1) outright BS and distortions, but just as importantly, 2) the suppression of truthful news by the dominant news providers. We know about both of them. Lies of omission are lies nevertheless.
The alternative new media is highlighting the fake news in the MSM. This whole MSM meme of fake news is going to backfire on the MSM, the greatest source of fake news.
How’d that defense work out for her?
“When hillary spread fake news about a youtube video…
Her defense was..
What difference does it make.”
That’s not fake news. It’s the truth. Hillary *did* spread fake news about a video. She claimed the video caused the Benghazi attack. That’s a lie/fake news.
And Hillary did say “What difference does it make”, so that’s true also.
No fake news here.
@TA
Steven was making those precise points. In a rare moment, he’s aligned with the majority of the denizens here. I know lots of people enjoy bashing Mosher, but knee-jerk replies like yours are just embarrassing.
Yes, but it was the entire Obama administration promoting that fake news.
D.J.Hawkins wrote: @TA, Steven was making those precise points. In a rare moment, he’s aligned with the majority of the denizens here.”
Well, now that you mention it, and I reread it, I guess he was.
D.J.: “I know lots of people enjoy bashing Mosher, but knee-jerk replies like yours are just embarrassing.”
Actually, I do not enjoy bashing Mosher, I just misinterpreted what he was saying. I thought he was casting doubt on, rather than making a straightforward statement of fact, based on his past tendencies.
I was just trying to refute what I thought he said. I wasn’t trying to personally bash Mosher. I try to treat everyone with respect, no matter what side they are on.
Writing on the internet can cause confusion and misinterpretation sometimes, and it’s good to explain oneself once in a while.
And I don’t fault you for trying to right a wrong as you see it. That’s what you should do.
Please, everyone, enjoy this. It is bang on subject and FANTASTIC!
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=071E-sPcemw ]
[ It might well be, it’s also off-topic, and unrelated to this thread -Anthony]
;’) tell me that you weren’t cheering! :’)
PW – thank you, thank you, thank you!
BC
Is the MSM so thick that they don’t realize they in a hole and still digging?
Apparently yes.
Everybody I know voted for the other guy.
When you are in an echo chamber, it’s rare to find someone who will tell you how stupid you are acting.
Here is the headline right now on Breitbart, concerning weather AND Fake News at the Weather Channel.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/07/weather-channel-attacks-breitbarts-climate-science-fake-news-climate-change/
President Obama complained that we need a “curating function” to deal with the “wild-wild-west-of-information flow.”
George Orwell had a Department for that Mr. President. He called it the “Ministry of Truth.” We know it by many names: The New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Hollywood. I think what the President is suggesting is that we roll all these purveyors of propaganda up under one centralized organization so that they can all get “their stories straight.”
Probably not a coincidence that each of the outlets that you cite has been losing audience over the past 5-6 years, particularly NYT, and CNN
On Drudge today there is a story about CNN being sued for racial discrimination.
It seems that over the years blacks have not been promoted at the same rate as whites.
For years, CNN has been in the fore front of organizations demanding that disparate impact be the standard by which such suits were to be judged.
Wonder if they still believe that, now that the shoe is on the other foot.
No they believe that as part of the propaganda ministry that they should have special exemption from those rules that apply to the rest of us.
The fracking contaminates groundwater canard has been around for years. It relies on two big dishonest misconceptions. Fresh groundwater is almost always from aquifers not more than a few hundrd feet deep. Production wells are usually double cased in concrete/steel down about 1000 feet, far past any fresh groundwater aquifers. My farm taps 2: one at about 65 feet and one at about 120 feet. The source rock shales that get fracked are by definition buried very deep to have undergone catagenesis. Typically they are a mile or more below the surface.
Specific to Pavillion Wyoming, the deepest water well in SW Wyoming is 700 feet (they all have to be registered and tested). The target shale formation is the Niobrara. Around Pavillion, it is 8000 feet down. A solid rock vertical separation of 1.4 miles when fracking causes cracks in maybe a 100 meter radius at best in the horizontal plane, less in the vertical. Info courtesy state of Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, exactly one google click away.
A picture is sometimes worth more than a thousand d words.
http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/OCD/images/wellPic.png
Read more @ur momisugly http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/OCD/education.html
Pretty much by definition, there needs to be a layer of impermeable rock above the area being fracked.
If there weren’t, the oil or gas would have escaped to the surface millennia ago.
Actually, while an immediately overlying caprock is always necessary for a conventional porous reservoir sourced from an underlying source rock shale, it does not have to be true for source rock shales themselves depending on the local geology. The more there is horizontal autofracturing and vertical thrust faulting, the more a caprock is important. Essay Matryoshka Reserves explains this in detail using Russia’s Bahzenov shale as the example.
Ristvan writes: “the deepest water well in SW Wyoming is 700 feet (they all have to be registered and tested).”
I think you found my old well. Far as I know it was a bit deeper than that but not much. It was certainly the deepest I’d ever heard of in SW Wyoming. Etna to be exact.
The reference to Yellowstone park is similar to the greenies campaign against the Adaami coal mine being proposed in Australia where its proximity is going to damage the Great Barrier Reef a mere 400 kilometres away.
In addition, Pavillion appears to be downhill from Yellowstone. Not much chance of the former polluting the latter.
There’s actually an entire mountain range in between. The Continental Divide is between Pavilion and Yellowstone.
Are you going to let a couple of big rocks get in the way of making a political point?
Considering how far apart many land-based instruments are (see: Arctic…Antarctic…etc.), 400 km away is a cakewalk.
I’ve argued that the fact checking orgs during the election were subverted by left manipulators. They even were finding false what were clearly satirical jokes by Trump. The other weasels media were consulting were the ‘nonpartisan’ economists who evaluated statements about proposed tax cuts and policy prescriptions, projected growth rates and their costs. They basically used zero sum assumptions and indices derived from historical performance of establishment politicians. These would not admit as possible foreign investment potential like the recent Japanese proposal for 50 billion inv with 50k jobs – precisely because lefties never got that kind of interest and the global model was a further divestment one.
Don’t forget the new totalitarian left’s policy is to shift us to a global kumbaya system run by billionaire socialist-elites. Traditional socialists have even been rendered redundant; they just don’t know that they are only useful fools now – ironically a concept of their own invention.
Unfettered information flow has proved to be a solid wall blocking their plans. So “fake news” is their diabolical response. Transference anyone? WUWT would be high up on the list to block. We know they have a ready and willing phalanx of useful, unquestioning faithful who would appear to be the majority. We get our share coming to disrupt this site regularly. I think with this earthshaking election result In USA we dodged a bullet for now. Only in the USA could this have happened. The rest of the world had already passed the end of freedom tipping point.
“The rest of the world had already passed the end of freedom tipping point.”
With good leadership, the poor ole world might just manage to survive its totalitarianism.
When a template looks like it is working, others notice and want to emulate what they see. Success has momentum and the more success, the more momentum, to the point that it might just spread to the entire planet. Or maybe not. We’ll see.
You do notice lots of people jumping on the Trump train lately, don’t you? That’s because he is looking like a winner and people want to be associated, and be around, and be friendly with a winner.
Donald, we will definitely *not* get tired of you winning for us. And if he wins a little for the rest of the world, so much the better. 44 days.
The good news is that only liberals go to factcheck.org so it has no effect on people who can think for themselves. And every now and then, accidentally perhaps, factcheck.org gets closer to the truth than not. Maybe some of their liberal readership will occasionally reconsider a few of the myths they’ve peddled.
The mainstream media much prefer official lies.