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by 0x7f800000 3070 days ago
This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible."

Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.

6 comments

The problem isn't that simple. Most mainstream news, including CNN, have traded in objective reporting for idealogical dissemination. You can very often, legitimately call CNN "not credible". Just in the last couple years they have:

1. Told their viewers that it was illegal to read the DNC emails leaked to Wikileaks themselves, and to just listen to what CNN has to say about them.

2. Got caught posing one of their cameramen as a protester/rioter for an interview about why he was "in the streets".

3. Deceptively edited a video of Trump dumping fish food into a koi pond to omit the fact that he was following the Japanese PM's lead, then spent a whole day talking about how disrespectful it was.

4. Spent a whole morning talking about how Trump drinks diet coke, while there was an active terrorist attack in NY.

That's just what I pulled off the top of my head, too.

Edit: to the user that downvoted my comment: which of the four bullet points was false? It's easy to protect the liars who benefit our goals. It takes intellectual honesty to criticize one's allies.

to the user that downvoted my comment: which of the four bullet points was false?

Didn't downvote (and I don't have CNN), but your complete lack of links to back up any of the things you mentioned makes it very hard to judge if they're actually true or false.

I was under the assumption that most of these were well known. Links:

* "‘Remember, it’s illegal to possess’ WikiLeaks Clinton emails, but ‘it’s different for the media,’ says CNN’s Chris Cuomo": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Fake protester is a CNN cameraman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s57pKCRcuF4

* Snopes: An image showing President Trump dumping fish food into a koi pond was shared with misleading statements about his behavior: https://www.snopes.com/did-trump-impatiently-dump-fish-food-...

* "CNN mocked for airing segment on Trump's soda consumption while NYC faced terror attack": http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/12/11/cnn-mocked-f...

The story of CNN misreporting the fish story is true.

I won’t bother linking to CNN directly because they’ve probably edited their original article by now, but here’s a link from WAPO:

https://washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/11/06/c...

I suppose that's possible, but I expect that, like Google's attempts to address the same issue[0], the biggest loser in this change is going to be independent news sources.

[0] https://medium.com/@evanpopp/google-changes-its-algorithm-to...

From the article, it weren't independent sources which were punished, but far-left and far-right sources.

> However, in addition to AlterNet and other left-wing news sites, Rosenfeld said right-wing, alternative media outlets have also seen a reduction in viewership due to the change in Google’s algorithm.

So? Independent news sources almost always have a non-mainstream political bent; that's why the writers aren't just writing in the New York Times. I don't think most people understand "weeding out fake news" to mean "only allowing a narrow spectrum of respectable opinion." And these sources do real reporting and break real news.
So that, unlike what OP mentioned, independent sources aren't being "punished", heavily biased sources are.

Which is fine, IMHO.

Notice that Mother Jones (independent, leftist) and Fox News (non-independent, large) have not been "punished".

Please read the article. This isn't how any of this works.

It is a randomised sample of their user base. It will not be possible for any group to gain an advantage.

Bots! Bots! Bots! Bots!

A random sampling of shit is still shit.

You think CNN is 100% honest and credible? The same could be said of liberals or any arbitrary group of people.
I don’t think that was the point.

The point is that even credible sources are going to be voted down as “idealogically biased“ no matter how neutral the story is.

Headline says candidate Johnson lost by 15%? Better vote it down. After all, you hate candidate Johnson. Doesn’t matter if he actually lost.

That's true but that seems like the easiest issue to deal with, considering how much information you have about user's political preferences if you're Facebook.
Yeah, I think "I can turn my brain off and just trust anything this source says" is probably the wrong approach to news.
No they are just incompetent and pointless. The Kardashians of news
This is worse than that. Imagine your Bernie-supporting extended family voting down Fox news stories as "not credible."

Expect mass brigading by /r/politics.

yeah only one side routinely falls for russian propaganda, downright lies and breitbart.
Really? Here’s a paper (PDF) showing some of the most active & influential #BlackLivesMatter tweeters were linked to Russia. On BOTH SIDES.

http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polar...

This matches similar research I saw in the last few days on some other political topic (can’t remember which) were some of the most important and active tweeters were Russian on both sides.

Russia wasn’t trying to get Trump elected (though they HATED Clinton). They were trying to get America to fight with itself and sew division. They did a really good job.

Certainly people on both sides were accused of that but the idea that Black Lives Matter was actually just a Russian plot is frankly pretty repellent, and that paper in the end just defers to Twitter's ideas of who's a Russian troll, and how did they decide? We've seen a lot of really shoddy work in this department.
No, I’m not saying it was a Russian plot at all. It’s a real thing.

I’m saying they seized on it as something they could use to push division between people.

I find that incredibly unlikely. I used to work in bot fighting on Google. Claims of Russian bots on Twitter and especially claims by academics are invariably riddled with methodological errors that render the "research" useless. I wrote about this problem here:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

These studies are seeing patterns in noise. That's why the narrative changed over time - it used to be "Russian twitter bots got Trump elected!" and now it's "they're supporting both sides .... to sow division!".

The former claim was extremely implausible but at least it had some sort of inner logic to it, in that Trump was more friendly to Russia than Clinton. The new spin doesn't even make logical sense. However it makes perfect sense if you're just picking random Twitter users and trying to explain their behaviour through the prism of some convoluted conspiracy.

Charges of being Russian tools have been hurled at everyone left and right of the DNC (for instance they were going after Jill Stein).
To be fair, nothing on CNN is credible. They are not partisan, they are simply the "off" cousin your family ignores