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"Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. • Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. • Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. • Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us." The author of the book is Donald A Barclay, librarian, who gave an interview to Publisher's Weekly last September. This excerpt mirrors a part of the preface, which I will dictate and post below. Dude sounds like a dang Objectivist here, if a plodder ... -- cross-linking here to a dedicated Front Porch topic thread "Fake News," and to a "fake news" OL-internal-search page of this blog, "Friends and Foes." There are at this moment 732 items in the "Fake News" phrase search returns of the whole of the Objectivist Living community. The subtitle to Barclay's book is "How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age."

Fake News Let's see if this thread gets some traction. It is dedicated to all the fake news that is fit to publish. Let's start with Mika over at MSNBC for a mission statement, shall we? From Zero Hedge: MSNBC Anchor: "Our Job" Is To "Control Exactly What People Think" Michael EDIT: The fake news media constantly concocts fake hate crimes, or spins normal crimes into hate crimes, and I want an easy to find where people can source these incidents without plowing through a lot of propaganda. The opening post of the Fake News thread seems as good a place as any. So here is the gem of a site I just found. To quote from the site, it's a "database of the false reports of 'hate crimes' committed in the USA": Fake Hate Crimes I might add to this as I discover more. If anyone needs this information for research (like for articles, videos, memes, etc.), please bookmark the site or this page. Michael

Trading Up The Chain Persuasion--Sweet Poison Poor Tim Pool. He obviously is not familiar with the term "trading up the chain." But he figured it out on his own and man, is he pissed. You see, Tim Pool is in love with journalism, holds to the highest journalistic integrity he can muster, but sees a world where he is punished for it. If he were not left-leaning, he would be right out of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. In tracing sources, he does what I do when reading news stories. Watch this video to see the process, but also see Tim go on one hell of a nice rant. Note, this video is about a political issue that is important now, but soon forgotten. The main point is the process behind how fake news comes into being and spreads so easily. I have used the term "trading up the chain" several times here on OL. I don't want to rewrite everything, so here are some of my former posts. It's important to learn this technique if you want to persuade in the culture or fight toxic propaganda. Here's basically how it works and where it was first formalized as a technique (by Ryan Holiday). Here's a simpler explanation: Journalists all quote each other without running down the original source. Also, this process can turn a lie into reality over time. Here's another way of saying trading up the chain. Sorry to be a bit repetitious, but after you read this opening post, you will be a master of the basics. So there you have it. Trading up the chain--sweet poison for journalists to serve to the public. It tastes like legitimate candy, but it poisons people with lies. As journalists are discovering, it also poisons them. Just look at today's stories about mainstream news layoffs and how many are going out of business. The sweetness for journalists comes from the fact that they don't need a whole lot of effort to manufacture this form of propaganda and still come off as credible. They don't need to do real research, just quote someone else (who is quoting someone else and so on). The poison comes from their stories ultimately being garbage and being debunked over and over and over. They lose their credibility. Then they lose their audience and paying customers. And for honest journalists like Tim Pool, it drives them crazy. Michael

The article "Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News" appeared at the Scientific American website on February 6th. Its subheadline is "Researchers identify a major risk factor for pernicious effects of misinformation." The article makes for interesting reading, whether you consider 'fake news' a classifier for broad swaths of the information landscape, or whether you consider 'fake news' to be particular items that are inaccurate, infused with partisan bias, subject to grotesque editorial demands, or otherwise not adequate to your needs. Excerpts: ... you can guess what happened next. If you seek verity, verily you must verify ... To that end, that of critical appraisal, one dear to the heart of all Objectivish people, the magazine has another useful (or familiar) set of verification rules of thumb: Six Tips for Identifying Fake News -- this is presented at the site as an MP3 sound file, which I link to here: Note on audio files: the code to insert an audio file is dead easy if you have a little knowledge of HTML. Any modern browser will return a little player like that above -- given the code format below. All you need to do is make sure the file to be played is MP3, the web standard. <audio controls src="http://www.somesite.com/soundfile.mp3"> -- to insert similar audio file code on OL in your edit box, click on the "Source" button up under "Content" at the top of the edit box. This reveals the underlying HTML.

This is taken from Conservative Treehouse. The hoopla industry and the committees of benghazi will have another picnic. Here is the state of Grand Supreme Hoopla ... from Memeorandum: