Facts no longer exist
My inbox is full of “news.”
The Internet is full of “news” and “facts.”
Much of it is nonsense or made-up — to push someone’s agenda, political, business or personal. Or all three.
In the old days, you could check with Snopes.com. Their job is to check stories floating on the Internet. But these days, the Internet is spewing so much so often Snopes can’t keep up.
This means that, before you forward the latest email to your 500 closest friends, you put the email to a logical test. Does the email make sense? Is it likely to be true? Is there anything on the Internet that might say it’s nonsense?
You need to take with a grain of salt what hear from politicians. Donald Trump probably told more lies than he told truths. Among his largest lie was that he saw thousands of people in Jersey City cheering when the World Trade Center came down. Trump made the story up to serve his political campaign, to justify his love for Muslims.
It gets worse. There’s a serious business creating fake news. One entrepreneur allegedly is earning $10,000 a month from creating it.
Here’s CBS News:
Paul Horner – the 38-year-old self-made titan of a fake news empire on Facebook – is claiming responsibility for pushing Donald Trump to the White House, and says he has no plans to stop publishing fake news.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Horner attributed his success to Trumps’ particular base of supporters. He is the man behind such viral headlines as “The Amish in America Commit their Vote to Donald Trump” and “President Obama Signs Executive Order Banning the National Anthem at all Sporting Events Nationwide” – neither of which were true.
“My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything – they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist,” he told The Washington Post.
Horner’s fake news articles – published on sites designed to mimic the look and feel of well-known, legitimate news outlets – had enormous impact this election cycle. Even members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, including Trump’s son Eric and then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, shared links to Horner’s content. Horner’s stories also made their way to Google News, known to feature stories from reputable news sources.
“Honestly, people are definitely dumber,” Horner told The Post to explain the popularity of his content, which he suggested he sees as satire akin to The Onion. “Nobody fact-checks anything anymore – I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary.”
I saw the author of the Washington Post article, Caitlin Dewey, being interviewed on BubbleVision the other night. She seemed miffed (my interpretation) that Paul Horner, the fake news reporter, was earning more than she was, the real news reporter.
The moral of this story is simple: Don’t believe anything, without checking. That specifically includes stock and investment tips from your friends. Remember your friends don’t check either. In doubt? Stay out.
I once had a publishing company. We put out half a dozen magazines a month, some as big as 350 pages. To ensure their accuracy, I printed a three-word motto and hung it everywhere: CHECK. CHECK. CHECK.
I worked at Business Week magazine in the late 1960s. I submitted an article. They laid it out. Then they sent it to a department of “fact checkers.” Those guys would check every fact in my piece. They’d call all the people I interviewed and they’d read them back their quotes. A few days later, my article would come with blue check marks in the margin. Boy, did those blue check marks keep Business Week’s reporters honest.
These days fact checkers have gone. The print business is ailing. There are too few reporters, no fact checkers. It’s become so bad you now routinely find spelling mistakes in all newspapers and magazines — from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post to the New York Times.
These guys could do with a fact checker:
Save a trip to the E.R.
This cuts bagels. I wrote about it yesterday.
You get it from Amazon or a zillion other places online. My dear friend Frank Derfler emailed me this morning:
I once had an ER doc tell me that a major problem in their emergency center was people cutting their hands while slicing bagels on Sunday morning. “It’s the only time it happens” he said.
Harry Newton, who updated the list of stocks I like — see the right hand column in the online blog. Facebook is in the list. It’s crashing. Put a limit buy in at $110. But now now.
If you’re still having trouble with the emails of this blog, please read the blog online and email me the problems. Fixing email software is difficult when everyone reads their emails with a different email client. Microsoft’s Outlook is the absolute worst.
You must be a Trumper…