Hype - The Art of the Prank

April 20, 2008January 15, 2019

“Investor Literacy” is a Hoax

11 reasons ‘investor literacy’ is a big hoax
by Paul B. Farrell
MarketWatch
April 15, 2008

Commentary: Wall Street prefers clueless, irrational investors

Arroyo Grande, Calif. (MarketWatch) — So Congress made April “Investor Literacy Month.” What a hoax, a cruel joke, yes, an insult to America’s 95 million investors.

What’s really happening? Here’s the short version: In the past five years Wall Street’s out-of-control greed (with the backing of Greenspan’s cheap-money Fed, an “anything-goes, free-market” White House and a banking industry that loves piling up debt in order to charge excessive fees) created a massive housing-credit bubble to rapidly replace their earlier busted dot-com bubble.

Then last summer the new bubble failed, exploding in our faces, nearly destroying the global monetary system. Result? These two bubbles triggered a diversionary, knee-jerk reaction: A wave of so-called “investor education” programs across the U.S. and world.

That’s the joke, the hoax, the insult. Get it? Wall Street’s greed nearly destroys the world’s economy twice in less than a decade. Solution? Bail out Wall Street, then blame it on the little guy, the Main Street investor, for not being “educated enough!” That’s a hoax. Continue reading ““Investor Literacy” is a Hoax”

March 21, 2008January 15, 2019

Fake News

Submitted by Josh Jasper:

How local TV embraced fake news
Americans’ first source in news is overrun by marketing videos.
by Farhad Manjoo

Note: Here is another excerpt from my new book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. (For previous excerpts, see here and here.) The book argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture’s grip on what people once called “objective reality.” Here, I look at how fakery has overrun local TV news.

Excerpted from True Enough by Farhad Manjoo (Wiley, 2008)

Late in the holiday shopping season of 2005, Robin Raskin began to worry about a hidden danger posed by the world’s most popular gadget: Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she’d once written a magazine column called “Internet Mom”). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.

“There’s scores of ‘iPorn’ everywhere,” Raskin warned in an appearance on KGUN, an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz. The iPod had become “a pedophile’s playground,” she said, and Apple was doing little to stem the smut. On Pittsburgh’s Fox affiliate, WPGH Channel 53, Raskin called the iPod one of the “scariest” gifts of the season. The ABC station in Columbus, Ohio, featured Raskin’s warnings as part of a report by Kent Justice, a correspondent who produces a regular segment called “On Your Side.” Justice told viewers, “If you didn’t know it, now prepare for it: Hundreds of Web sites are selling iPorn.”

Nine stations aired Raskin’s warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11. Continue reading “Fake News”

March 9, 2008January 15, 2019

NBC Pursuit of Ratings Achieves New Low

NBC “˜Predator” lawsuit: journalism on trial
by Douglas Lee
Special to the First Amendment Center Online
March 4, 2008

Yes, it”s only a ruling on a motion to dismiss. And, yes, in such a ruling, the plaintiff”s allegations are presumed to be true. And, yes, it”s only the ruling of a trial judge, not a ruling of an appellate court establishing new precedent.

So, yes, many reasons exist to minimize the importance of the recent ruling in Conradt v. NBC Universal, Inc. At the same time, many reasons exist for NBC to be concerned.

In Conradt, Patricia Conradt is suing NBC for the network”s role in her brother”s suicide. Conradt claims NBC, in an effort to create a sensational arrest for “Dateline NBC: To Catch A Predator,” recklessly orchestrated a police action that caused her brother to take his life.

On Feb. 26, 2008, Denny Chin, a U.S. district judge sitting in the Southern District of New York, held that Conradt”s case could proceed. While he dismissed seven of Conradt”s claims, Chin ruled that the most serious of her allegations “” that NBC had violated her brother”s civil rights and had intentionally caused him emotional distress “” warranted a jury trial. “[A] reasonable jury,” Chin wrote, “could find that NBC crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement.” Continue reading “NBC Pursuit of Ratings Achieves New Low”

February 15, 2008January 15, 2019

Journalist Bites Reality!

From Skeptic.com:

In this week”s eSkeptic, Steve Salerno discusses the fundamental flaws of broadcast journalism as a tool for informing viewers.

Journalist-Bites-Reality!
by Steve Salerno
eSkeptic.com
February 13, 2008

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil.

It is the measure of the media”s obsession with its “pedophiles run amok!” story line that so many of us are on a first-name basis with the victims: Polly, Amber, JonBenet, Danielle, Elizabeth, Samantha. And now there is Madeleine. Clearly these crimes were and are horrific, and nothing here is intended to diminish the parents” loss. But something else has been lost in the bargain as journalists tirelessly stoke fear of strangers, segueing from nightly-news segments about cyber-stalkers and “the rapist in your neighborhood” to prime-time reality series like Dateline”s “To Catch a Predator.” That “something else” is reality.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time “” and just 3 percentof the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true “predators” so much as confused or unruly teens.) Overall, the odds that one of America”s 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: “Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers.” Continue reading “Journalist Bites Reality!”

December 31, 2007January 15, 2019

2007: The Year in Spin

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The Whoppers of 2007
December 30, 2007
by Brooks Jackson, with the staff of
FactCheck.org

We review some notable political falsehoods and distortions of the year.

Summary

The year 2007 wasn’t a good one for political honesty. Though not even technically an election year, it provided a bumper crop of falsehoods and distortions nonetheless.

Presidential candidates kept us busy:

Republican Rudy Giuliani made false claims over and over about his record as mayor of New York, and even about England’s health care system.

Democrat Bill Richardson also mangled the facts repeatedly, claiming credit for creating more jobs as New Mexico’s governor than actually materialized and using a made-up figure about the performance of U.S. students, among other misstatements.

Republican Mitt Romney claimed undeserved credit for himself as governor of Massachusetts and made false or misleading claims about two of his rivals.

Democrat Hillary Clinton ran an ad claiming that National Guard and Reserve troops had no health insurance before she went to work, when in fact most of them did.

Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee repeatedly twisted the facts when talking about his record on taxes in Arkansas and other subjects. And there were plenty of other howlers from the large field of candidates.

Misinformation came both from Congress and the White House: Continue reading “2007: The Year in Spin”