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  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    How the Drudge Report, With Its Condoleezza Rice ‘Scoop,’ Rules Fake news

    How the Drudge Report, With Its Condoleezza Rice ‘Scoop,’ Again Rules the Media

    by Lauren Ashburn Jul 15, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

    His Condi Rice “scoop” went viral despite its utter implausibility. Lauren Ashburn on why the press is held captive by the conservative blogger’s thinly sourced gossip.

    The headline screamed across the homepage of the Drudge Report: ROMNEY NARROWS VP CHOICES; CONDI EMERGES AS FRONTRUNNER.

    Matt Drudge—the shadowy, fedora-wearing Internet gossip machine who has boasted from day one that he is a conservative—crowed that his sources revealed former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is at the top of the veep list. He even went so far as to punctuate the scoop with an exclamation point!

    Bull. I’m a good enough poker player to know a bluff when I see one. The claim is so ludicrous as to be laughable.

    Yet in typical fashion, the media—knowing the claim had little basis in reality—went along for the ride. The Today show, Good Morning America, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, even The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, along with plenty of others, took the bait and devoted countless minutes and column inches to the tale. The speculation spread like wildfire across the web, with The Daily Beast and Politico taking the “scoop” and running with it, spicing up the summer’s otherwise ennui-inducing campaign. And questioning the skimpy Drudge item became just another form of wallowing in it.

    “Redistributing the work of others is so easy and has become a form of news,” says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

    So why not do it? Why shouldn’t news outlets seize the opportunity to pooh-pooh the story as a way of driving clicks and ratings?

    Rosenstiel says reporting on another journalist’s reporting raises serious questions about fact-checking someone else’s anonymous sources. “When you post something because it is out there and can get you attention, traffic, even revenue, are you responsible if it is wrong?”

    Apparently not. It’s pretty obvious that most of those who picked up this story failed to vet it before blasting the claim to the world—or trumpeted it even if their own sources called the idea absurd. They know Drudge is a monster traffic-driver and that even if they ignore his tasty tidbits, their rivals won’t.

    In this case, mindlessly repeating the far-fetched scenario aided what was probably the intent of whoever whispered to Drudge: to suck the air out of the day’s other big news. That, of course, was the Boston Globe report that Romney remained as Bain Capital’s chief executive and sole stockholder through 2002—three years after he has insisted he left the firm.

    Beyond the political distraction, there is some marginal benefit to the Romney campaign for Mitt to be seen as open-minded enough to consider a female African-American. This is, after all, the same candidate who was booed during his speech a day earlier to the NAACP.

    In Washington politics, there is no such thing as a coincidence. Even if it were remotely true that Condi is at the top of Romney’s list—which it isn’t—the timing of the leak doesn’t pass the smell test.

    But hey, score one for Drudge. He turned the entire press corps upside down with an off-the-record source, or sources. Anyone who has even remotely followed the veepstakes already knows that Rice has denied the possibility, saying, “I don’t see myself in any way in elected office.” What part of “no” doesn’t Drudge understand?
    It’s pretty obvious that most of those who picked up this story did not vet it before blasting the claim to the world.
    The litany of political reasons why it wouldn’t happen is as long as the distance to the man in the moon. Rice has said she is pro-choice, may not have voted for John McCain in 2008, and her positions on gun control, immigration, education, and gay marriage don’t seem to completely jibe with the party line. Her involvement in launching the war in Iraq and high-profile role under George W. Bush would muddy the Romney camp’s main message on the economy. That’s a whole lotta differences that could derail Romney’s chances.

    It’s a bellwether of the Internet age that just about anyone can make anything go viral, true or not. Cable news, desperate for fresh meat, will always chase after the latest shiny object, even when journalists know the premise is silly. If the news had been about Tim Pawlenty—a serious contender for VP—surging to the top of the list, repeating the exclusive would make sense. But then forget the front-page treatment, and the possibility of even an iota of increased readership/viewership.

    Rosenstiel says that the ethics and implications of the new role of redistributors of news—and, for that matter, aggregators—is something that has not been thought through. “Is it enough to say I don’t care if what I pass along is true?”

    Good question. We live in a 24/7 news cycle that gives every pontificating pundit and boastful blogger the chance to spin thousands of others. It’s a dangerous weapon that, in this case, misfired.

    How the Drudge Report, With Its Condoleezza Rice
    Last edited by JohnDoe2; 07-14-2012 at 08:58 PM.
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    Senior Member HAPPY2BME's Avatar
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    I would still not rule out Marco Rubio.
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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    POLITICO AND THE DRUDGE REPORT GET CAUGHT PUBLISHING FAKE NEWS

    May 03, 2012

    (NATIONAL) -- “One reason why fake news is so pervasive, so easy to spread, and so hard to debunk is that it almost always has some sort of basis in reality. For example, real-life end-of-life consultation becomes "death panels." Because debunkers have to explain the complex reality in detail, the simpler but false version never gets dislodged. But it's not often that we get to see just how the fake-news sausage gets made.”

    Thus begins the lead-in to a new report by The Atlantic claiming that both Politoco.com and Drudgereport.com created and published fake news.

    Only this time, claims Associate Editor David Graham both outfits got caught with their knickers down and as a result, “We can trace exactly how the false claim that Obama lied about his college girlfriends in his memoir got started.”

    He then goes on to explain (in great detail) how journalist and presidential biographer David Maraniss had uncovered new information about President Obama, which he's publishing in a forthcoming book – info that has to do with Obama's college girlfriends.

    Maraniss managed to contact Genevieve Cook, who dated the future president at Columbia University, and she turned over her diary to him.

    Graham then goes on in excruciating detail how both Politico and the Drudge Report twisted and massaged factual information from the book to serve their own ends in creating a bombastic story with their own desired slant.

    And in doing so Graham proves handily why it is so easy for untruths to become mass truth in the 24/7 news cycle: because creating and broadcasting the slant on fact is so easy to do (death panels!!) and is consumed readily and fully by certain segments of the public willing to buy into anything which confirms their own already firmly committed beliefs, yet explaining the facts behind how the fake news was made takes time, space and detail -- just the things a 20-second Twitter/Facebook attention span generation doesn’t have time for.

    Besides that, the story with the facts behind it doesn’t make for a short, catchy headline and cannot be explained in three or four short sentences.

    You can read Grahams’ report
    here


    POLITICO AND THE DRUDGE REPORT GET CAUGHT PUBLISHING FAKE NEWS | BREAKING NEWS | Sky Valley Chronicle Washington State News
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