Fox News undermines a free, independent press; Washington Post, May 15, 2017

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post; Fox News undermines a free, independent press

"With the departure of credible centrist and conservative voices and professional journalists (e.g. Megyn Kelly, Greta Van Susteren, George Will, Major Garrett), the alternative-reality programming seen in the Fox evening and afternoon lineup and on “Fox & Friends” now overwhelms the rest of the operation. In the firing of Comey, we see Fox coverage devoted to carrying the false Trump narrative (the idea to fire him came from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein) long after every other network had ferreted out the true story. Fox, in short, now is practically indistinguishable from Breitbart — and in some cases, RT. It has become the purveyor of falsehoods and propaganda, not a member of an independent media tasked with holding elected leaders accountable."

Unchecked fake news gave rise to an evil empire in Star Wars; Washington Post, May 4, 2017

Ben Guarino, Washington Post; Unchecked fake news gave rise to an evil empire in Star Wars

[Kip Currier: In discussing the "media-poor" fictional Star Wars-universe, the Washington Post reporter and cited experts implicate the critical roles of "real world" archives, libraries, the historical record, print and media cultures, education, access to information, data stewardship and analysis, rational "truth"-based discourse, free and independent press, and literate and questioning citizenry, within technology-infused--and increasingly tech-dependent--societies. These implications also raise some persuasive arguments for the relevance and interdependence of humanities-focused practitioners and research disciplines to technology fields and endeavors.]

"“Fake news in 'Star Wars' is probably their number one problem,” says Ryan Britt, an editor who specializes in science fiction at the website Inverse. Britt, in his 2015 book “Luke Skywalker Can’t Read,” makes a provocative claim: Most “Star Wars” denizens, if they're not illiterate, seem fundamentally disinterested in reading...

Fake news is a deadly symptom of the media-poor culture displayed in “Star Wars.” Facebook, in a report released at the end of April, defined fake news as a “catch-all” phrase that may include “hoaxes, rumors, memes, online abuse, and factual misstatements by public figures that are reported in otherwise accurate news pieces.” And in “Star Wars,” a few whopping “factual misstatements” by a public figure give rise to an evil empire.

Near the end of the prequel “Revenge of the Sith,” the elected leader of the Galactic Republic gives a speech. It's a rousing speech, full of carnage and conspiracy. Supreme Chancellor Palpatine spins a wild theory that the powerful elite, the Jedi, wish to subvert the government. It's also total bull...

“When you take out print, when you legislate against media, what results is some kind of totalitarian state,” says Joseph Hurtgen, an English instructor at Georgia's Young Harris College and an expert in archival theory, the way information is kept and stored. “That’s always where this goes when you undermine print culture.”

The funny thing about records in “Star Wars,” Hurtgen says, is that they betray an obsession with technology. “The only archive that anybody bothers to keep in 'Star Wars' is technology,” he says. “Nobody’s writing down memos or news.”

Even those technological archives are devoid of context. The Jedi library contains volumes of star charts but allows no room for questioning their accuracy. “The library is complete garbage,” in Britt's estimation."

Russia Heats Up Its Infowar With the West; Daily Beast, March 3, 2017

Ilan Berman, Daily Beast; Russia Heats Up Its Infowar With the West

"[Russia's information operations] objective is clear and unequivocal: to obscure objective facts through a veritable “firehose of falsehood,” thereby creating doubt in Western governments, undermining trust in democratic institutions, and garnering greater sympathy for the Russian government (or, at least, greater freedom of action) for its actions abroad.

Last month, in a presentation before the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu formally unveiled the establishment of a new military unit designed to conduct “information operations” against the country’s adversaries. The goal of the new initiative, according to Vladimir Shamanov, head of the Duma’s defense committee, is to “protect the national defense interests and engage in information warfare.”"

In today’s world, the truth is losing; Washington Post, 11/29/16

David Ignatius, Washington Post; In today’s world, the truth is losing:

"How should citizens who want a fact-based world combat this assault on truth? Stengel has approved State Department programs that teach investigative reporting and empower truth-tellers, but he’s right that this isn’t really a job for Uncle Sam.

The best hope may be the global companies that have created the social-media platforms. “They see this information war as an existential threat,” says Stengel. The tech companies have made a start: He says Twitter has removed more than 400,000 accounts, and YouTube daily deletes extremist videos.

The real challenge for global tech giants is to restore the currency of truth. Perhaps “machine learning” can identify falsehoods and expose every argument that uses them. Perhaps someday, a human-machine process will create what Stengel describes as a “global ombudsman for information.”"

Before ‘fake news,’ there was Soviet ‘disinformation’; Washington Post, 11/26/16

Adam Taylor, Washington Post; Before ‘fake news,’ there was Soviet ‘disinformation’ :

"In the parlance of 2016, we would probably refer to the Patriot's front page story as “fake news.” It's not so dissimilar to the flimsy or outright false stories that spread online in the United States this year. There may be a shared Russian link too: This week, a number of groups alleged that a Russian propaganda effort had helped spread these “fake news” stories to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton's chances in the 2016 presidential election.

But during the height of the Cold War, these false stories were referred to as something else: “disinformation.”

That term came into use in the early 1960s, and came into widespread use in the 1980s. It is based upon a Russian word: Dezinformatsiya. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, a high-ranking official in Romania's secret police who defected in 1978, the French-sounding word was invented by Joseph Stalin after World War II. A definition from the 1952 Great Soviet Encyclopedia called it the “dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended to mislead public opinion” and suggested that the Soviet Union was the target of such tactics from the West."

Just how partisan is Facebook's fake news? We tested it; PC World, 11/21/16

Mark Hachman, PCWorld; Just how partisan is Facebook's fake news? We tested it:

"We decided to test who’s seeing this partisan fake news, who’s supplying it, and just how obvious it is.

We began our investigation last Monday, as the fake-news controversy gained momentum—and Facebook and Google began blocking sites that traffic in disinformation from their respective advertising networks. We set up two Facebook accounts, one favoring Hillary Clinton, and the other supporting Trump, then let Facebook recommend a series of news pages. In effect, we were asking Facebook to be our news service.

Then we sat back and watched the news roll in. We looked closely at each post to determine whether it was real news, fake news, or something in between."

Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News; New York Times, 11/17/16

Gardiner Harris and Melissa Eddy, New York Times; Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News:

"...[I]t was on the subject of false information coursing through social media and television that Mr. Obama was most impassioned, so much so that at one stage he lost track of the question he was answering...

“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.””

Bigger than Watergate: The Russian-orchestrated DNC email hack places our national sovereignty at stake; Salon, 7/27/16

Bob Cesca, Salon; Bigger than Watergate: The Russian-orchestrated DNC email hack places our national sovereignty at stake:

"As of this writing, further details along with the chain-of-evidence is still being established by journalists, security experts and the FBI. (By the way, before anyone kneejerks to the “crazy conspiracy theory” conclusion, it’s worth noting that everyone from the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, to A-list reporter Richard Engel, along with The Daily Beast, ABC News, NBC News, Yahoo! News, Slate, TPM, Vice and The Washington Post have been uncovering new and frightening aspects of this story going back to June and culminating with the past 48 hours.) According to investigative journalists at Vice’s “Motherboard,” in particular, a security firm hired by the DNC discovered the existence of “two sophisticated adversaries” that had infiltrated the Democratic Party’s internal email network. Known as “APT 28″ and “APT 29,” the handles are used by both the Russian intelligence service, the FSB (formerly the KGB) and the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. Later, using a front handle known as the aforementioned “Guccifer 2.0,” the agencies announced back in June that it had given Wikileaks “thousands of files and mails.”

Regarding the content of some of the emails, bear this in mind: according to conservative author and former NSA analyst, John Schindler, who, by the way, is no fan of Hillary Clinton, part of the FSB’s tradecraft is to fabricate intelligence and toss it into a cocktail of legitimate documents. In other words, it’s fair to speculate, based on Russia’s modus operandi, that the questionable emails were doctored, if not manufactured for impact, while exculpatory emails might’ve been scrubbed from the tranche. We have to question everything here, given the tenacity of Putin’s propaganda efforts...

One last thing: if you’re only looking at this story as an internal DNC scandal, you’re missing the despotic forest for the trees. We can’t emphasize enough: this story is bigger than Bernie or Hillary. It’s bigger than Trump. It speaks directly to the sovereignty of our electoral process. The sooner it’s treated this way, the better off we’ll be."