Settle For This

Everyone was looking forward to the civil trial brought about by the lawsuit of Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for lying about the ballot services firm and especially looking forward to seeing not just Rupert Murdoch by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham having to take the witness stand.  Instead, he settled out of court and the trial of this still-young century never happened.

Fox News' critics say that Rupert Murdoch was the big loser because Dominion was able to prove before the trial that he knew that everything said about the 2020 presidential election on Fox was a lie, and that everyone from Murdoch on down - even Tucker Carlson - was eager to get Donald Trump behind them, and Murdoch was forced to pay Dominion $787.5 million in damages.  But the truth of the matter is that Murdoch bought himself a settlement that, had the suit gone forward and been ruled in Dominion's favor, would have been twice as expensive, as Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion.  Such a payout might have devastated the company and destroyed the already tattered reputations of their on-air pseudo-personalities, who know don't have to take the witness stand and admit having lied to their viewers under cross-examination.   

And on top of it all, Fox News never has to admit on the air to its own viewers that the network lied abut the 2020 presidential election being stolen. 

Murdoch gets to put the matter behind him at a discount and continue to run Fox News as he always has.  Fox News isn't going to reform itself and concentrate more on the truth going forward.  The network is still going to slant and bend the truth - and sometimes disregard it - in its never-ending quest for ratings.   

And we can expect more lies from Tucker Carlson that threaten to destroy the country.

No Fake News Here!

This past Sunday I saw a report on "60 Minutes" on fake news and the sites that promote it.  Scott Pelley showed how fake-news sites proliferate across the Internet and how they're designed to get the attention of ideologically charged audiences by using fake Twitter accounts known as "bots" to spread them as far and wide as possible.  They have people on the left and right believing the worst about each other's political opponents - I'll grant that not everything reported about Donald Trump is true - and that's pretty much how that story about a Washington pizzeria that was reported to have been the center of a child sex-slave operation run by Hillary Clinton got started.  That, of course, led to a person who believed the worst about Hillary going there and shooting up the place.

One of those "fake news" purveyors, Mike Cernovich, defended his work in an interview with Pelley, saying that his information about the Clinton campaign and the Democratic left (which, remember, are not one and the same) is a counterpoint to the official line from the Democratic Party, his "facts" based on his own "reporting" - like having a doctor Hillary has never met examine her based on a clip of her showing signs of fatigue (from an illness) and attributing it to Parkinson's disease.

Well, you won't find any fake news here.  Because, apart from a piece on a Swedish Christmas fair that I reported on here because I had no other place to publish it, I don't report news stories on this blog, and I have made it clear that this blog is not meant to be a news source.  It's just social and cultural commentary, essays about personal experiences, and the occasional book or record review.  And my blog "Pictures of Beautiful  Women" is just that and nothing else.

You know, the world would be a whole lot better if those of us who write blogs without any news value remembered that we are just reporting opinions and hearsay without presenting them as the facts.  I merely comment on what I've heard, and if it sounds fishy or fake, I either say so or refuse to even dignify the story with commentary. Look, the Internet is meant to spread free speech, but free speech is a responsibility that has to be taken more seriously.  I am responsible for saying that what you read on this blog is not the gospel, just me mouthing off about whatever happens to be on my mind.

That's why this blog is called "Miscellaneous Musings."

Fakebook

Are you outraged by some of the stories about the presidential candidates of 2016 and the dastardly deeds they've done?  Well, guess what - it you find such stories on a Web site you'd never heard of before via Facebook, they're not true. Well, 99.9 percent of them.

Fake news sites (it's the news that's fake, not the sites) have been promoting their stories (appropriate word for them) on Facebook (founded in 2004) for months (and this is the only sentence in this blog entry interrupted by parenthetical asides that you'll have to read).  It seems that only a couple of weeks ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg denied that any such sites were having their links promoted on the social media site.  Now he says that Facebook knows about it and has been working on the problem.  Gee, what could have made him change his tune?  Maybe it was because he was getting a lot of flak from Hillary Clinton supporters, who figure prominently on Facebook and thought the fake stories about Hillary swung the presidential election to Donald Trump.

While this sounds like Hillary supporters looking for yet another scapegoat to blame for their candidate's loss, this is actually serious.  A lot of unreliable news sites have been proliferating all over the place, offering up "news" stories that sound too outrageous to be true, and probably are. I don't doubt that there were stories about Hillary Clinton that weren't true, but I'm sure that there were several Trump stories that were balderdash as well, and if people voted one way or another based on any of them, that's a problem.

It's relatively easy to spot a fake news site.  If it has an obscure name or anything other than a dot-com domain, you shouldn't trust it.  Take special care and beware of any sites that look like legitimate sites from the U.S. broadcast network news departments or CNN, MSNBC and the like.  If it says ".com.co" at the end of the URL, it's a fraudulent version of the real thing.  If it's foxnews.com.co, though, it's probably more accurate than the actual Fox News site.

Ha ha!  I am only kidding about Fox, of course, but this "fake news" business is still a serious problem that demands a serious answer.  Mark Zuckerberg doesn't see a social-connection site like his as a traditional media outlet.  But he'd better start treating it like one, since a majority of Americans get at least some of their news, if not all of it, from the links they see on social media.  If there are sites out there willing to take advantage of people's unfamiliarity with where real news comes from, then Zuckerberg ought to take his role as a gatekeeper much more seriously than he already has.

Me, I think I'll curtail my search for news and commentary on the Web through Facebook or stop altogether.  After all, as noted, Facebook isn't supposed to be a site to get news from.  It's a site you use to communicate with and make friends and also to establish connections with Broadway actresses.

I ain't naming names. ;-)                            

And if you've come here via Facebook, let me say again that I never claimed that this blog is supposed to be a legitimate news source.