"[A]n army of fans [are] now competing to produce the catchiest and most outrageous videos supporting [Spencer Pratt's] campaign."

"They share and cross-promote a seemingly endless stream of computer-generated clips boosting Mr. Pratt and bashing his opponents with depictions of Los Angeles as a dirty, dangerous wasteland. One released on Sunday depicts women at a fitness studio confiding to one another that they secretly plan to vote for Mr. Pratt.... [T]he A.I. videos often venture into offensive territory. In the Batman clip boosting Mr. Pratt, Mr. Newsom’s likeness makes a crude sexual remark, and the phony Ms. Harris drinks out of a bottle of cheap liquor...."

From "A.I. Videos Help Reality TV Antagonist Break Through in L.A. Mayor’s Race/Supporters have created A.I. videos to boost the mayoral campaign of Spencer Pratt, the former MTV star. Some videos have gone viral, but it’s not clear whether they will yield votes" (NYT).

The phrase "the phony Ms. Harris" genuinely confused me. For a second there, I thought the NYT was calling Kamala Harris — the real Kamala Harris — phony. No, they were using the word "phony" to mean A.I.-generated.

"WTF is going on here with Michael Wolff giving PR strategy to Jeffrey Epstein?"

Said the podcaster Brian Reed, quoted by The Guardian in "Blurred lines: how Michael Wolff aspired to be part of elite circles he wrote about/The writer who features prominently in newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails has achieved extraordinary access but faced questions about his journalistic ethics."

Wolff's attempt at an explanation: "I was engaged then in an in-depth conversation with Epstein about his relationship with Trump and this seems to be part of that conversation."

The Guardian also quotes what NYT reporter Maggie Haberman said about Wolff back in 2018 (when his Trump-bashing book "Fire and Fury" came out: "He believes in larger truths and narratives.... So he creates a narrative that is notionally true, that’s conceptually true; the details are often wrong."

Reminds me of the old Ratherism "fake but accurate."

Back to The Guardian:

"So how did The [London] Times, a pillar of quality British journalism since the 18th century, blow the story so badly?"

The question is asked, in "How a London newspaper botched a New York political story" (Semafor).

The answer is: hilariously. 

As the New York mayor’s race approaches, The Times of London has accelerated its push for more, and largely hostile, coverage of Mamdani. That campaign has been driven internally by Margi Conklin [who]... reached out to an email address the reporter believed belonged to the former mayor of New York.... 

Semafor reached out to a Gmail address our sources believed to be the one used by The Times.

“You are correct. It was me. The real Bill DeBlasio,” the person who controls the email address responded. The person didn’t respond to further questions, and phone calls to two numbers associated with the email address went unanswered....

Apparently, there's someone else named Bill DeBlasio.

I got to this story from here:

"How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?"

Yesterday, in the Oval Office, Peter Doocy asked Trump: "How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?... People didn't see you for a couple days, 1.3 million user engagements as of Saturday morning about your demise. "

TRUMP: "Really? I didn't see that. You know, I have heard — it's sort of crazy — but last week I did numerous news conferences, all successful. They went very well. Like this is going very well. And then I didn't do any for two days and they said there must be something wrong with him. Biden wouldn't do them for months. You wouldn't see him. And nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him. And we know he wasn't in the greatest of shape. No, I heard that. I get reports now. You knew I did an interview that lasted for about an hour and a half with somebody and everybody saw that was on one of your competitors. Uh I did numerous uh shows and also did a number of Truths, long Truths. I think pretty poignant Truths. No, I was very active over the weekend. They also knew I went out to visit some people at the at the club that I own pretty nearby on the Potomac River. And no, I've been very active actually over the weekend. I didn't hear that one. That's pretty serious...."

Also, at 31:20, Doocy gets another question and asks about the mysterious throwing of something out of a White House window.

If your first thought is "Sheer Madness," your second thought should be is this for real.

If you just X about it, you're revealing something about yourself. Do you want this to be true?

***

I just found that in draft form. Couldn't remember what it was, and it seemed so strange. Now, I remember and I remember why I left it unfinished, and somehow I like it in its unfinished form. I don't want to call attention to the specific thing I was reacting to, and I like it in the abstract.

Fake outrage, isn't it?

I'm reading, among other things, "Young Democrats’ Anger Boils Over as Schumer Retreats on Shutdown/A generational divide, seen in newer lawmakers’ impatience with bipartisanship and for colleagues who don’t understand new media, has emerged as one of the deepest rifts within the party" (NYT)(free-access link).

The Democrats have to make a show of fighting Trump, but Schumer's move was more important anti-Trumpism, and I think they all know it:

On Thursday, Mr. Schumer explained his decision to vote to keep the government open in an opinion piece in The New York Times, a version of which he read on the Senate floor.

“As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be, I believe a government shutdown is far worse,” Mr. Schumer wrote.

From the written opinion piece:

"No, Trump Did Not Hold the Bible Upside Down at Lafayette Square."

That's a NYT headline from September 18, 2020.

Video and photographs clearly show that the Bible wasn’t upside down, as fact checkers at PolitiFact and Snopes have noted. But that hasn’t stopped the claim from spreading on social media, an example of how speculation on the internet can morph into a zombie claim that refuses to die.

But just now on CNN, as Trump entered the church, the historian chosen to provide depth and context— Timothy Naftali — repeated the longstanding and long-discredited misinformation.

"But is Zuckerberg’s claim that 'fact-checkers have just been too politically biased' correct?"

Asks Nate Silver, at Silver Bulletin:

In my view, it’s at least pointing in the right direction, in line with my Indigo Blob theory about how the lines between nonpartisan institutions and partisan actors have become blurred. In the B.T. days — Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship — a sharp contrast to edgier and less experienced journalists in the Trump era who would later claim to own the disinformation beat. Perhaps because demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left... the journalists who selected into the subfield tended to be especially left of center.... 

"Mr. Trump beat his polling numbers by about 2.5 points nationally... and 2.1 points in the average swing state."

"Our final forecast had it so close to 50-50 that the outcome was literally more random than a coin flip. (Empirically, heads win 50.5 percent of the time.) But a Trump sweep of the swing states was our single most likely outcome, because polling errors tend to be correlated. It’s not great that the polls missed low on Mr. Trump for the third and final time, even in a year when survey companies adopted all sorts of novel strategies to avoid this exact outcome."

Writes Nate Silver, in "Don’t Blame Polling" (NYT).

I'm blaming polling. What's Silver's reason not to blame polling? First, Republicans are (supposedly) more suspicious and less likely to respond to polls. Pollsters using "weighting" to try to compensate. There's also "herding," which is massaging the numbers to make them more like other pollsters' numbers, but herding isn't a basis for not blaming polling, and Silver is certain that herding occurred in 2024. So what justifies that headline? I see this:

Should we trust polls less? I’ll offer a brave and qualified no, but only because the shift in public sentiment about polls — from viewing them as oracular to seeing them as fake news — has probably overcorrected relative to reality....

Blaming and not trusting are 2 different things! But that's an issue with the headline writer. Silver is talking about trust, and he's only saying don't trust polls any less that you already do. I guess it's like the way I feel about reading the mainstream news, which I do every day. I don't consider it a complete waste of time. I regard it as biased and manipulative, but the alternatives are even worse. (And this blog is not an alternative to MSM. It feeds off MSM.)

"In MAGA world, the alleged pet-eating is already a matter of fact..."

"... and Republican elected officials, including Vance, are hurrying to join the clout rush, the scramble to get attention and likes and followers by treating it as a serious issue."

Writes Phillip Bump, in "The right-wing bubble says Trump will save your cat from immigrants/False claims and baseless ones are politically useful, so they rocket to the social media accounts of prominent right-wing people" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Did you notice it yesterday? "Seemingly out of the blue Monday morning, supporters of former president Donald Trump began posting myriad AI-generated images depicting the Republican presidential nominee as a savior. Not of the American Dream or of Christianity, mind you, the normal targets of such praise. Instead, Trump was shown protecting ducks and kitty cats."

Yeah, I was wondering what this — forwarded to me yesterday — was all about:

A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, has an opinion piece in The Washington Post: "How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America."

Here's a gift link so you can read the whole thing. Excerpt:

It has been only eight years since Donald Trump popularized the term “fake news” as a cudgel to dismiss and attack journalism that challenged him. 

That phrase, from the president of the United States, was all the encouragement many would-be authoritarians needed. In the following years, around 70 countries on six continents have enacted “fake news” laws. Nominally aimed at stamping out disinformation, many primarily serve to allow governments to punish independent journalism. Under these laws, journalists have faced fines, arrest and censorship for reporting on a separatist conflict in Cameroon, documenting Cambodian sex-trafficking rings, chronicling the covid-19 pandemic in Russia, and questioning Egyptian economic policy. Trump has effectively championed this effort, as he did when he told Bolsonaro at a joint news conference, “I’m very proud to hear the president use the term ‘fake news.’” 

"The Biden Administration went all in on the false claim as a cudgel to use against Texas for trying to secure the Southern border with its own personnel to stop the unprecedented surge of illegal migrants."

Writes Jonathan Turley, in "The Biden Administration and Media Accused of Another False Claim on the Border."

Perhaps you heard: "On Friday night, a woman and two children drowned near Eagle Pass, and Texas officials blocked U.S. Border Patrol from attempting to provide emergency assistance." 

"Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof."

Said Jann Wenner, quoted in "Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s/The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine on the legacy of boomers and why he chose only white men for his book on rock’s 'masters'" (NYT).

This is the interview that's been in the news — see "Jann Wenner’s Rock Hall Reign Lasted Years. It Ended in 20 Minutes. The day after the Rolling Stone co-founder made remarks widely criticized as racist and sexist in a Times interview, the Hall of Fame called an emergency vote and ousted him" — and that we've talked about already, but I'm calling attention to something I haven't seen discussed yet.

Here's the remark I've quoted in context. The interviewer, David Marchese, is in boldface. The rest is Wenner. I've put the above-quoted remark in red:

"People don’t necessarily go into standup shows expecting airtight truths. They expect laughs, perhaps some trenchant observation...."

"[Hasan] Minhaj described his work as 'the dynamic range that theatre and storytelling and comedy allow you to explore.' Does that mean audiences should expect his words onstage to stringently hew to the facts on the ground? The slipperiness of memoir finds a new dimension when it’s played for laughs in front of a crowd...."

Writes Clare Malone, in "Hasan Minhaj’s 'Emotional Truths'/In his standup specials, the former 'Patriot Act' host often recounts harrowing experiences he’s faced as an Asian American and Muslim American. Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?" (The New Yorker).

Did CNN cut the Trump town hall short — by 20 minutes?

I didn't know how long the show was supposed to be, but when it ran over the hour, I figured it would go 90 minutes, and then it ended at 10 minutes after the hour? Was that the plan?

I see Newsweek has a piece this morning titled "CNN Cutting Donald Trump Town Hall Short by 20 Minutes Raises Questions." It begins:

Questions have been raised as to why CNN appeared to cut a town hall broadcast with Donald Trump on Wednesday evening short by as much as 20 minutes....

If you go deep enough into that article, you'll see:

A CNN spokesperson told Newsweek it had gone on record "days ago" that the town hall would last "roughly an hour" with "a little room to bleed over." 

I believe that, because, seen live, the ending didn't look abrupt, Trump didn't act surprised or outraged, and the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, didn't seem to be acting ungracious or punitive. She had been prodding him about his lies/"lies" throughout, and to give up before the planned end time would seem as though her pushback had been inadequate, which is not something CNN would want to concede. Of course, Trump bulled ever onward. That was predicted and prepared for. Nothing went wrong, and it would have been wrong to pull the plug early. 

That the "Day of Hate" did not happen is a news story that must be reported.

It's not nothing, because of the warnings. When I google "Day of Hate," I see no news of the actual day, when, apparently, nothing happened, but the warnings about it:

 

I want to see not merely the news of what, if anything, happened but also the investigation of how these warnings came into being. Did the authorities get conned by some internet trolls? Are the Russians afoot? Does our own government seek to control us with racial paranoia?

Elon Musk responds "true" to the statement "The most damaging fake news comes from the biggest corporate media outlets."

True

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 22, 2022

Satire? How is that satire? Stop puffing. It's simply wrong. If some people found it funny it's not because the art of satire was at play.

I'm reading a Reuters fact-check on what looked like a screenshot of a CNN report that Trump had died. It was a fake headline, and should have just been called false.

But somehow Reuters credited it as "satire."

 

How is that satire? The only levity comes from the reader's internal state of wanting to see Trump dead.

IN THE COMMENTS: Readering says: "'Cause of death autoerotic asphyxiation.' So satire. Also pathetic."

That text is in tiny print under the photo. I wrote this post without noticing that. If the Reuters fact-check had even mentioned that, I would have written a different post, but it does not. So I still reject the Reuters analysis, but I agree with Readering that it does count as satire — and that it's pathetic. Low skill, low effort, overall lowliness.

The most delightfully layered accusation of fake news.

This is fake – I did *not* tweet out a link to The New York Times! pic.twitter.com/d6V6m5ATW2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022

He doesn't favor the NYT with a link, just a screen grab.

To read the actual NYT article, here: "Elon Musk, in a Tweet, Shares Link From Site Known to Publish False News/The tweet on Sunday, which was later deleted, posted an article that made baseless allegations about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.". 

First, I have a problem with the phrase "baseless allegations." You shouldn't add the word "baseless" to "allegations" unless you have determined that the allegations are based on nothing. Has the NYT done that? Or is it simply showing its bias?

"Litter boxes in schools" is a Wikipedia article — with an active discussion of whether it should be retitled "Litter boxes in schools hoax."

It begins:

 

I used a screenshot because I wanted you to experience the absurdity of the picture of an actual cat litter box. Surely, if there were a litter box for a human being it would need to be proportional, and I think a third grader is about 6 times as large as a cat. I don't know the urine output of a child versus a cat, but, seriously, you're going to need a bigger box. But if it is a hoax — and Wikipedia assures me it is a hoax — then there is no box and that's the whole point.

I was going to make a joke using the phrase "Schrödinger's cat box," but the Wikipedia entry "Schrödinger's cat" was a real rat hole.