Tag: misinformation

The Story: A recent report from an activist group (Avaaz) highlights the great flood of misinformation reaching the public through social media, especially through Facebook,...

Rarely does the victim of a crime first hire a private investigator whose findings later form the basis of government conclusions. He has insisted for well over a year that the Russians did not provide him with the DNC emails. When it was discovered that the emails had been compromised, then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz weirdly refused to allow forensic detectives from the FBI to examine the DNC server to probe the evidence of the theft. It has since been disclosed that Comey offered that conclusion before he had even interviewed Clinton. That inversion suggests that Comey had assumed that whatever he found out about Clinton would not change the reality that the Obama administration would probably drop the inquiry anyway -- so Comey made the necessary ethical adjustments. Instead, Trump's anguished letter complained about Comey's private assurances that the president was not under FBI investigation, which were offered at about the same time a winking-and-nodding Comey would not confirm that reality to the press, thus leaving the apparently deliberate impression that a compromised president was in legal jeopardy. Antifa rioters in Charlottesville were praised by progressives for violently confronting a few dozen creepy white supremacists, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis. Yet Antifa's use of violence was compared perversely by some progressives to American soldiers storming the beaches on D-Day. It was recently disclosed that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had warned the Obama administration in 2016 that Antifa was a domestic terrorist organization that aimed to incite violence during street protests. Doubts about official narratives of the DNC leaks and the errant behavior of James Comey and misinformation about the violent extremists of Antifa illustrate media bias -- not to mention entrenched government bureaucracies that are either incompetent, ethically compromised or completely politicized.