Donald is here to stay, now what? Cursing and swearing OK

[Animavore]

Trump's scientifically backward and censorious government strikes again.

[Animavore]

Full story.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... ccc75efbda

Hack! Spit!

[Tyrannical]

If I could vote for someone as Evil as you think Trump is, I would

[pErvinalia]

A breakdown of how much members of congress have been receiving from telecoms.

http://verifiedpolitics.com/heres-much- ... eutrality/

Heh. Remember Trump said he was going to drain the swamp and his unthinking followers lapped it up?

I remember.

He's lulling the lobbyists and corporations into a false sense of security and he's going to SMASH them in his next term.

[pErvinalia]

If I could vote for someone as Evil as you think Trump is, I would

You did.

[Forty Two]

Full story.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... ccc75efbda

Hack! Spit!

More fake news -- http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hhs-disp ... d=51832679

They really pile it higher and deeper. Some "unnamed source" led the WaPo down the primrose path again....

CDC flouting the supposed word ban with wild abandon -- using the word "fetus" right on their website! https://www.cdc.gov/zika/pregnancy/index.html That's to this very day....! Such flagrant disregard to the direct orders of an evil President designed to prevent people from using the word "fetus."

A search on the CDC site reveals many usages of the word "transgender." Nothing has been purged from the lexicon as of yet. Must be that they have not yet gotten to ridding the CDC of all reference to the word "transgender" yet.

Who is the anonymous source? Why are all of these stories based on anonymous stories, and so many of them turn out to be gross mischaracterizations, if not downright false.

[Forty Two]

Covering the Trump presidency has not always been the media’s finest hour, but even grading on that curve, the month of December has brought astonishing screwups. Professor and venerable political observer Walter Russell Mead tweeted on December 8, “I remember Watergate pretty well, and I don’t remember anything like this level of journalistic carelessness back then. The constant stream of ‘bombshells’ that turn into duds is doing much more to damage the media than anything Trump could manage.”

On December 1, ABC News correspondent Brian Ross went on air and made a remarkable claim. For months, the media have been furiously trying to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Ross reported that former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had just pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, was prepared to testify that President Trump had instructed him to contact Russian officials before the 2016 election, while Trump was still a candidate. If true, it would have been a gamechanger. But Ross’s claim was inaccurate. Flynn’s documented attempts to contact the Russians came after Trump was president-elect, allegedly trying to lay diplomatic groundwork for the new administration. Ross was suspended by ABC for four weeks without pay for the error.

Later that same weekend, the New York Times ran a story about Trump transition official K. T. McFarland, charging that she had lied to congressional investigators about knowledge of the Trump transition team’s contacts with Russia. The article went through four headline changes and extensive edits after it was first published, substantially softening and backing away from claims made in the original version. The first headline made a definitive claim: “McFarland Contradicted Herself on Russia Contacts, Congressional Testimony Shows.” The headline now reads “Former Aide’s Testimony on Russia Is Questioned.” The website Newsdiffs, which tracks edits of articles after publication, shows nearly the entire body of the article was rewritten. (The Times website makes no mention of the changes.)

Still in that first weekend of December, Senator Orrin Hatch criticized the excesses of federal welfare programs, saying, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves.” The quote was taken wildly out of context. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as well as journalists from Mic, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Hatch was directly criticizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, with some suggesting Hatch thought children should be put to work to pay for subsidized health care. Not only was Hatch not criticizing the CHIP program, he cowrote the recent bill to extend its funding.

On December 5, Reuters and Bloomberg reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank account records of President Trump and family members, possibly related to business done in Russia. The report was later corrected to say Mueller was subpoenaing “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.”

Then on December 8, another Russia bombshell turned into a dud. CNN’s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb reported Donald Trump Jr. had been sent an email on September 4, 2016, with a decryption key to a WikiLeaks trove of hacked emails from Clinton confidant and Democratic operative John Podesta—that is, before the hacked emails were made public. (WikiLeaks is widely surmised to act as a front for Russian intelligence.) MSNBC and CBS quickly claimed to have confirmed CNN’s scoop. Within hours, though, CNN’s report was discredited. The email was sent on September 14, after the hacked Podesta emails had been made publicly available. CNN later admitted it never saw the email it was reporting the contents of.

This is just eight days’ worth of blundering. Since October of last year, when Franklin Foer at Slate filed an erroneous report on a computer server in Trump Tower communicating with a Russian bank, there have been an unprecedented number of media faceplants, most of them directly related to the Russia-collusion theory. The errors always run in the same direction—they report or imply that the Trump campaign was in league with Moscow. For a politicized and overwhelmingly liberal press corps, the wish that this story be true is obviously the father to the errors. Just as obviously, there are precedents for such high-profile embarrassments in the past. (Remember Dan Rather’s “scoop” on George W. Bush’s National Guard service?) But flawed reporting in the Trump era is becoming more the norm than the exception, suggesting the media have become far too willing to abandon some pretty basic journalistic standards.

Editors at top news organizations once treated anonymous sourcing as a necessary evil, a tool to be used sparingly. Now anonymous sources dominate Trump coverage. It’s not just a problem for readers, who should rightly be skeptical of information someone isn’t willing to vouch for by name. It’s a problem for reporters, too, because anonymous sources are less likely to be cautious and diligent in providing information. According to CNN, the sources behind the busted report on Trump Jr.’s contact with WikiLeaks didn’t intend to deceive and had been reliable in the past. Maybe so, but given the network’s repeated errors it’s difficult to just take CNN’s word for it.

But it’s one thing to use anonymous sources; it’s quite another to be entirely trusting of them. CNN decided to report the contents of an email to Donald Trump Jr. based only on the say-so of two anonymous sources and without seeing the emails. “I remember when I was [a staffer] on the Ways and Means committee and I would try and give reporters stories, and I remember the Wall Street Journal demanded to see a document,” former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer tells The Weekly Standard. “They wouldn’t take it from me if I didn’t give them the document, and I thought, ‘Good for them!’ ”

What makes the botched story of the WikiLeaks email more troubling is how quickly MSNBC and CBS ran with CNN’s scoop. “It’s hard to imagine how independent people could repeatedly misread a date on an email and do so for three different networks,” says Fleischer. “Whose eyesight is that bad?”

This points to an additional problem with the sourcing on these unfounded reports. The only way three networks could claim to have verified the same specious story is if they were all relying on the very same sources. Many of the flawed Trump reports appear to be sourced from a very narrow circle of people, who no doubt share partisan motivations or personal animus.

Certainly, it appears a number of recent spurious stories have originated as leaks from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. In Raju and Herb’s report, they revealed that Trump Jr. had been asked about the WikiLeaks email in closed-door testimony before the committee. After CNN’s scoop imploded, a spokesman for Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, issued a classic non-denial denial, telling Politico “that neither he nor his staff leaked any ‘non-public information’ ” about Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony.

Meanwhile, the Russia investigation has been very good for raising Schiff’s profile. A December 13 press release from the Republican National Committee notes the congressman has at that point spent 20 hours, 44 minutes, and 49 seconds on television since Trump took office, talking mostly about the investigation (pity the low-level staffer who must have had to do the research for that release). During that time, Schiff has always declined to discuss the particulars of the intel committee’s work. Nonetheless, consideration of his sensitive position hasn’t stopped him from offering all manner of innuendo to national TV audiences about evidence suggesting Russia collusion.

For their part, the media don’t seem to be coming to grips with the damage they’re doing to their own credibility. CNN, which calls itself “the most trusted name in news,” didn’t retract their WikiLeaks report but rewrote it in such a way as to render the story meaningless. They also came to the defense of Raju and Herb, saying the reporters acted in accordance with the network’s editorial policies. And of course they didn’t out their sources—the ultimate punishment news organizations can mete out to anonymous tipsters who steer them wrong.

It understandably infuriates the media that President Trump remains unwilling to own up to his own glaring errors and untruths, while news organizations run correction after correction. And it also understandably upsets the media to watch the president actively attack and seek to undermine their work, which remains vital to ensuring accountability in American governance. What they haven’t grasped is how perversely helpful to him they are being: On a very basic level, President Trump’s repeated salvos against “fake news” have resonance because, well, there does indeed appear to be a lot of fake news.

“There is nothing wrong with holding powerful people accountable. There’s nothing wrong with investigating whether or not collusion took place. But there’s a lot wrong when because you want to believe in the story so much you suspend skepticism,” says Fleischer. “You let your guard down. You abandon the normal filters that protect journalistic integrity. And you fail to also hold to account powerful leakers, or powerful members of Congress who themselves have an anti-Trump agenda. It’s called putting your thumb on the scale.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/while-tru ... le/2010858

In other words, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, ABCNews, etc., have lost credibility. It makes no sense to believe what they say when they rely on "anonymous sources." They've been duped too many times. They've lied too many times. It's obvious. Everyone knows it. So, the suggestion that someone gave CDC employees a list of 7 commoonplace words they are not allowed to use is simply not credible. If that was the case, there ought to be plenty of people ready to go on record. One of the articles refers to a "former" employee of the CDC. Why does that person not go on record? What's the corroborating information here? Have they seen a document? Do they have any confirmation?

No sir - folks -- no sir -- not buying it. Provide evidence -- gain some credibility back - then let's talk,.

[Hermit]

Full story.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... ccc75efbda

Hack! Spit!

More fake news -- http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hhs-disp ... d=51832679

From your link:

In response to ABC News' request for comment from the CDC, an HHS spokesperson responded in a statement.

"The assertion that HHS has 'banned words' is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process," the HHS statement said. "HHS will continue to use the best scientific evidence available to improve the health of all Americans. HHS also strongly encourages the use of outcome and evidence data in program evaluations and budget decisions.”

ABC News asked HHS for further clarification but has not yet received a response.

Unnamed HHS spokesperson fails to deny WaPo's allegations. Refers to them as "mischaracterisations" instead. No clarification given to date.

So, rather than calling the article fake news, I'd say it uncovered something distinctly smelling of rotten fish.

The Post reported that, according to a source, policy analysts were given some phrases to use instead of the prohibited words, such as instead of saying “science-based” or “evidence-based” using the phrase, “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

It should have been easy for the anonymous HHS spokesperson to address this particular allegation, for example. That it did not happen deepens my suspicion that there is substance to the allegation.

[pErvinalia]

Isn't it amazing that whenever we look into the articles that 42 posts, they often don't say what he claims they say?

[JimC]

Read my son's latest scientific paper about environmental modelling - the term "evidence-based" appears several times. Guess he's not going to get an invite to the White House...

[Brian Peacock]

All stories from anonymous sources are just as likely to be false as to be true, so unless a news organisation gives the names and addresses of it's sources to 42 we can probably just dismiss it as bunkum.

[Forty Two]

Full story.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... ccc75efbda

Hack! Spit!

More fake news -- http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hhs-disp ... d=51832679

From your link:

In response to ABC News' request for comment from the CDC, an HHS spokesperson responded in a statement.

"The assertion that HHS has 'banned words' is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process," the HHS statement said. "HHS will continue to use the best scientific evidence available to improve the health of all Americans. HHS also strongly encourages the use of outcome and evidence data in program evaluations and budget decisions.”

ABC News asked HHS for further clarification but has not yet received a response.

Unnamed HHS spokesperson fails to deny WaPo's allegations. Refers to them as "mischaracterisations" instead. No clarification given to date.

So, rather than calling the article fake news, I'd say it uncovered something distinctly smelling of rotten fish.

The Post reported that, according to a source, policy analysts were given some phrases to use instead of the prohibited words, such as instead of saying “science-based” or “evidence-based” using the phrase, “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

It should have been easy for the anonymous HHS spokesperson to address this particular allegation, for example. That it did not happen deepens my suspicion that there is substance to the allegation.

The HHS Spokesperson is Matt Lloyd. Why he was not named in the article there is unclear. However, WaPo has named him in another article.

So, we have an "unnamed source" which refers to an allegation that CDC employees were "given 7 words which are now banned" or words to that effect. No document is cited. No policy. No email. No confirmation of any kind. Nobody goes on record. HHS official spokesman says the idea that 7 words are banned is a mischaracterization.

The HHS says it hasn't enacted such a policy.

I don't buy an unnamed source, with no other corroboration mentioned, on anything. You can feel free to panic, luck much of the rest of the anti-Trump crowd, which, if you google this issue, are apoplectic. The articles on it refer to the HHS statement that it's a complete mischaracterization and then go on to refer to it still as a policy which threatens to undermine health and safety of an entire nation. I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If you don't hear about how the budget-related papers have replaced "fetus" with "baby" or something, then you'll know this is fake news. Obviously, the press will hardly cover the eventuality of these words continuing to be used. It's only if the words aren't used that we'll hear about it.

So, let's see what happens. Let's keep this in mind, and see if sometime in the coming months, as they work on this -- will some corroboration arise that a "ban" was actually mentioned at the CDC, or if a ban actually goes into effect.

[Forty Two]

All stories from anonymous sources are just as likely to be false as to be true, so unless a news organisation gives the names and addresses of it's sources to 42 we can probably just dismiss it as bunkum.

It's not an either/or proposition. A story based on "an unnamed source" is very weak. Journalist ethics has traditionally required corroboration. You don't just go with "an unnamed source." You need to to be able to confirm the information. E.g. see the article I linked and quoted at length above where Ari Fleischer refers to times when he was giving the press information and he would not go on record at the time. The journalists would demand corroboration.

On a story that sounds outrageous -- the CDC being told that 7 words are being banned and those words include "evidence based" and "fetus" and "diversity" and "transgender" etc. -- something that sounds so out in left field, that it doesn't even make sense as to why they would need to do this and what they would stand to gain from it -- after a series of stories where the media is being told things by unnamed sources which turn out to be complete bullshit, and where the HHS has said outright that the notion ofthe 7 banned words is "a complete mischaracterization," there ought to be a rather healthy dose of skepticism.

For me, it's tissue paper thin, and the idea of the ban is so ridiculous that for me to accept it, I'd need to not only trust the reporter making the claim, but I'd need to be willing to accept that the reporter has vetted the unnamed source and gotten some sort of corroboration or confirmation on the source's information, even though the article does not say that any such vetting took place or any such corroboration or confirmation took place. It's not unusual for people to embellish, take words out of context and twist words into meanings that are not fair under the circumstances, and this is particularly true where there is so much open vitriol against the current administration.

It's not per se wrong to use an unnamed source, but I frankly can't take the WaPo or CNN's word about it. Given how those outlets have been quick on the draw, and failed to vet unnamed sources recently, and very giddy and hopeful that their unconfirmed stories would be true, they need a dose of skepticism.

Is there enough evidence of the assertion here, in your view?

[Animavore]

Wow! He actually used the term "fake news".

Fucking unbelievable.

[Forty Two]

All stories from anonymous sources are just as likely to be false as to be true, so unless a news organisation gives the names and addresses of it's sources to 42 we can probably just dismiss it as bunkum.

The idea that all stories from anonymous sources are just as likely to be false as true is not accurate, as there can be stories based on anonymous sources where the source's information is confirmed either by multiple anonymous sources, or by a document or other piece of evidence. A reporter can quote an anonymous source, and the reporter can also say that he or she has viewed an email which corroborates the information being provided.

An anonymous source says that Donald Trump was given access to information by email to Wikileakes documents on November 4, 2016! He's going to jail! He's going to jail!! Yay!!! -- Oh, wait, the anonymous source was wrong, and six news outlets reporting on the incident all failed to check on the allegation, read the referenced email, which actually said "November 14" after the information was already released to the public by Wikileaks. Nobody checked. Nobody cared. They just wanted to report it. Based on an anonymous source.

Now that they were lied to, why don't those media outlets disclose who the anonymous source was? When a source loses credibility like that and gets a newsman fired because they lied about something that important - not fired, but suspended without pay -- don't you think the public has a right to know who the lying anonymous source was? Who was this person? We still don't know.