Fake news, disinformation, and conspiracy theories continue to steamroll across the country. Here are the most notable instances from the past week. Belief in COVID-related conspiracies is contributing to a growing amount of conflict throughout our society. Opposition to both masking and vaccines is taking over debates at school board and city council meetings across … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending August 20, 2021
There's a lot of news about fake news this week, so let's skip the preliminaries and get right to it. Conspiracy theories seem to be particularly appealing to right-wingers, for whatever reason, and it's nothing new. (Remember the so-called "Communist plot" to put fluoride in our water back in the '50s and '60s, parodied by … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending August 13, 2021
COVID-related disinformation and vaccine hesitancy keep leading the fake news parade. It continues to amaze me that about a third of the people in this country insist on believing random people on social media rather than the legions of doctors, scientists, and other experts who report the facts that the COVID vaccine is both safe … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending August 6, 2021
Sometimes fake news and disinformation is easy to spot. Sometimes discerning the truth is more difficult. With that in mind, let's move on to this week's news about fake news. Here's an interesting one. For the past several months videos have been circulating on TikTok, Facebook, and other social media purporting to show President Joe … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending July 30, 2021
What's real and what's fake? That's what this blog is all about. Case in point, the ongoing feud between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul (R-TN). The senator has it out for the doctor and takes every opportunity to accuse him of one transgression or another. I'm not sure why, but Paul is a … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending July 23, 2021
The perpetrator and beneficiary of the Big Lie is in the news this week, thanks to the publication of several post-mortem books about the last days of the Trump presidency. Fortunately or unfortunately, none of the revelations, while shocking, were truly surprising. With that said, let's move on to the newer fake news news of … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending July 16, 2021
Conspiracy theories continue to run rampant, and more this week in fake news. The good news from a recent Rasmussen poll is that 83% of likely voters say that "fake news" in the media is a big problem. That bad news is that 58% of those same people think that media "are truly the enemy … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending July 9, 2021
There's been so much real news this week (Trump business indicted, Florida condo collapse, Donald Rumsfeld passing, Supreme Court rulings, Pacific Coast heatwave, Bill Cosby released from jail, and more) that the fake news pales in comparison. But there's still some of it, so let's get started. In recent weeks four British Airways pilots and … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending July 2, 2021
The majority of news about fake news continues to be generated by the previous presidential administration. They generated enough lies and disinformation to last a lifetime. Former president Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has spent the entire post-election period spreading lies and conspiracy theories calling the entire election a fraud and filing scurrilous … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending June 25, 2021
If a politician lies, does that automatically make it fake news? Fake news can be disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories, as well as lying outright for a particular purpose. But when a politician just comes out and says things that everybody knows isn't true, is that necessary fake news or just the politician … Continue reading Fake News for the Week Ending June 18, 2021
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