Internet Hoaxes

Question: Are younger educated people who were raised on the Internet LESS likely to be taken in by hoax emails such as Obama as "radical Muslim" than Jon Stewart's 80-year-old aunt? Or the hoax about clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger as racist? 

Last year, hoaxes (so-called "fake news") from pseudo-news sites were shared more widely than actual news, according to a Buzzfeed study. And WTOE 5 is not a real TV station any more than the Denver Guardian is a real newspaper. Here's a doozy from a hugely-trafficked rightwing site called "Conservative Tribune." Hoaxer/alleged comic Paul Horner tells the Washington Post: "I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me." #Pizzagateanyone; it never dies, but don't blame me.

NBC "Today" show interviewed me in 2013 about separating fact from fiction in media and Internet. 

Book sells, despite MSM shunning . . . thanks largely to bloggers

Journalists dismissed as part of "the reality-based community"

In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind interviewed a top aide to President George W. Bush. (It's believed the aide was Karl Rove.) As Suskind reported in his NY Times magazine article:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” ... “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Is U.S. Media System Failing to Inform?

Typical of similar academic studies over the years, a study published in 2009 compared the level of public knowledge about current events in Denmark, Finland, United Kingdom and the United States. It found that the countries where TV/radio is dominated by public broadcasting -- Denmark and Finland -- were the best informed. Our country, dominated by corporate commercial media, was the least informed, especially among lower-income people. The U.K.'s public, with its mix of Murdoch-style tabloids and BBC, was in the middle. The study's authors suggest that differing media systems play a role in those results, although other factors also play a role (perhaps differences in educational and social systems).

A 2003 study of public knowledge of facts related to the Iraq War found that misperceptions among U.S. residents (that evidence linked Iraq and al Qaeda; that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq; and that world public opinion favored the US invasion) were greatest among those whose primary info source was Fox News -- and least among those whose primary info source was public broadcasting. (A Pew poll taken in Aug. 2010 found that almost 1 in 5 Americans believed President Obama to be a Muslim; only 34% knew he is a Christian. 43% chose "don't know.")

Video and blogging for human rights

Launched in 1992 with the help of musician Peter Gabriel, the nonprofit Witness.org began distributing video cameras in hopes of minimizing human rights abuses. Now they support and train people in the safe use of cell phones and cameras to record abuses. Their slogan: "See it. Film it. Change it."

The Israeli human rights group, B'Tzelem, provides cameras to Palestinians so they can record Israeli settlers who harass Palestinians, including incidents of intimidation in and around the Palestinian city of Hebron, which rightwing Israeli religious settlers believe God has bequeathed to Jews.

Vancouver Film School students created an inspiring video, "Iran, A Nation of Bloggers," and put it online months before the tech-fueled protests over Iran's disputed 2009 election.

Nightmare in Tunisia for Dictatorship

Tunisia is a small, Mediterranean country in North Africa.  Back in 2007, Tunisian citizen-journalists had documented the tourism/shopping sprees of the dictator's wife aboard the presidential plane to global shopping/fashion capitals. (H/t Global Voices)

In 2010, the TuniLeaks website was set up to post (WikiLeaks-released) internal U.S. Embassy documents candidly exposing the corruption of Tunisia's dictatorship. Here's a heartfelt thank you to Chelsea Manning from a Tunisian.

Fascinating photo (released by Ben Ali's office) of dictator Ben Ali visiting the hospital bed of the desperate young man who set himself on fire in protest in Dec. 2010 -- the young man didn't live long enough to learn that his act led to the overthrow of Ben Ali after sustained, Internet-fueled nonviolent protests. 

Amid the protests, Tunisian rapper El General put out this widely-circulated music video against Ben Ali that urged people to join the protest. It led to his arrest for a few days. Soon after, the dictator fled. The song went on to become an anthem in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere.

Despite upheaval, Tunisia has been the model of democracy and compromise in the wake of the Arab Spring, as suggested this article from 2016, and this new documentary.

U.S. jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie performs his classic jazz tune "Night in Tunisia," first recorded in 1944.

OhMyNews TV correspondent . . .

. . . tries to get answers in Dec 2013 from a former South Korean president who appointed a discredited director of the National Intelligence Service. Spy chief Won Sei-hoon faced legal charges that he'd meddled in the 2012 presidential election on behalf of the winning conservative candidate through a covert Internet effort to smear opposition candidates. The reporter asked the former president: Do you feel responsible as a person who appointed Won to this post? Soon after this TV report, the spy chief was convicted of graft. 

In 2008, OhMyNews heavily covered the protests over the US/South Korea trade deal.