The Propaganda Model of the Media

Here is a fantastic video that nicely illustrates Chomsky and Hermann's Propaganda Model of the Media.

More information on this topic can be found here.
h/t to Kelly Mayhew

Sometimes, the media just lies.

With all the debate and hand-wringing swirling around fake news, it is sometimes important to remember that many mainstream media outlets, particularly on the right, sometimes just lie. Case in point is this story from a Swedish newspaper about a Swedish "Security expert" Nils Bildt who appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News.

Screenshot from the The O'Reilly Factor identifying guest Nils Bildt as a "Swedish Defense and National Security Advisor. "

As you can see, he is identified as a "Swedish Defense and National Security Advisor," and he was on Fox News to spread the lie that Sweden is extremely dangerous due to the influx of refuges from Muslim countries who have settled there in recent years.

As the above story from Dagens Nyheter (one of the largest Swedish daily newspapers) indicates, Bildt has no formal affiliation with the Swedish Government, and has not even lived in Sweden since 1994. Furthermore, the article is a further example of the relative shock the people of Sweden have felt since being accused by President Trump of being a hellhole due to their acceptance of refuges fleeing the chaos in Syria and the Middle East. Needless to say, most Swedes have no idea what Trump is talking about. And for O'Reilly to continue to spread this falsehood is a real stain on the media and journalism generally.

h/t to San Diego Free Press

Update: Here is another article on the same story from the Intercept.

A handy chart for evaluating news sources

This is a nice infographic making the rounds that provides some helpful advice on how to evaluate news sources. I tend to think that some of the more centrist outlets tend to still have problems (see critiques of the mainstream media elsewhere, especially Chomsky and Hermann's Propaganda Model of the Media), but this is still a very useful resource.

A helpful chart with some advice on evaluating news sources. Click to embiggen.

Thanks to Professor Lisa Chaddock from San Diego City College who gave me the link. I don't know much else about the individual(s) who made this.

Lisa, I want to buy your rock!

This is one of the best examples of the Post Hoc fallacy out there. For a long time, a clip of this was unavailable on the internet (I don't know why), but today I finally came across one, and here it is:


The key here is Homer's confusion about the rock. If we reconstruct his argument it goes like this:

1. Lisa has a rock.
2. There are no tigers.
3. Therefore, the rock kept the tigers away.

It is the assumption that the rock caused the tigers to stay away which is the Post Hoc fallacy. 

The Bullshit of Donald Trump

Trump redlines the bullshit meter

One of the defining features of the 2016 presidential election is the degree to which the Republican party, under the leadership of their presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, has completely abandoned anything that could be characterized as "reality" or the "truth." I have discussed before how American political discourse generally has moved into a "post-truth" era in which things like facts and reality  are held in low esteem and in opposition to whatever makes someone feel good, or which reinforce existing prejudices. This phenomenon has clearly reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump, a man who has a very problematic relationship with reality and the truth. In fact, the man spreads so many lies and so much nonsense, that it is virtually impossible to keep anything resembling a comprehensive list. He generates lies and bullshit at such a rate that it is difficult even for professional fact-checkers to keep up.

Fortunately, to help us make sense of the Trump campaign and Trump's problematic relationship to the truth, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has recently penned a useful article for Time magazine. For those not in the know, Frankfurt is most famous for a short essay he wrote in the late 80's which was repackaged as a separate volume in 2005. This essay, On Bullshit, seeks to provide a theoretical definition of bullshit as well as explain how bullshit differs from lying. In his recent article for Time, Frankfurt extends that analysis to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. It is reasonably short, and rather than summarize it here, I encourage folks just to read it for themselves.

Science!

John Oliver gives a fantastic takedown of some of the terrible science reporting one finds in the media, and also gives a good analysis of some of the causes.

This is an interesting optical illusion, with a really nice explanation of how it works.

You can find examples of this in the real world, particularly with some of those spinning signs like the one pictured below:

When you see these signs spinning, you can often make it appear to yourself as if the sign is spinning in both directions, much like the spinning dancer illusion above.

h/t to SGU