A reasonable criticism. Be the change you want to see in the world.

New details about a program from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) are getting attention after the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) published a trove of internal documents about ICE’s ‘Citizens Academy’ programs.

This tradition?

MBFC is claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone. This is an example of MBFC’s intentional distortion of the political spectrum by falsely representing it as dominated by a left-wing bias.

An example of CNN’s actual right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their televised panel of ‘undecided voters’. According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn’t “an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years.” She suggests it could be “a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television.” - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are sources of bias that MBFC does not adequately account for.

!politics and !world now appear to be willing to consider backing away from MBFC. The vote to “Kill” – stop their bot from advertising MBFC in all of community posts – appears to be leading in both communities.

If you upvote the Kill comment so that this lead becomes a landslide, you can make it even more embarrassing and difficult for them to claim ‘bots’ or backtrack.

ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising. It is lead by a conservative billionaire, and is not a left-biased organization.

Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality. Dave Van Zandt has admitted to a US-centric bias in MBFC’s ratings. It’s fairly easy to notice an American conservative lean in MBFC’s bias ratings, as well as their credibility ratings.

A consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website. MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.

Please choose “Kill” – to stop giving free advertising to MBFC on Lemmy.

• Lemmyverse.link for !world
• Lemmyverse.link for !politics

For the first time in decades, The Washington Post will not endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election, the newspaper’s publisher announced Friday, a decision that sparked widespread outrage among the paper’s staffers.

“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Post publisher Will Lewis said in a statement. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

The Post reported the decision not to endorse was made by the newspaper’s billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, citing two sources briefed on the matter.

– CNN

Media Bias Fact Check is a right-wing propaganda tool to repeat the laughable lie that the media has a left-wing bias.

I think David Van Zandt has a vendetta against Philip Weiss. Racists tend to be unfeeling or feel contempt for ‘lesser’ racial groups, and are merely indifferent to their suffering. The most intense ‘hate’ in hate groups comes from the intensity of feeling racists have toward other people of their own race they perceive as ‘race traitors’ - who demonstrate that people who share their culture and heritage can afford empathy for the ‘other’ whom racists believe are unworthy of concern.

Truthout is a reputable website, with good journalism and reporting. There’s a number of other websites that report favorably on Palestinians, and don’t toe Van Zandt’s line that criticism of Israel and antisemitism are the same thing. They have higher ‘Credibility’ and ‘Factual Reporting’ scores than Truthout. But Truthout occasionally rehosts reporting from Mondoweiss, a site that Van Zandt has labelled as ‘antisemitic,’ and therefore Truthout must be punished for giving support to the most notorious enemy of Israel – ‘self-hating’ Jews.

HuffPost was founded by four people, including Arianna Huffington, CEO of Thrive Global, and Andrew Breitbart, who also built the alt-right outlet Breitbart News. Breitbart was also instrumental in founding The Drudge Report, an early popular news site that promoted news and opinion favorable to the Republican Party, and was The Huffington Post’s direct inspiration, with the focus instead on the Democratic party and ‘progressive’ values.

CNN is part of the Warner Bros. Discovery advertising portfolio.

MBFC classifies pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, and anti-genocide bias in reporting as left-biased, but also classifies CNN as Left-Center biased. CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’.

Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism.

In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site.

Manufacturing Consent has this to say about PBS:

Globalization, along with deregulation and national budgetary pressures, has also helped reduce the importance of noncommercial media in country after country. This has been especially important in Europe and Asia, where public broadcasting systems were dominant (in contrast with the United States and Latin America). The financial pressures on public broadcasters has forced them to shrink or emulate the commercial systems in fund~raising and programming, and some have been fully commercialized by policy change or privatization. The global balance of power has shifted decisively toward commercial systems.

James Ledbetter points out that in the United States, under incessant right-wing political pressure and financial stringency, “the 90s have seen a tidal wave of commercialism overtake public broadcasting,” with public broadcasters" rushing as fast as they can to merge their services with those offered by commercial networks." And in the process of what Ledbetter calls the “mailing” of public broadcasting, its already modest differences from the commercial networks have almost disappeared. Most important, in their programming “they share either the avoidance or the defanging of contemporary political controversy, the kind that would bring trouble from powerful patrons.”

CNN is part of the Warner Bros. Discovery advertising portfolio. CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’.

Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site.

MBFC claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone. This is an example of MBFC’s intentional distortion of the political spectrum by falsely representing it as dominated by a left-wing bias.

An example of CNN’s actual right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their recent panel of ‘undecided voters’. According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn’t “an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years.” She suggests it could be “a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television.” - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are sources of bias that MBFC does not adequately account for.

If you want to understand how propaganda works, learn the five filters of the propaganda model.

“Every life is precious, I learned that firsthand when I nearly experienced a post third-trimester abortion in Afghanistan.”

Do you unironically believe Martin Luther King Jr. wanted Barry Goldwater to win when he increased his civil rights protest organizing in defiance of Lyndon B Johnson during the lead up to the 1964 presidential election?

[Image Description: Anakin Skywalker on Lava Planet, block-face text “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy”]

I’m not trying to have a discussion about electoral politics.

I’m pointing out that the American window of respectable political discourse is shifted dangerously to the right, and that gives fascist candidates like Trump a foothold, while Eisenhower Republicans like Bernie Sanders are popularly viewed as extremists.

The Democrats should not be viewed as saviors in this situation, they are complicit in the fascist collapse of the United States political system. It may survive this election, but the catastrophes created by capitalism can’t be solved by capitalist solutions. As long as the political system is incapable of real democracy, authoritarian populists will always be a threat.

One of the disgusting aspects of Trump’s rise to power is the rehabilitation of former Republican presidents’ legacies. Once faced with a terrible enough alternative, George Bush looks less like the terrible monster he was to those who allow themselves to acclimate to the new normal.

Imagine Trump is defeated, disgraced, and jailed. Do you think the vacuum he leaves in the political system will remain unfilled? What if that space was filled by a more competent fascist? Will people look back on Trump the way some do at Bush and say, “It’s true he was a fascist, but at least he hardly got anything done.”

CNN is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone, one of the largest landlords in the world. An example of its right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their recent panel of ‘undecided voters’.

According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn’t “an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years.” She suggests it could be “a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television.” - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are the first and third filters of the propaganda model.

Harris and Walz picking CNN is futher evidence that the the Democrats are not a left-wing party.

Voice of America is the official propaganda broadcaster of the United States Government. It was founded during WWII and its role was increased as a weapon to promote capitalism in 2nd and 3rd world countries during the cold war. While its feed is mostly Reuters and other centrist corporate news outlets, the focus of its original journalism is now is on Africa, where the CIA is concerned that US concerns on the continent are being overshadowed by Russian and Chinese influence.

MBFC rates this propaganda outlet as ‘least biased.’ The role of a flak organization in the propaganda model is to center corporate and government views and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is harmful to democracy.