Conservative Media Is Hazardous To Your Health

[Chicks]

Trump team makes a suspicious effort to swing the election with purported Hunter Biden emails
Rudy Giuliani is again trying to drum up a scandal about the Bidens and Ukraine.

https://www.vox.com/2020/10/14/21515...mails-giuliani

Clearly a bullshit story from non-credible sources, especially rootin' tootin' Rudy.

[Oerets]

Most of the people I know who are voting Biden already have.

[RickeyM]

I trust Rudy Giuliani just about as much as a tRump approved Covid cure.

[Chicks]

The stunning extent to which Trumpism is centered among Fox News-watching Republicans

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...g-republicans/

Faux "News" viewers aren't just uninformed, they're utterly misinformed. Such a sad bunch, being fed propaganda 24X7, in a bubble. They will surely be the subject of political science courses one day.

[Chicks]

As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place
A nationwide operation of 1,300 local sites publishes coverage that is ordered up by Republican groups and corporate P.R. firms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/t...ric-media.html

The instructions were clear: Write an article calling out Sara Gideon, a Democrat running for a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat in Maine, as a hypocrite.

Angela Underwood, a freelance reporter in upstate New York, took the $22 assignment over email. She contacted the spokesman for Senator Susan Collins, the Republican opponent, and wrote an article on his accusations that Ms. Gideon was two-faced for criticizing shadowy political groups and then accepting their help.

The short article was published on Maine Business Daily, a seemingly run-of-the-mill news website, under the headline “Sen. Collins camp says House Speaker Gideon’s actions are hypocritical.” It extensively quoted Ms. Collins’s spokesman but had no comment from Ms. Gideon’s campaign.

Then Ms. Underwood received another email: The “client” who had ordered up the article, her editor said, wanted it to add more detail.

The client, according to emails and the editing history reviewed by The New York Times, was a Republican operative.

Maine Business Daily is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.

[Chicks]

Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working.
She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/b...n-college.html

Her daily post is the first thing in my Facebook feed most mornings. She's brilliant. The antidote to the dishonest lunacy of conservative propaganda.

“We’re in an inflection moment of American politics, and one of the things that happens in that moment is that a lot of people get involved in politics again,” she said.

Many of those newly energized Americans are women around Dr. Richardson’s age, 58, and they form the bulk of her audience. She’s writing for people who want to leave an article feeling “smarter not dumber,” she says, and who don’t want to learn about the events of the day through the panicked channels of cable news and Twitter, but calmly situated in the long sweep of American history and values.

Dr. Richardson’s focus on straightforward explanations to a mass audience comes as much of the American media is going in the opposite direction, driven by the incentives of subscription economics that push newspapers, magazines, and cable channels alike toward super-serving subscribers, making you feel as if you’re on the right team, part of the right faction, at least a member of the right community.

[Chicks]

Even If It's 'Bonkers,' Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/95109...iracy-theories

A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Forty percent of respondents said they believe the coronavirus was made in a lab in China even though there is no evidence for this. Scientists say the virus was transmitted to humans from another species.

And one-third of Americans believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election, despite the fact that courts, election officials and the Justice Department have found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome.

The poll results add to mounting evidence that misinformation is gaining a foothold in American society and that conspiracy theories are going mainstream, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. This has raised concerns about how to get people to believe in a "baseline reality," said Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos.

Incredible. Yet we have some of these Insane lunatics right here on these forums...

[Mark B]

Originally Posted by Chicks

Even If It's 'Bonkers,' Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/95109...iracy-theories



Incredible. Yet we have some of these Insane lunatics right here on these forums...

The false narrative is now a mainstream Repubican strategy. A litany of lies and distortions spews forth from that parties elected officials. The currently popular screed is that Democrats running for office are "radical social-ists".

[Mark B]

A principled (possibly former) Republican:

https://newsadvance.com/news/local/i...b30a4067a.html

[RickeyM]

Originally Posted by Mark B

A principled (possibly former) Republican:

https://newsadvance.com/news/local/i...b30a4067a.html

Riggleman, who has said he is considering a run for governor, said “people are more important than party” and “pandering is a political sickness.”

With that kind of thinking if he runs for governor he'll get about as much help from the Republican party as Hillary Clinton did.