Beware of Left Wing Fake News
Finally motivated to write new articles. As a writer and poet of 35 years, I've long been a supporter of media literacy organizations, including Project Censored. It breaks my heart to see an organization, whose mission I believe in deeply, develop a sad pattern of confirmation bias. Becoming everything they once stood against. I'm starting a new series I'm thinking about calling, Project Censored: Left-Wing Purveyors of Fake News.
...The pattern continues: Cherry-pick a controversial data point, take it out-of-context, and then make fallacious arguments around it. Wordsmiths, like a group of college professors, can change just one word and accomplish this trick.
Project Censored: “New Knowledge... the source of information for the Senate Intel Committee on Russian Meddling in the 2016 election”. Therefore, (slippery slope logic) if New Knowledge is compromised so to must the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s work. They should stop looking into Russia meddling and Putin.
Fact Check: The Senate Select Intelligence Committee has reviewed more than a dozen reports from social media, other online platforms, and now comprehensive third-party reports, including one from the University of Oxford and Graphaki. Every one of those reports confirm the findings in the New Knowledge report. The conclusions unanimously agree Russia meddled in the 2016 elections. The New Knowledge report was not “the source”, rather just one of many that continue to confirm the Russian meddling conclusion. According to the Oxford and Graphaki conclusions, “Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) launched an extended attack on the United States by using computational propaganda to misinform and polarize US voters.”
It’s not like Mickey Huff didn’t know of the University of Oxford and Graphaki report, the many other sources, nor the history of the committee. I told him about them and even sent him links (Huff is a History professor after all). Yet, Huff continued to support the false claim that the New Knowledge report was “the source of information for the Senate Intel Committee on “Russian” meddling in the 2016 election”.
When presented with the FACT that the New Knowledge report was just one of many, and if he just changed the “THE" to an “A” the statement would be more transparent and factual, Mickey Huff responded, “Mickey Huff Dean Walker My statement stands as a matter of fact.”
Clearly, Mickey Huff and Project Censored has chosen an agenda to spread disinformation over accurate reporting. The leadership at Project Censored has shown a pattern of taking facts and quotes out-of-context and then making fallacious arguments around them. For this reason, Project Censored has degenerated into the very animal they spend so much time harping against...fake news.
Below is the full context of Mickey Huff’s statement (slippery slope argument) along with the press release from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on the release of the New Knowledge report. Judge for yourself.
Mickey Huff, Director of Project Censored, “Would someone please tell MSNBC's Maddow and the new techno determinist PropOrNot-like firm New Knowledge (the one that got caught meddling in the AL Senate race that made it look like Russian bots were trying to help elect alleged pedophile Roy Moore- yes, faking it, while also being “THE” (emphasis added) source of information for the Senate Intel Committee on "Russian" meddling in the 2016 election...can't make this shit up, folks) that Putin was not involved (hasty generalization, an assumption Huff makes without enough information) and they maybe should spend more time looking for actual vulnerabilities in our election systems.”
SSCI Press Release, December 17, 2018:
"WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, third-party experts released two independent analyses of social media tactics used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) in their attempts to influence U.S. political discourse. The reports are the first comprehensive analyses of their kind conducted by entities other than social media companies themselves, and are based in part on data provided by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).
The reports, titled “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency” and “The IRA and Political Polarization in the United States, 2015-2017,” were authored by New Knowledge, and University of Oxford and Graphika, respectively."
To learn more about the FACTS on the SSCI reports and their findings (so far) I suggest starting with the University of Oxford and Graphika. Not Project Censored's Fake News.
comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/...