Index

Reality and News Reporting

What are the facts? Again and again and again–what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”–what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts! - Robert A. Heinlein

While The Daily Beast may or may not be your taste in news sources, a post there by John Avalon gives a very good view of the challenges facing those of us who believe in reporting the truth as news.  Between the incredibly misnamed Fox News with its nose buried up the right’s ass, the Russian дезинформация (dezinformatsiya) campaign (and a British Putin fan’s as well) in favor of Trump, and the collection of Trump-trolls that patrol the media doing everything they can to deflect eyes from the NSFW reality of their king, we have had a very bad time of late trying to sort out reality from fiction.  That doesn’t even include the insane mix of Nazis, KKK, and other wild nutcases with even more twisted views of reality that also supported Trump.

While this blog is NOT a sterling example of pure news reportage, I do try to keep my opinions based in reality.  This means that (for instance) opinions based in religion automatically have no credibility here, whether it is ISIS, Muslim, Christian or any other. Religion has no basis in fact, and has no place in the news except possibly reporting the religious organizations’activities as groups, and the threats they represent to the rest of us.  While I know that ISIS and Christianity consider themselves to be on opposite sides, it is in reality a battle of brothers, both worshiping the same God in different languages, and both having histories of extreme violence and pushing theocracy; neither of them has any edge on the other in credibility.

Web sites that propagate false news need no reportage except to call them out as false - more than that only adds to their credibility.  To that end, a “shit list” of false news sites is all they deserve.  What needs reporting is the actions of those that create and propagate that false news, and the deluded  people that act on it.  Fox news already has its own crowd of debunkers, so while it is a source of obviously false news, it deserves no special mention here.

I am going to do my part to help reverse this tide of false news, calling out false news and its creators when I see them, and analyzing claims to determine which are counter-factual, and by how much.  To the end that this changes my blog focus, so be it.

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. - John Philpot Curran