Big day in Washington; Tucker Carlson's gaffe; The City rises in NYC; Is Siri a racist?
Today, Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. Newsrooms such as NPR are trying to stay nimble on
special coverage plans, as well as contingencies should the status of
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein change after his meeting with President
Trump — also today.
"At least we have warning," said Beth Donovan,
NPR's Washington Desk head, "unlike so many other days when we're juggling
two massive stories."
NPR plans gavel-to-gavel coverage of the judiciary committee and
a special 8 p.m. EST wrap-up. Its annotation desk, putting in context to
transcripts, will also be operating full-tilt.
For everybody else, here are a few resources for the day's
coverage:
— Network coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. (TV
Newser)
— 'Seared into my memory:' Christine Blasey Ford's prepared opening remarks. (The Atlantic)
— Her four sworn affidavits. (Mother Jones)
— The facts on sexual assault: Why so few report, according
to prosecutors and victim's advocates. (Salem Reporter)
— The third woman with a sexual misconduct
allegation: Who is Julie Swetnick? (Washington Post)
— Ronald Brownstein: A vote won't end the Kavanaugh controversy. (The
Atlantic)
Quick hits
BLAMING THE VICTIMS: Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson
is coming under fire after blaming sexual assault victims for the prevalence of
rape and attempted rape. To sexual assault survivors too frightened or shocked
or demeaned to report, he said Tuesday night, "You're part of the problem." The
remark, coming amid the sentencing of Bill Cosby and accusations
that Kavanaugh committed sexual assault, prompted widespread denunciation.
TUCKER UNDER FIRE, PART II: The group Sleeping
Giants, which has led successful ad boycotts, questioned how any brand reliant
on women like Honda, Nutrisystem, Bayer or Jenny Craig, could continue to
advertise on the network. I wondered if Carlson would be disciplined by new Fox
News head Suzanne Scott, who has sought to reduce racist and misogynistic
commentary.
This reader offered a helpful chart for Carlson:
This reader offered a helpful chart for Carlson:
REACTION FROM THE BOROUGHS: Bklyner editor
Liena Zagare greeted the creation of The City on her local website, saying “There’s a new
kid in town and they’re hiring.” For Zagare, the kid is not so new: The City's
board chair is her husband, Ben Smith of BuzzFeed. (Earlier: Zagare and
The Atlantic’s Scott Nover on Brooklyn’s vanishing local news voices.)
LIFE AND DEATH: Why didn’t Orlando paramedics move faster to help victims of
the Pulse nightclub shooting? The city’s fire department had a mass-shooting plan, but bureaucratic delays
prevented it from being implemented, ProPublica reports. A peer-reviewed study
estimates 16 of the 49 victims could have been saved. (h/t Doris Truong)
NEW THIS MORNNG: Three years ago, a
conference and festival began to highlight the work of the relatively few women
then in podcasting. Now, both it and the role of women in podcasting is huge. Work It 2018, this year’s conference, will be
at Knockdown Center in Queens on Nov. 13-14, coupled with live events and podcast tapings in venues
across New York, such as the Apollo Theater, Hunter College and The Greene
Space at WNYC.
RUSSIAN MISCHIEF: Beware of a Moscow-based and funded site called USAReally, started by a Russian with little
journalism experience. The NYT’s Kevin Roose makes the case for it being another
Trojan Horse from the Kremlin to influence Americans.
WHY A WHATSAPP CO-FOUNDER LEFT FACEBOOK: FB wanted Brian
Acton to monetize his invention and open it up to commercial messaging, he
tells Forbes’ Parmy Olson. In March, with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica
scandal brewing, Acton got tired of fighting Facebook leaders and
walked out the door, tweeting to the world to #deletefacebook. Yeah, he left a
final tranche of $850 million on the table from his sale of the world’s biggest
messaging service to Facebook. But hey, he’s worth $3.6 billion, enough to tip
$20 for a cup of coffee on one recent morning.
THINK BEFORE YOU QUOTE: Define American, which advocates for DREAMers
and immigration reform, says four leading American dailies have sharply
increased their sourcing from three migration “think-tanks” that have been characterized as anti-immigrant hate
groups. The Trump administration has borrowed ideas and personnel
from the groups as it developed the disastrous “family separation” policy,
expanded private detention centers, sought to limit legal migration and
attempted to strip citizenship retroactively from naturalized residents.
SIRI, DON’T GIVE ME A RACIST: The “Siri
Suggested” recommended feature has led Apple users to Pizzagate conspiracies and debunked articles on bogus
race “science” and Holocaust denial, BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel
found. Apple removed the search results Warzel supplied, but the exercise
raised new questions about relying on algorithms to police the internet.
WANT A GRANT FOR STORY COVERAGE?: Two organizations
have opportunities. The Solutions Journalism Network has grants for 13 newsrooms on projects
related to the midterm elections and their effects. Each grant is $2,500. Apply here. Also, The Fund for
Investigative Journalism has four diversity fellowships available, in
partnership with Reveal from the Center for Investigative
Reporting, InsideClimate News and the Marshall Project. Apply here by Oct. 4.
BETTER CALIFORNIA COVERAGE: Could that be the
play of the Los Angeles Times' new owner in backing a bid by Sacramento-based McClatchy
for Tronc, publishers of the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily
News? Via the New York Post.
MOVES: Charo Henríquez has been promoted to senior editor of digital strategy
at The New York Times, Media Moves reported. Henríquez, formerly senior
editor of digital storytelling and training, previously was executive digital
editor of People en
Español. ... The Chronicle of Higher Education’s editor, Liz McMillen, is
changing roles and will be the new executive editor of Chronicle Intelligence, a new initiative. The Chronicle will be
conducting a search for McMillen's successor.
QUIT: The chair of Australia's independent national broadcaster,
after reports that he wanted to fire two journalists just because the
government said it disliked them.
SOCIAL HELP: The Local Media Association is setting up a news resource center to help
members with social media questions. The center is being funded by the Facebook
Journalism Project and will focus on training, case studies and best practices.
Measuring Facebook’s fact-checking effort
Many
have tried to figure out how exactly Facebook’s effort to cut down on
misinformation is going.
BuzzFeed
News does
an annual roundup of the top-performing hoaxes on the social network.
Newswhip regularly
measures how well fake news stories perform on Facebook. And other
publishers have gotten more
anecdotal evidence on how the company’s efforts are going.
Last
week, those ad hoc measurements got some academic backup (which Slate’s Will
Oremus covers well here.)
In
a working paper, researchers at Stanford University, New York University
and Microsoft Research analyzed 570 sites between January 2015 and July 2018
that were identified by at least one credible source as being consistent
purveyors of false news. They found that interactions with those sites rose on
both Facebook and Twitter during 2016, but fell sharply for the former in the
beginning of 2017 while the latter’s continued to rise. They found no similar
patterns for other news sites.
At
least one reason for the fall in interactions with fake news sites could be
Facebook’s partnership with independent fact-checking projects, which debunk
false news stories, images and videos on the platform, decreasing their reach
in News Feed. The project launched in December 2016 (and is partly facilitated
by the IFCN).
The
partnership isn’t perfect. Daniel found
in July that many stories Facebook’s fact-checking partners rate as false
aren’t flagged in the platform’s system.
Facebook
has worked to improve its flagging mechanism — which fact-checkers told
the company was hard to use — by incorporating the Schema.org
ClaimReview markup, which Facebook announced
it was incorporating at the Global Fact-Checking Summit in June. That
should cut down on the amount of time it takes to get a fact check into
Facebook’s system.
Beyond
Facebook, the study’s results also highlight the need for a more robust
approach to misinformation on Twitter. Daniel pointed
out in August that the platform doesn’t have a similar initiative like
Facebook’s fact-checking product — in spite of fact-checkers repeatedly
asking for one. It’s taken smaller steps to cut down on misinformation,
such as deleting
bot accounts, but the working paper suggests that they don't seem to be
working.
The
study’s authors concede that their findings are “far from definitive.” As
Alexios noted,
the definition of "fake news" at the domain level — and which domains
made the cut — makes a big difference on the results. The researchers also
concentrated only on the United States.
With
these caveats, the study provides helpful additional information to what
journalists have spent months trying to figure out.
(Shutterstock)
This is how we do it
- The New York Times is asking its readers to send examples of potential election misinformation. (As one fact-checker noted on Twitter: Welcome to the club.)
- Verificado 2018 won an Online Journalism Award in the Collaboration and Partnerships category. Here’s what the project was like behind the scenes.
- Aos Fatos won the third IFCN flash grant (following La Voce in Italy and Factly in India). The funds will allow the Brazilian fact-checkers’ Twitter bot Fátima to track and respond to fact-checked political claims.
This is bad
- The New York Times miscaptioned a picture of actress Angela Basset as former Trump White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman. This is at least the third major incident this year of an American news organization mixing up the photos of black women.
- This Sean Hannity fan group is actually run by a network of spammers in Kosovo.
- Two Indian public figures shared misinformation on social media.
This is fun
- Toad is not wearing a mushroom hat. That’s his head. (Alexios wants the record to show he disagreed with the inclusion of this item.)
- Superfans are gaming Spotify’s music charts by creating multiple accounts, sharing them across several countries and streaming music continuously.
- Never. Omit. Cream. Cheese.
Coming up
- We’re always updating our ongoing guide to misinformation actions around the world. Use this form to tell us which bills, laws, committees or initiatives we should add.
- Are you a U.S. fact-checking project that needs $10,000 for a big project? Apply for the IFCN’s flash grant by Oct. 1!
- Africa Check outlined how health misinformation spreads in Nigeria. Next week it’s hosting a workshop in Abuja to discuss what to do about the problem.
(Shutterstock)A closer look
- The New York Times took a look inside Facebook’s election War Room, where dashboards show spikes in the circulation of false stories or the creation of automated accounts in specific locations.
- At the Online News Association conference, danah boyd of Data & Society gave a keynote about how the media can avoid amplifying conspiratorial messages. Read a summary of her remarks on Medium.
- Agência Lupa boss Cris Tardáguila co-authored "Você foi enganado," a book fact-checking claims by Brazilian presidents all the way back to 1921. Political lying has a long history, turns out.
12 quick fact-checking links
- Three members of Congress have asked the intelligence community to assess the potential security threat posted by deepfake videos.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being sued for sharing a fake news story about George Soros.
- Stop. With. The. Post-Truth. Headlines.
- Still relevant, from our archives: Journalism can’t afford for corrections to be the next victim of the “fake news” frenzy.
- A modest proposal: Maybe Sweden should run Twitter.
- Do you know the difference between a goatee and a Van Dyke? If not, you’re in good company.
- Sometimes saying there’s no evidence is as important as saying what evidence there is.
- Polygraphs are in the news this week. Evidence suggests they aren’t actually any good at detecting lies.
- Google is still featuring results from dubious sources. This time, on celebrities’ wealth.
- Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a photo of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in waist-high floodwaters, claiming he faked the scene to make it look like Hurricane Florence was worse than it was. But Cooper debunked that on his show — the photo was actually from Hurricane Ike.
- A fact-checking training event in Kazakhstan was interrupted when police arrested a journalist visiting from Ukraine.
- The New York Times issued an editor’s note after a story about expensive curtains at the home of the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It focused too much on current ambassador Nikki Haley, even though the curtains were ordered under the Obama administration.