I will also share what I learned recently about one specific way that news is faked. What we call news is really just propaganda, most of the time, anyway.
The Associated Press (AP) is a propaganda machine. Here is how it works, this propaganda pipeline:
Individual newspapers and media companies pay to AP a fee to have access to "the AP wire", which is how the AP sends out stories they publish. Being a member of the AP wire allows those newspapers and media companies to upload their own stories to the AP wire, where other newspapers and media companies can copy them and publish them in their own newspapers, tv shows, radio, and websites; it also allows anyone who is a member of the AP wire to download and publish any stories on the AP wire.
Whoever the author of the story was gets removed by the AP as soon as the story is uploaded to the wire. So for example, if journalist John A. publishes a story from Chicago about crime rates in the city, and his newspaper The Chicago Times uploads this story of his to the AP wire, then anyone else who pays for access to the AP wire can steal this story and publish it themselves, but as soon as the story is originally uploaded to the wire then the AP strips off the name of the author and replaces it with "By The Associated Press". Then when another company, say the New York Times, takes the story from the wire and re-publishes it in their own NYT print and website, the story says it is by the Associated Press.
This is why you see a lot of news stories that say they are by the Associated Press. What this really means is that the story was stolen from a content creator, someone wrote the story originally and had it uploaded to the AP wire by their news company, and when that happened had their name as author stripped off.
So now there is no historical trace record of who wrote the story or for what publication. The person who wrote it gets no credit, their creation, their story and writing, was literally stolen from them and they get no monetary compensation and no recognition for having created that story. So basically, news and media companies are constantly doing this, ripping off the content of their own journalists, removing bylines (the author's name), and sharing it between each other. But it is even worse than this, because anyone who has a subscription to the AP wire can upload anything at all, any story even if it is totally made up or inaccurate, and the AP has no way to verify if it is true or not, they simply strip off the author's name and re-post it up on the wire.
So just imagine what a tool of fake news this is. The CIA for example, I am sure they have fake journalists positioned in certain real and fake media companies, and all it takes is for such a person to publish something to the AP wire; then this fake story has the author's name stripped away and replaced with "By The Associated Press" to make it look all official, and then the NYT or whoever else can use that story as if it were legitimate, and no one ever checked to see if it is accurate or not. Literally you cannot check, because you don't even know who the author was, when it was originally written, where it was originally written... the entire context is gone.
I just found out this week that this is how the AP works. Not only is it a gigantic machine for stealing the writing of real content creators, the actually good journalists out there, but it is also used to disseminate fake news in such a way that make it look legitimate while also removing any chance of actually tracking down who wrote it and why.
You ever see those stories that say things like "sources say" or "unconfirmed reports are stating that" or "multiple eyewitnesses report", there are dozens of euphemisms for this... it all means the same thing: this story is made up. If there is no actual person credited by name with a quote, and also if there is no author name attached to the story itself, you can be sure it is either stolen by the writer him/herself in the best case, or literally made up fake news in the worst case.
Something else I learned, journalists regularly change the quotes that people say to them on record in interviews. They do this to make the quote "more readable" or to fit with an existing narrative. They actually change what someone said and call that a "quote". And this is apparently standard practice in media.
Subject: Faking the news 
Sat Jun 17, 2017 10:31 pm
