Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 30, 2024

Substantiated news is rare in any medium.

It looks like traffic lights and parking meter in a pedestrian plaza. I don’t see a street.

As long as it conforms to what I already believe, I call it substantiated.

A lot of people like their news straight out of trumps butt

In the “Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network” defamation case, FOX News admitted that the news network knowingly lied about voter fraud and a lot more. One might have thought that FOX News’ credibility would have plummeted … but no. That confession doesn’t seem to have fazed the average FOX News viewer in the slightest.

Fox News Network said they did the misreporting about the 2020 election because they feared if they didn’t their viewers would defect to another conservative news network, where the “reality” was more palatable.

No market for this.

Our local potentially paper paper has now raised it’s subscription for ONLINE readers to more than $1 per day. ($36.95 if I recall, which I don’t, clearly). Spouse is considering whether it’s worth it, since there’s not even a usable crossword puzzle (the pen that marks on the screen is REALLY hard to clean off).

I’ve often seen where war pics etc are either verified or not verified.

TV news can be just as sensationalistic as social media these days.

Sensationalism sells.

Unfortunately.

A slow business day every day.

Sad but true. Give me the NYT any day of the week.

Republicans are up in arms as the FCC is trying to stop Fake AI posts about Biden.

Do they still have those news sales booths on the streets of major cities anymore? (I don’t get out much these days.)

For many people today (we know who you are) News is substantiated specifically by seeing it on the internet.

Part of the problem is that print media has largely decided they don’t want to do that anymore. If a politician says it, they uncritically repeat it. They’re stenographers, not reporters.

Ever notice that there is a small but very vocal group on these message boards that spend way too much time exclusively attacking one party/person? Many of them are even premium members – it’s almost like they are working on an agenda to try to influence voters ahead of the election by making it seem public opinion is different than it really is.

Substantiated by whom?

My name for some kinds of social media is sucker media. Recent studies show that the most negatively affected are children between the ages of 4 and 14. They can become both victim and antagonist. Another article points out that, when schools began requiring phones to be put into shielded pouches and locked until end of day, student social interaction and behaviors improved in a very obvious fashion. They stopped ‘anticipating’ a post from a friend and also ‘dreading’ a derogatory post from another person. They stopped being prey for hunters and trolls. Their classroom attention spans improved.

One can only hope that these changes will spread across elementary and secondary systems and that they will become the theme for newer generations.

I get my news from a news feed that normally carries several versions of the same story from various sources. I could not do that with a newsPAPER.

However, there are some stories of interest that I have to dig deep to find.

My best approach is the “shotgun” my viewing across various news sources so the bot doesn’t serve me up the point of view it thinks I have. Besides I like to see what lies FOX News is printing on any given day.

I call these poor fools Phone Zombies . It seems they’re always searching for something and seldom finding it.

As Captain Eddieonce said ‘if technology’s not a good then how come folks is always praying to the phones?’

wiley is getting really grim in his tone over the last few months

And it’s all behind firewalls. At least with physical newspapers and magazines you could buy one to sample the writing. Now you have to buy a year’s subscription to read a single article.

Wouldn’t that be something? Just imagine…

Sunday night, our local TV station had exactly one news story in the half-hour show. They had weather, one news story, more weather, “veteran salute,” and sports analysis. Interspersed in this they had at least 10 commercials for injury lawyers, 6 for furniture stores, 8 for medications to cure diseases you never heard of, 4 car dealers. Then came the ending banter, “we’re all out of time for tonight.”

Substantiated news – as approved by the US government.

Nuff said

Fake news, it goes against my bias.

#sad

So, neither Facebook nor Truth Social.

There’s the rub: The only news most people get is false. Read a newspaper, listen to the national news.

I terminated my TV with extreme prejudice in 1994, I have never missed it. I learned in 2010 just how easy it was to hack FB and other social media) when I watched my supervisor casually asking a coworker to “use the spider” and check on what a potential new hire really believed. Asked coworker what a “spider” was and it had nothing to do with arachnids. It was a small easy to use program that could dig behind FB’s password wall with amazing ease. Yes, it’s illegal, no they weren’t and won’t ever be prosecuted. 10 minutes after her comment to the coworker he had the potential new hire’s passworded FB account up on screen and was digging to see what all they’d liked or tagged. Scary… This comic site is about as far as I go into social media now.

This is why “professional wrestling” gets monumentally higher ratings than Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling.

Smartphones are the dumbest idea yet.

In breaking news, what Harry and Meghan had for breakfast and the latest Kardasian event.

Here’s a simple but “inconvenient” fact:

News outlets choose what qualifies as “substantiated,” and what news to even bother to substantiate, let alone run.

Further, news “consumers” will choose what “news” to believe uncritically and what “news” requires “substantiation,” accepting some sources without hesitation while condemning others as “biased” or “lying.” (As seen in these comments.)

News “bias” is largely executed by decision of what news to cover and how thoroughly, and which news is to be excluded as “inconsequential” or irrelevant TO ITS AUDIENCE. A decision not to report on the bankruptcy of a small company in Thailand or Belgium? Irrelevant to nearly all Americans. A decision not to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop? Bias. A decision to repeatedly being up repeatedly alleged (and ultimately unproven) “Russian collusion” with Trump? Whatever it was, it wasn’t “news.”

Actually a news story at a major newspaper of record, or any other news source, that’s linked in a social media post is just as substantiated as the same story if it’s read anywhere else. The problem lies with the reader and their lack of critical thinking capacity.

Some of my gratest memories are of reading the sunday comics, in color, pages spread out on the floor. Can’t do that with a computer screen.

“Trust, but verify,” a traditional Russian language rhyme taught by Suzanne Massie, a scholar of Russian history, to Ronald Reagan.

Nowadays, it should be, “Do not trust and always verify.”

I think the newspaper-seller has shut the barn door after the horse has bolted.

I’m amazed he’s still open.

lots of sources out there, sample them all, only way to have hope of actually getting the facts.

There is no such thing as substantiated news.   The best you can do is to find two news outlets sponsored by tribes that hate each other’s guts.   If they agree, there’s an off chance that it really happened.

Reality is getting harder and harder to find these days. Look at that guy who was on trial – he bribed a porn star he slept with and lied again and again about it, and then compared himself favorably to Mother Theresa. Reality ended where he opened his mouth.

It’s tempting to see how FOXis covering the verdict… but, nah!

Getting very hard to find; and now you don’t even know if you’re reading legitimate lies of random junk pull from the air by some artificial “intelligence”.

As the ridiculous left, and the loony right, say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story