EppsNet Archive: News

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A Trip to the Supermarket

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As I was walking up to the local supermarket, one of the cart wranglers was near the entrance saying — loudly — “Number one! Eyewitness News!” Now this is a grown man, of what looked like Middle Eastern extraction, although that’s not really relevant. As I got closer, he asked me, “Have you heard that?” “I don’t watch the news,” I said. “It’s depressing, It’s dishonest. It’s the same things happening every day: A car chase on the freeway, someone got killed, someone got robbed, someone got stabbed on the Metro, a boy wearing makeup won a girls’ track meet.” “I love the news,” he said. “I’d like to be a reporter.” If anyone reading this is looking to hire a challenged but enthusiastic reporter, message me.   I exited the store through the other door, where two young people had a table set up, selling stuffed animals to benefit… Read more →

Goodbye Joy Reid, et al

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How naive of me to think Joy Reid was fired over ratings: https://t.co/ToLxT96iNN pic.twitter.com/MoJh3WsPwm — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 25, 2025 Joy Reid is one of many media personalities being shuffled about recently. Joy Reid oozes racial hatred from every pore. She used to laugh at “white tears.” Who’s crying now? After being fired, Reid will have more time to grope around for some kind of an explanation for how little influence she and people like her have over increasingly large numbers of the American public. Imagine that you’re an MSNBC host and every day you show up and say the same things. Trump is a fascist. Trump is a racist. Trump is the new Hitler. Trump’s going to destroy our country. Trump is a rapist. He’s a white supremacist, white nationalist. Then you see a huge portion of the country vote for the person that you’ve been obsessively condemning… Read more →

A Positive Human Future?

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If you were a farmer in Nebraska 100 years ago when the Titanic went down, you wouldn’t have known about that for about six months. Today we’re bombarded with news, almost all of which is bad, and yet people wonder about the epidemic of depression and anxiety. What is journalism’s vision of a positive human future? Where are the people who are being praised for bringing about a positive human future? Where is the news about virtue and heroism in the world? Read more →

Gimme Some Truth

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I’m sick and tired of hearing things from Uptight short-sighted narrow-minded hypocrites All I want is the truth, just give me some truth I’m sick to death of seeing things from Tight-lipped condescending mama’s little chauvinists All I want is the truth, just give me some truth I’ve had enough of watching scenes from Schizophrenic egocentric paranoiac primadonnas All I want is the truth, just give me some truth — John Lennon, “Gimme Some Truth” Read more →

See You in Hell: Fake News Edition

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[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the Underworld, my friends and foes! I’m reading about a hostage situation, including a fatal shooting of one of the hostages, at a Trader Joe’s in Los Angeles over the weekend. It was covered nationally and even internationally. Here’s a photo from a British news site of the suspect being taken away: I looked at the major US news sites — CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC — and about a dozen smaller sites . . . no one mentioned the race of the suspect, no one gave the suspect’s name, and no one ran a photo. I could understand a media policy where, in reporting shootings, we consider race to always be relevant, or we consider race to never be relevant, but not a policy where race is only considered relevant when the victim is… Read more →

Spot the Fake News: Obamacare Subsidies

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I read four news stories on the same topic — the end of Obamacare subsidies to insurance companies. The Wall Street Journal plays it straight down the middle: President Donald Trump’s executive order on health care issued Thursday marks the first major salvo in what the White House promises will be an extensive, targeted campaign to unravel the Affordable Care Act administratively. As does Bloomberg: President Donald Trump said he is moving “step by step” on his own to remake the U.S. health care system because Congress won’t act on his demand to repeal Obamacare. The Trump administration took its most drastic measure yet to roll back the Affordable Care Act Thursday evening, announcing it would cut off a subsidy to insurers hours after issuing an executive order designed to draw people away from the health law’s markets. See if you can spot the fake news in the Politico version:… Read more →

A Fake News Taxonomy: 7 Types of Mis- and Disinformation

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First Draft makes an interesting effort to classify different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false), based on the type of content, the motivations of those who create the content and the ways that content is disseminated Here are the categories they came up with, in descending order of intent to deceive: Fabricated Content: New content that is 100% false Manipulated Content: Genuine information or imagery is manipulated Imposter Content: Impersonation of genuine sources False Context: Genuine content is shared with false contextual information Misleading Content: Misleading use of information to frame an issue/individual False Connection: Headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content Satire or Parody: No intention to cause harm but potential to fool We used to have the Five W’s: who, what, when, where and why. Now we have the Eight P’s:… Read more →