Fake News Watch

• While July 27 is a particularly important day for me, the planet Mars will not be making an approach close enough to make it appear bigger than the moon. Being that close would probably mean a Roland Emmerich movie is about to happen.

• Pretty soon I’m going to have to create a separate category for Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories. This week’s stupidity centers on the murder-suicide of FBI agent David Raynor, who was witnessed killing himself in front of police after stabbing his wife to death. He had absolutely nothing to do with the so-called Fast and Furious operation, which also had nothing to do with Clinton and the State Department. Also, he was not scheduled to testify in anything, much less a federal investigation.

• Wait, what? The meme spread that “for the first time in the 242-year history of the U.S., a one-year-old child appears in court as a defendant.” However, this is not true. It happens all the time  to immigrant children. And sometimes without an attorney.

• Former FBI attorney Lisa Page did not testify that China hacked the DNC server in contradiction of the Russian allegations. It was posted by Your News Wire, a well-known fake site, but Breitbart, The Daily Caller and others ran with it. Of course.

• Despite DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s statement that there are billboards in Central America on how to sneak into the U.S., there is no evidence of any such thing, much less one advising them to “grab a kid.”

• No, Clint Eastwood isn’t leaving his millions to the Trump 2020 campaign.  That would be illegal.

The mayor of San Juan is not facing fraud charges over disaster relief funds. Another mayor has been accused of fraud, but unrelated to disaster relief. Sabana Grande Mayor Miguel Ortiz-Velez allegedly took kickbacks for overestimating construction project costs. Why target Carmen Yulin Cruz with Ortiz-Velez’s alleged crimes? Cruz is a vocal opponent of President Trump and the relief efforts following Hurricane Maria, and that was apparently enough for Fox News.

• Last week the word “treason” was all over the interwebs, so Politifact dug into what actually is and is not treason. Legal experts say despite the plethora of memes, the legal definition of treason is far too narrow to be applied to anything that happened last week. It has to be during war, and while it doesn’t have to be a declared war (we haven’t declared war since WWII), just saying nice things about another country doesn’t count. Adam Gadahn was an American citizen charged with being an al-Qaeda spokesman, but was killed by a drone strike before trial. That was 2006, and the most recent indictment. As many pointed out, the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, not treason. And Trump’s appearance with Putin doesn’t count, according to a unanimous collection of experts.

• I’m embarrassed that this one is the third most-searched this week on Snopes. No, ABC News did NOT ban flag lapel pins after 9/11. Seriously??

• Pick of the Week: No, the Obama family did not wear Che Guevara shirts in Cuba. And yet, 20,000 shares on Facebook. Again: Seriously??

It’s Actually True: A Russian asbestos company actually did place a seal with the face of President Trump alleging it had been approved by him. Uralasbest is one of the world’s largest producers of asbestos, and apparently extrapolated from pro-asbestos comments in Trump’s 1997 book and pulling the EPA off asbestos control.

 

Note: This feature does not take a stance on political issues. It is solely in favor of fact over fiction, at least in the public discourse.

Fake News Watch

Attempting to debug the internet… emptying the ocean with a thimble.

• John Fugelsang’s tweet about the Secret Service and  President Trump is going crazy online. Here’s the deal: The Secret Service cannot accept gifts from a subject they protect, not even hotel rooms and travel expenses or renting tables and lights near Mar-a-Lago. The Trumps are not directly sending the SS a bill, but the SS is required to pay for it, including rent in Trump Tower for their security station. What has never happened before (that I’m aware of) is a president who owns multiple resorts and golf courses and goes there often. The SS is therefore indirectly paying the Trumps, but it’s required by law.

If you want more data, the Washington Post tracked how much of Trump’s travel has been at his own resorts. As of that report, he had been in office 346 days and spent 116 of them at a Trump property, or 33.5 percent.

• Oh for the love of… No, the senior-citizen couple who died in New Jersey on July 7 were NOT scheduled to testify before a grand jury against Hillary Clinton. Neither of them had a damn thing to do with the pharmaceutical industry, much less the company that blew up the price of EpiPens, which also has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton, which never seems to faze 4chan. The house blew up because of natural gas, possibly caused by poor installation of a new stove.

The Fourth of July meme that showed Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump celebrating Independence Day by visiting troops in three cases and golf in the fourth is not accurate. None of the photos were taken on any Fourth of July, and the Trump image on the golf course is several years before his presidency.

• There is no Congresswoman Ateesha Nubbins, and no one is proposing a law to establish an upper-age voting limit declaring no one over age 60 can vote.

• Immigration fun: No, immigrants cannot apply for asylum at U.S. embassies or consulates, no matter what happens in the movies. This one was repeated by a sitting Congressman. Asylum claims must be made while physically present in the U.S., and they have a year to do so. Also: No, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters did not tell CNN that Trump should “nominate an illegal immigrant” to SCOTUS. It’s a doctored image, and your first clue should be that “illegal immigrant” is not AP style. No, California does not have “39 percent illegals” in public school. It’s about 3 percent, about 12 percent parents. The same idiot meme that’s been circulating for decades says 66 percent of California births are “to illegals on Medi-Cal.” It was 15 percent in 2011, dropped to 12.6 percent two y ears later and keeps dropping.

Meanwhile, we usually don’t bother with things that are true, but people have been yelling Fake News at the word that a new ICE task force is charged with investigating and revoking citizenship from naturalized citizens. Sorry, folks, it’s absolutely true and it IS a new initiative, not people freaking out over something that’s always existed. It hasn’t happened since McCarthyism.

• Did Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh say presidents shouldn’t be investigated while in office? Analysis says: Sort of. In 2009, he wrote an article for the Minnesota Law Review in which he cited his experience with the Starr Report and opined that Congress could consider a law exempting the president from criminal prosecution because of the dangers of politicizing. However, legal experts say in context, the statement was about temporary immunity as granted by Congress, which has not been passed. Instead, U.S. v. Nixon still holds, which upholds that the president is not immune from subpoenas. Politifact has much more detail and rates it half-true.

• Speaking of SCOTUS, that pic of Sens. Schumer, Warren and Booker saying they don’t want a judge who follows the U.S. Constitution is rated “pants on fire” by Politifact, as the only source showing any of them saying these quotes is “The Babylon Bee,” which describes itself as “your trusted source for Christian news satire.” And no, of course the Notorious RBG  did NOT write that “pedophilia is good for children.” It’s a gross misinterpretation of an attempt to make a statutory rape law gender-neutral, in recognition that any gender can commit sexual assault.

• Of 98 statements of fact at President Trump’s campaign rally in Montana last week, 76 percent were false, misleading or unsupported by evidence, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker database. They focus only on material fact, not trivialities or opinions. Some are perhaps just misleading – calling on Sen. Tester a liberal Democrat when he’s voted with Trump more than one-third of the time – while others are… um. Read it here yourself – it’s long.

• My Favorite Fakery of the Week: No, Disney is NOT planning to build a new theme part in Escanaba, Mich.

Trufax: Walt Disney DID consider building a second Disneyland in St. Louis. It was to be called Riverfront Square, incorporating prototypes for Pirates and the Caribbean and New Orleans, among others based on Davy Crockett and the Meramec Caverns, etc. It’s not far from Walt’s hometown of Marceline, Mo., after all, and the famous Main Streets of Disneyland and Walt Disney World tend toward a stylized impression of Marceline.

So what happened? Beer. Legend has it that August Busch Jr. publicly insulted Walt after the MouseMan declared they would not sell beer in a St. Louis park. Financing and ownership were probably also factors, and then Walt started buying up acres in central Florida….

Note: This feature does not take a stance on political issues. It is solely in favor of fact over fiction, at least in the public discourse.

Annapolis

There are hundreds of columns and editorials out in the world condemning the slaughter of five journalists at a newsroom just like mine, less than two weeks after it happened. The columns appeared within hours, tweets and posts and laments. There’s a reason. Words are our lifeblood and our solace. We may be working out our collective sadness and fury in words for some time to come.

I honestly feel this is the closest we journalists will come to understanding how police officers feel when they hear one of their own has been killed in the line of duty. You feel shaken and sick to your stomach, angry and generally beyond rational thought.

It doesn’t matter that you didn’t know them personally. You live your life by a mission, and they were killed while fulfilling it. There but for the grace of God.

That Thursday afternoon, Annapolis was on all three screens in our newsroom. Everyone who was not actively writing something on deadline was gathered by the screens. Watching and waiting and trying not to show how it struck us in the gut.

They’re the same size we are, you know. Maybe a little smaller.

But the news doesn’t wait for tragedy. Within a couple of hours, a gigantic storm rolled into the area and we had to shift into emergency coverage mode. No time to obsess over tweets and updates; we had to churn out tornado warnings and closed roads and flooding dangers and power outages and damage reports.

The evacuated survivors of the Capital Gazette used the bed of a pickup truck to write their stories for the morning edition while they waited to hear which of their colleagues – their family – survived the shooting. No time for mourning.

Because that’s the job. As their editor now-famously declared, “We’re putting out a damn paper tomorrow.” And in a heart-rending cartoon showing the five murdered journalists at the pearly gates, St. Peter soberly shows them a copy and says, “Yes, they got the paper out.”

The Baltimore Sun reported on their own, on the journalists writing about the murders of their colleagues. Two reporters and a photography writing the most hellish story of their lives, chronicling for the world the deaths in their family. “I don’t know what else to do except this,” said reporter Chase Cook.

We are a family. Hour for hour, we spend more time with the people in our newsrooms than we do with wives and husbands, children and parents. We are sometimes a dysfunctional family, with the unusual personalities attracted by the profession, and the immense stresses that the job places on us. But a family nonetheless.

It takes a stalwart heart to love a journalist, and many marriages do not survive its rigors.

To love a journalist, you must be prepared for random phone calls during family occasions that see your loved one vanish into another room, taking notes on a napkin.

To love a journalist, you must get used to a partner who has to scan email and headlines before even getting out of bed in the morning.

To love a journalist, you must be patient when you’ve planned a romantic luncheon for two at a not-inexpensive Italian restaurant, and ten minutes after the iced tea is poured,  your partner is asking for that meal to go, there’s a standoff in the next town, I’m so sorry, dear.

To love a journalist, you have to still that whisper of nervousness when there’s a tornado warning and your partner has to go out and take a video, or is sheltered in a steel mill under the giant, heavy equipment. He or she may be sent to a rough neighborhood only minutes after a gang shoot-out, or writes a story that ruffles the wrong feathers, or is standing by the side of the interstate shooting video of the crash while someone may be coming up behind him, not quite paying attention.

To love a journalist, you have to know that there’s a possibility he or she won’t come home.

For five families in Annapolis, that worst possibility came true. It’s an accepted risk for police officers and firefighters and military personnel, but few people ever consider that journalists are one step behind those brave first responders and bullets hit us just as hard.

When a soldier is killed in action overseas, he is a hero. When Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered overseas, they said, “What was he doing there, anyway?”

His job.

It’s getting worse. At least 41 journalists have been killed this year, at least 30 of which were in direct retribution for a story or caught in a crossfire. That doesn’t include the Annapolis five. Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists both detailed the darkening climate for journalists worldwide in a Washington Post piece that largely focused overseas. World leaders decry journalists, discrediting and undermining them – and it works. Someone will listen, and pick up a gun.

The threats aren’t just deadly. Internet bullying, harassment and stalking are pervasive. When we talk about it, it is dismissed as “the cost of doing business.” In the week since the Annapolis shooting, the Capital Gazette has received death threats and untold piles of emails and letters cheering on the attack, and not just in the darker corners of Reddit or 4chan.

I personally received mockery and abuse simply because as president of the St. Louis Society of Professional Journalists, I co-signed a mass statement from the Student Press Law Center essentially saying we have the right to work without being slaughtered.

We try to laugh when another crazed reader emails us a nastygram, stifling the tiny thread of worry that says this could be the one who decides to back up his vendetta by striding into the lobby with an AR-15.

After all, my newspaper is based in the hometown of James Hodgkinson, who decided to vent his fury by shooting up a Congressional baseball practice. The idea that any of these shootings are in “other” places and therefore we are safe belongs in the far-distant past.

Every shooting is somewhere else until it’s here.

Every newspaper has a Jarrod Ramos. Every single one, and most have multiples. Ramos’ defamation suit has become the focus of the world’s attention – oh, he had a motive, so it’s easier to dismiss it. “He had a vendetta against the paper,” sayeth law enforcement, and already the shooting is recategorized.

It’s not about journalists or journalism, it’s not about violence against newspapers, they argue. It was just this one guy, this one newspaper.

But his defamation suit that supposedly spurred this caused me even more concern. Once again it began with a man stalking and harassing a woman, a common denominator among mass shooters. He pleaded guilty, then sued the paper for defamation because they reported it. When it was thrown out he appealed (thus costing the paper quite a lot in legal fees, I would imagine).

The appellate decision, as reported, is a thing of beauty. If he had had a lawyer, they stated in much more polite language, he might have been advised that in order to BE defamation, it actually has to be false. You can’t be defamed with the truth.

But he didn’t understand the difference between “fake news” and reality. He didn’t like it, therefore it was defamation.

And he isn’t alone. If the comments we received, the badinage on Twitter and the endless screaming threads on Facebook are any indication, there is an enormous and troubling population that can no longer tell the difference between fact and fantasy – and simply doesn’t care.

That is far, far more dangerous for journalists – and for the United States of America – than the guns or the mental illness or any other cause we can blame. We make our living through words, and our passion is for the facts, and to see both dismissed in the wake of a hail of bullets tore us all apart.

We got emotional. Some stepped over the line. Two journalists openly tweeted blame for President Trump in direct or indirect language. Both retracted their comments later; one was fired/resigned, his 21-year career as a journalist at an end in one foolish, heated Tweet. That, too, is a tragedy.

We spend our careers, our precious time with those long-suffering, patient families, our very lives in pursuit of the facts – I resist the word truth, since truth can be subjective, but facts are facts no matter what your perspective.  When you dedicate your life in the pursuit of finding and reporting facts to the world so that they can be informed, and they stop caring about the difference between fact and fiction, the very foundation on which you have built your life shudders.

And yet… there is another story waiting to be told.

June Linkspam Round-up

At least my last month in daily journalism won’t be boring.

On the Patreon:

• A short story titled “Dead Heat,” for patrons at $10 or more.

• Blog post: “Goal No. 1 – Unlocked,” for patrons only.

• A short story titled “Sisyphus,” one of my golden oldies, open to all.

• Photo posts of a double rainbow sighting ($5 and up) and the MoBot glass show. (open to all).

• A personal essay on “Life After News,” open to all.

I also posted this essay on meeting a group of Chinese journalists.

You can get all this lovely content by subscribing to my Patreon!

In the news:

• Feature: A son’s gift to his father: 16 more years of life and counting

SIU board to vote on firing President Dunn

SIU meeting to fire Dunn illegal, chairwoman says

Board deadlocks on firing Dunn

• Granite City teacher resigns after allegations of affair with student

Storm pummels metro-east; 45,000 without power

Also, a public statement as president of the St. Louis Society of Professional Journalists regarding Lindenwood University’s decision to stop printing its student magazine after controversial (and award-winning) stories.

And finally… I was not permitted to use puns in this story. I think the loss of income going freelance will be worth it simply to be allowed to pun in public.

ME: Am I allowed to say he got stuck with the bill?
EDITOR: No.
ME: Sigh. Someday I’m gonna quack you up.
EDITOR: *stare*
ME: Look, Leader Pub’s lead is, “One Six Flags patron apparently thought it was duck season.”
EDITOR 2: Are you sure it’s not wabbit season?
EDITOR: I’m about to declare a time-out.
ME: I’m not allowed to use puns. See? No puns in my story, and it is physically painful.
EDITOR 3: Since you’re leaving, does that make you a … lame duck?
ME: *points* How come he gets away with that and I can’t make a single pun??
EDITOR: I gave him the side-eye glare.