Deception Watch: AstroTurf, Lobbying, and Dirty Politics
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-01 13:42:51 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-01 13:42:51 UTC
Media Bias
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The BBC has been accused of yielding to political pressure since the last election and allowing a right-wing bias to emerge in its journalism.
The serious criticism by a distinguished media professor suggests that the BBC has compromised its impartiality by depending too heavily on sources from business, the media, law and order and politics.
Covert Marketing
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Two-time "Worst Company In America" winner Electronic Arts isn't doing its publicity department any favors. The company's new freemium game Dungeon Keeper tricks frustrated players into leaving bad reviews on its own site, instead of on the Google Play Store, Gamasutra reports.
Politics
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Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., is defending his actions after he physically threatened a reporter at the Capitol after President Barack Obama's State of the Union address.
The confrontation began Tuesday when Michael Scotto, a reporter for New York cable news station NY1, asked Grimm about a Justice Department investigation into his campaign finances.
After cutting the interview short, Grimm told Scotto, "You ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this (expletive) balcony." He also threatened to "break (Scotto) in half."
NY1 posted video of the incident on its website.
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The Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity (through its Wisconsin Reporter and Watchdog.org websites) has aggressively attacked the "John Doe" probe into possible campaign finance violations during Wisconsin's 2011 and 2012 recall elections. Its outlets have also published new information about the apparent targets of the investigation, but they have omitted an important detail: Franklin Center has close ties to individuals and groups that may be caught up in the John Doe.
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Google, the tech giant supposedly guided by its “don’t be evil” motto, has been funding a growing list of groups advancing the agenda of the Koch brothers.
Organizations that received “substantial” funding from Google for the first time over the past year include Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Federalist Society, the American Conservative Union (best known for its CPAC conference) and the political arm of the Heritage Foundation that led the charge to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act: Heritage Action.
South Korea
Revisionism
Consumerism and Distraction
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This ad strongly promotes the values of consumerism, and implies that consumerism leads directly to happiness. In the ad, the girls bought these shoes, are wearing them, and are now fashionable, popular, and happy. This message encourages the belief that spending money and obtaining material goods is the only path to happiness for girls. This big lie will lower girls’ self-esteem and perhaps cause them to purchase unnecessary goods in their quest to appear cool and likeable.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Over at Tux Machines...
- 2 days' worth
- Microsoft's Demise in the Global News Cycle is Rather Telling
- It should be noted that Microsoft is, in general, no longer prominent or dominant in news headlines
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- Upcoming Talk by Dr. Richard Stallman: Large Language Models Are Not Artificial Intelligence
- LLMs aren't truly intelligent and cannot quite grasp what they spew out
- GulagTube is a Burning Platform (Exit YouTube, Invidious Won't Save Us From Google/Alphabet in the Long Run)
- Alphabet Agency (Google) sees the future of video as a "skinnerbox" (running Android) that indoctrinates you like TikTok does
- Fulfilling the Site's Full Potential
- We remain devoted to the aforementioned goal of posting more original material
- GNU/Linux Distributions as "Appliances" and DRM Platforms (the Case of ChromeOS and SteamOS)
- Is this what we envisioned in the 1980s and 90s?
- Gemini Migration and Backup Capsule (Archive)
- At the end we'll end up with something a lot better than before and latency should be massively reduced
- Links 01/10/2023: Science, Education, and pro-Russia Slovakia Leadership
- Links for the day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 01, 2023
- IRC logs for Sunday, October 01, 2023
- Links 01/10/2023: Climate, Patents, Programming, and More
- Links for the day
- Apple and Microsoft Problems
- half a dozen links
- Malware in the Ubuntu Snap Store, Thanks to Canonical Bloatware Mindset
- Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
- Gemini Rising
- There are 3523 capsules
- Richard Stallman Gave a Talk Yesterday, Will Give Another Talk Today, and Will Give Two More Talks in Germany Later This Week
- Those cover at least 2 different topics
- Beware the Microsoft Sharks
- We won't forgive and forget
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 30, 2023
- IRC logs for Saturday, September 30, 2023
- Don't be Afraid of the Command Line, It Might Even be a Friend
- There's a tendency to think that only graphical interfaces were made to simplify usage, and any declarative interface is by design raw, inherently unfit for usage
- One Positive Note About GNU/Linux Coverage in 2023 (Less Microsoft)
- GNU/Linux users do not want this, with very rare exceptions
- Snaps Were Never Good at Security, But the Media Coverage is Just Appalling
- The media should focus on culling Windows, not making a huge fuss over minor things wrongly attributed to "Linux"
- Better Footage of Richard Stallman's Talk Last Week: “Freedom in computing, forty years after starting to really protect it”
- Richard Stallman speaks about the cancer situation early in his speech
- Links 30/09/2023: A Government Shutdown and More Blizzard Layoffs
- Links for the day
- Links 30/09/2023: Bing Almost Offloaded Due to Failure/Losses, Nvidia Raided
- Links for the day
- A Lot of Technological 'Progress' Has Been Nothing But Buzzwords
- Free software does not try to excite people people over nothing
- Community is the Lifeblood of Freedom in the GNU/Linux World
- Removing or undoing the "cancerd" (systemd) is feasible but increasingly difficult
- Proprietary Software: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
- Proprietary software has an entirely different mindset, revolving around business models rather than science
- Web Hostnames Down to Lowest Number in More Than 7 Years!
- the number of hostnames is falling rapidly (they hide this by choosing logarithmic scale)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- 2 days' worth
- Richard Stallman Says He Will Probably Live Many More Years
- "Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19."
- Quitting 'Clown Computing' and GAFAM is Only the Start
- The Web and the Net at large became far too centralised
- Stop Begging Companies That Don't Value Your Freedom to Stop Pushing You Around
- That's not freedom
- They Say Free Software is Like Communism When They, the Proprietary Software Giants, Constantly Pursue Government Bailouts (Subsidies From Taxpayers)
- At the moment Ukraine is at most risk due to its dependence on Microsoft (inside its infrastructure)
- Social Control Media Has No Future, It Was Always Doomed to Fail (Also Promoted Based on Lies)
- Recent events, including developments at Twitter, meant that they lost a lot of their audience and then, in turn, sponsors/advertisers
- The forbidden topics
- There are forbidden topics in the hacker community
- They're Been Trying to 'Kill' Richard Stallman for Years (by Mentally Tormenting Him)
- Malicious tongue wanted to do him what had been done to Julian Assange
- We Temporarily Have Two Gemini Capsules
- They're both authentic and secure, but they're not the same
- Consumerism is Lying and Revisionism
- We need to reject these liars and charlatans
- Links 30/09/2023: Open VFS Framework, CrossOver 23.5, Dianne Feinstein Dies
- Links for the day
- Security Leftovers
- GNU/Linux, Microsoft, and more
- Microsoft Down on the World Wide Web, Shows Survey
- down by a lot in this category
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 29, 2023
- IRC logs for Friday, September 29, 2023
- A Society That Fails Journalists Does Not Deserve Journalism
- It's probably too later to save Julian Assange as a working publisher (he might never recover from the mental torture), but as a person and a father we can wish and work towards his release
- Almost Nothing To Go With Your Morning's Cup Of Coffee
- Newspaper? What newspaper?