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
- The Real Issue With The Register MS is Not the Politics of Some Staff's "Tweets", It's That The Register MS Publishes Fake Articles for Sponsors (50,000 Pounds Minimum)
- AWS and Google each pay millions for fake articles which beget journalistic bias too (they literally pay the salaries of the 'reporters')
- Microsoft Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): We Need Accountability Because Many People Die and It's Because of Microsoft Diehards or People Bribed by Microsoft to Deploy Microsoft Where Lives Are at Risk
- They're trying to save face right now
- What the Media Misses: It's Not an NVIDIA Issue, Super Micro Computer Inc Also Fell From $45 to $26 in the Period NVIDIA Lost 33% of Its Faked 'Value', NVIDIA is Collapsing Like Intel
- History goes in circles
- Waste of Money: Giving More Money to Toothless Regulators That Don't Even Examine Evidence
- Shame in SRA
- At Microsoft, "Buyouts" or "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" (GVSA) Not Much Different From Layoffs (Severance Shockingly Low)
- From what we are able to gather, many people are leaving Microsoft 'voluntarily'
- Is Microsoft the Next Fake-Valued Corporation to Lose 35% in "Market Value"? Is Slop Bringing Microsoft Down?
- Will NDAs prevent people talking or journalists finding out the true cause?
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- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXX - Pyramid Schemes (Planned Plunder) and Canceled/Botched Surgeries Aren't "Funny", They Cause Serious Harm and Distress
- We were right about Microsoft
- Links 14/11/2026: "OpenAI Is Sustaining Enormous Losses" and Slop "Loses the Popular Vote"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 13, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, November 13, 2026
- Gemini Links 14/11/2026: Code of Conduct, Back to Gemini, and Gemlog to Inbox
- Links for the day
- Slop Promotion, Including Paid-for Slop Promotion for So-called 'Linux' Foundation (Its Clients Are Slop Companies)
- We've noticed a lot of this lately in "It's FOSS" and to a lesser degree in "FOSS Force"
- Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Productivity Metrics and Antenna Outage
- Links for the day
- It's Not About China or Sex, It's About Corruption at NVIDIA and a Pyramid Scheme Perpetrated Under the Guise of "Hey Hi Revolution" (That Wasn't, It's Manufactured and Hyped by Bribes, Subsidised by Multi-Trillion-Dollar Loans, People's Pension Funds and More)
- What's at stake here is a lot bigger than the "Ponzi hub" of Jensen Huang
- No, You're Not a "Most Valuable Company" When Everything is Down for Half a Day in the Entire Planet
- Still down, still no explanation (maybe they too aren't sure)
- "Techrights Statement on Phoronix" Still Valid Five Years Later
- Our position as stated in early 2022 has not changed
- Vista 11's 'Growth' Has Stalled, It's Measured at Only 17.9% in the US This Year
- That helps put in perspective Microsoft's attempt to discard almost 30% of its remaining workforce
- "NVIDIA is Enron" (Subsidising the Pyramid Scheme That It Profited From), Microsoft is Next to be Down for the Count
- Microsoft increasingly looks like the "next NVIDIA"
- Richard Stallman Travels to South America to Give Talks About Free Software in Spanish, FSF Raises Money
- The FSF is raising money (goal is $400,000) and the FSF has just mentioned the upcoming talks by the FSF's founder
- United States Adding ~300 Billion in Government Debt Per Month, Wall Street Shaves Off Trillions in 'Value' in Less Than One Week
- cushioning "assets" by helping them fake "value"
- Microsoft: Pay Us for the Stuff That's Offline and We Cannot Fix
- Learn to take control of the technology that you rely on
- Links 13/11/2026: "Copyright-Strike-for-Hire" and "Stevie Wonder Photo Lawsuit"
- Links for the day
- The Slop Bubble (or Pyramid Scheme) Relied on Trust and Patience (Being Patient as Losses Grow and Debt Explodes, Trusting the Roadmap of Cheaters and Frauds)
- Remember that it all began with trust
- Anthropic's IPO Depends on $895.4 Billion in Debt (Money It Doesn't Have, It Loses Over 100 Billion Dollars Per Reporting Period), NVIDIA Has Just Lost Almost 2 Trillion Dollars In Value and Its Debt Trebled in Three Months
- This coming week will be very, very entertaining for slop critics/sceptics to watch
- Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) the Latest of Many to Quit Linux Development Over Linus Torvalds' Obsession With Slop (Linus Wants to Work With Bots, Not Humans Who Understand Whatever Code They Write)
- Linus caught the 'brain virus'
- Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Continue in November 2026
- IBM's CEO is "a Palliative Care Doctor Who Slides [IBM] Gently Into the Night"
- Microsoft Asks 60,000 Workers to Leave, Some Leave, Services Go Down
- Microsoft laid off about 40,000-50,000 people in past years
- Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Roku Exits the Smart Home Market and Poor Reporting/Journalism Regarding Slop Plagiarism
- Links for the day
- Links 13/11/2026: "Apple Support Community Forums to Permanently Close" and "The Slop Market is Getting Nervous"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 12, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, November 12, 2026
- Gemini Links 12/11/2026: A Firing of a Boss and Geminispace Growing Fast
- Links for the day
- Bill Epsteingate-Funded BBC "Totally Ignoring the $1.7 Trillion Wiped off NVIDIA Stocks"
- Imagine how many pension funds are tied to this NVIDIA pyramid scheme
- A Few Hours Before NVIDIA CEO Canned (and NVIDIA Shares Plunged) the NVIDIA-Funded The Register MS Published Paid Spam With "AI" 18 Times in It
- Anything to inflate the bubble
- Links 11/11/2026: NVIDIA Decapitated, "The Company That Published Fake Journalists in Sports Illustrated is Collapsing Dramatically"
- Links for the day
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXIX - We Didn't Start the Fire
- It started in 2012
- Photo Ops Are Liabilities
- NVIDIA is not a "family business" and its CEO isn't some modest genius
- NVIDIA’s Total Debt Trebled in Three Months!
- Not the hallmark of a rich company unless its accounting is fraudulent
- NVIDIA Turns Out to be Serial Cheater, Stock Plunges 33% in 5 Weeks
- The "slop bros" have long relied on patience and blind faith
- Adopting LLM Slop is Still Suicide
- Suicide (in the literal sense) is also linked to adoption of chatbots
- On Laundering Licences and Code
- A "Second SCO" waiting to happen
- The Cyber Show on Slop and the Ministry Of Truth in "Nineteen Eighty Four"
- "cultural erasure" by slop
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXVIII - Keeping Both Eyes on the Ball
- One upside of these disputes is that they raise at least two very important issues concerning the law
- Gemini Links 12/11/2026: Encryption is Easy, Human Emacs, and Legislation in Italy
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, November 11, 2026