From Pine View Farm

It’s time to stop worrying about “fake news” and start worrying about fake newspapers.

Snopes reports that wealthy right-wing donors are setting up websites pretending to belong to local newspapers and designed to look like local newspaper websites for newspapers that do not, in fact, exist. Here’s a snippet (emphasis added):

The issue is not the creation of conservative content. The issue, according to Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the director for the Center of Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is disguising conservative activism as journalism. “I have no problem with advocacy organizations creating content that reinforces the positions they take on public policy issues on the left, right or center. The issue comes in when they’re not transparent about that advocacy,” Culver told us via phone. “In this case, if you have a conservative take on a policy issue and you want to promote that take, go ahead. But just claim it for what it is.”

Remember, just because you see it on a computer screen, it ain’t necessarily so. Check the bona fides of sources you use for news.

One technique is to check the purported news stories for links to sources; no links indicate dubious or nonexistent sources. Also, links from random Facebook Frolickers and twisty Twitter Trolls are hysterically unreliable.

H/T to The Bob Cesca Show for this news item.

Gina Barreca considers the wasteland of liars in our political discourse-doesn’t-really-seem-like-the-correct-term and remembers some liars she has known personally. An excerpt:

Nobody lies to people they respect. People lie to chumps, doormats and clowns. If you expect others to enter into the lie with you, you must approach them with contempt.

(snip)

But when you launder a lie, pass it along as the truth, put it into cultural and social circulation, it’s as if you’re handling dirty money. You hope nobody looks at it too closely or holds it up to the light for examination. It’s Gresham’s law, adapted: The counterfeit currency of lying will inexorably drive out the more valuable currency of truth.

Follow the link for more.

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Job’s Anger.

Thom wonders what is this “center” of which the pundits speak, then goes on an epic rant about Republicans’ 90 year history of calling Democrats “socialists.”