Globe & Mail “Public Editor” Sylvia Stead shares some insights today on how professional journalists combat disinformation.
Apparently this is quite a struggle, especially in the current news environment, dominated by one V Putin, who is a serial liar, perhaps even as bad as Trump.
How do we know Putin is a liar?
“When a country claims to invade another nation, with a Jewish president, for the purpose of de-nazification, it’s pretty clear they are lying.”
That’s it, that’s all you need to know! I was hoping for something a little more sophisticated. The long and sordid history of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and its nazi sympathies can’t be brushed aside with such a trite remark.
But that’s all we get, even though most Globe readers are well aware that a president doesn’t necessarily wield much actual power, the Trump presidency being a prime example.
Then there are the Globe’s reporters on the ground in Ukraine, up to eight at a time! Funny how they never manage to get close enough to the action to provide any evidence of all that heroic resistance pushing the invaders back.
There are also the “trusted wire services,” of which there are two with global reach in the English speaking world. One is the Associated Press, owned by a consortium of US media companies, every one of which worships at the altar of American Exceptionalism.
The other is Reuters, owned by the same hereditary peer in the British House of Lords who happens to own the Globe! He also belongs to the same church as the other guys.
So yes, you can obviously count on getting nothing but the unvarnished truth from those “trusted wire services!”
By this point I’m starting to second guess my life-long assumption that The Globe and Mail is a serious newspaper. Then comes the clincher;
“Another technique to expose lies is using a “truth sandwich,” in which you first share the truth of what is happening, then describe the lie, returning finally to the truth.”
Really?
We're a whisker away from nuclear annihilation and this moron wants to talk juvenile witticisms?
Sounds to me like the G&M is trying to grow their pre-teen readership.
How else can you explain such idiocy?
This is the intellectual level of our "thought leaders."
We are fucked.
