Category Archives: Media

Why North Korea’s nuclear threat must be taken more seriously than ever

Graham Ong-Webb, Nanyang Technological University

During what was the 2017 Easter weekend for most of the world, North Koreans celebrated the “Day of the Sun”. It was the 105th birthday of the country’s late founding leader and “eternal president” Kim Il-sung (1912-1994).

Thousands of soldiers, military vehicles and, most notably, various ballistic missiles were paraded for the inspection of current supreme leader Kim Jong-Un (Kim Il-sung’s grandson).

But it wasn’t the parade that signalled North Korea’s belligerence; numerous other countries hold military parades to mark some significant occasion or another.

Instead, what was clearly aggressive was the presentation of a mock-up video of the country’s ballistic missiles destroying an American city during a national musical performance.

This video is the most visceral expression yet of Pyongyang’s intentions. Its telecast was likely timed to coincide with the expected arrival of the US Navy’s aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, and its accompanying fleet of warships in Korean waters.

Inching closer

On April 8, US President Donald Trump and other American officials told the media that the Carl Vinson had been ordered to make its way towards the Korean peninsula. The likely plan was to demonstrate American resolve in managing the crisis that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has created.

Subsequent revelations that the warship was actually heading south for exercises with the Australian Navy at the time showed a series of blunders in internal communication. But the fact that the Carl Vinson has arrived off Korean waters two weeks later does not change the prospect of a military conflict between North Korea and the United States.

The key question is whether North Korea does have nuclear weapons that it can readily use against the United States and its regional allies, South Korea and Japan. It’s still unlikely North Korea has the current capability to launch a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile that can destroy an American city.

North Korea’s scientists have yet to master the technology to build missiles that can traverse this distance and to construct warheads that can survive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere after space flight.

But years of testing has allowed North Korea to inch closer to getting right the extremely demanding science of building and launching viable intercontinental nuclear weapons. And this is why the United States is against further testing, to the point that the Trump administration seems serious about justifying pre-emptive strikes on the basis of further nuclear and missile tests.

What is of immediate concern is that previous tests have led to North Korea being able to achieve the relatively easier requirements of building workable medium-range ballistic missiles, with small enough warheads, to strike American bases in South Korea and Japan. These have about 80,000 US military personnel in total.

Approaching catastrophe

North Korea may already have as many 20 nuclear warheads that are small enough to be carried on its Nodong (or Rodong-1) medium-range missiles that can reach these bases. And the Trump administration seems to not want to risk the lives of American soldiers by assuming that North Korea doesn’t already have this nuclear capability.

The cost of that mistake would be the lives of not just 80,000 American military personnel but also countless South Korean and Japanese lives as well. In fact, a North Korean nuclear attack, which will likely develop into war, can be expected to create a humanitarian, environmental and economic catastrophe that will set back the international community.

This is what’s immediately at stake for everyone. And it explains why the United States is putting pressure on China, as an ally of North Korea, to influence it to stop its nuclear weapons program.

But if China and other countries fail to stop North Korea building nuclear weapons, the United States will feel pressured to use military force to destroy whatever nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles sites it can locate by satellite surveillance.

The decision to divert the Carl Vinson to waters near the Korean peninsula may also be driven by new intelligence on North Korea’s nuclear threat. The challenge is that sending an American naval armada towards North Korea risks triggering the very nuclear attack against US bases that the Trump administration is trying to avoid in the first place.

This could explain why the administration said it was sending its naval vessels two weeks ago when it really did so later. It may have been to test North Korea’s attitude without escalating the situation by the actual presence of American naval forces that could trigger military action by Kim Jong-Un’s regime.

A worrying stand-off

Why would North Korea want to use nuclear weapons against American bases in Northeast Asia in the first place? It is helpful to remember that, technically, North and South Korea have been at war since 1950 (the Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than peace). And that the United States has chosen to provide military assistance to the South to help protect it from any aggression by the North.

North Korea may have a very large army of about one million soldiers. South Korea effectively has half that number. Although the majority of South Korea’s able-bodied male citizens may contribute to a military reserve of a few million soldiers, mobilising them in time to respond to a conflict is another question and their role is often excluded from analyses.

As such, the American military personnel and the superior equipment, aircraft and ships that they operate provide the South with a better chance of avoiding defeat should war break out.

Pyongyang’s intention in using nuclear weapons would be to destroy these American bases to remove the advantage they give to South Korea’s national defence. This is why the threat of nuclear use, especially by a more brazen regime under Kim Jong-Un, needs to be taken very seriously.

Such is the current quagmire as the world waits to see how the geopolitics of the Korean peninsula will unfold over the next few months. And as strategists and policymakers scramble to find other approaches for halting North Korea’s growing nuclear threat.

Graham Ong-Webb, Research Fellow, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University

Facebook’s new anti-fake news strategy is not going to work – but something else might

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Have you seen some “tips to spot fake news” on your Facebook newsfeed recently?

Over the past year, the social media company has been scrutinized for influencing the US presidential election by spreading fake news (propoganda). Obviously, the ability to spread completely made-up stories about politicians trafficking child sex slaves and imaginary terrorist attacks with impunity is bad for democracy and society.

Something had to be done.

Enter Facebook’s new, depressingly incompetent strategy for tackling fake news. The strategy has three, frustratingly ill-considered parts.

New products

The first part of the plan is to build new products to curb the spread of fake news stories. Facebook says it’s trying “to make it easier to report a false news story” and find signs of fake news such as “if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it.”

It will then send the story to independent fact checkers. If fake, the story “will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to a corresponding article explaining why.”

This sounds pretty good, but it won’t work.

If non-experts could tell the difference between real news and fake news (which is doubtful), there would be no fake news problem to begin with.

What’s more, Facebook says: “We cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves — it’s not feasible given our scale, and it’s not our role.” Nonsense.

Facebook is like a megaphone. Normally, if someone says something horrible into the megaphone, it’s not the megaphone company’s fault. But Facebook is a very special kind of megaphone that listens first and then changes the volume.

The company’s algorithms largely determine both the content and order of your newsfeed. So if Facebook’s algorithms spread some neo-Nazi hate speech far and wide, yes, it is the company’s fault.

Worse yet, even if Facebook accurately labels fake news as contested, it will still affect public discourse through “availability cascades.”

Each time you see the same message repeated from (apparently) different sources, the message seems more believable and reasonable. Bold lies are extremely powerful because repeatedly fact-checking them can actually make people remember them as true.

These effects are exceptionally robust; they cannot be fixed with weak interventions such as public service announcements, which brings us to the second part of Facebook’s strategy: helping people make more informed decisions when they encounter false news.

Helping you help yourself

Facebook is releasing public service announcements and funding the “news integrity initiative” to help “people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online”.

This – also – doesn’t work.

A vast body of research in cognitive psychology concerns correcting systematic errors in reasoning such as failing to perceive propaganda and bias. We have known since the 1980s that simply warning people about their biased perceptions doesn’t work.

Similarly, funding a “news integrity” project sounds great until you realise the company is really talking about critical thinking skills.

Improving critical thinking skills is a key aim of primary, secondary and tertiary education. If four years of university barely improves these skills in students, what will this initiative do? Make some Youtube videos? A fake news FAQ?

Funding a few research projects and “meetings with industry experts” doesn’t stand a chance to change anything.

Disrupting economic incentives

The third prong of this non-strategy is cracking down on spammers and fake accounts, and making it harder for them to buy advertisements. While this is a good idea, it’s based on the false premise that most fake news comes from shady con artists rather than major news outlets.

You see, “fake news” is Orwellian newspeak — carefully crafted to mean a totally fabricated story from a fringe outlet masquerading as news for financial or political gain. But these stories are the most suspicious and therefore the least worrisome. Bias and lies from public figures, official reports and mainstream news are far more insidious.

And what about astrology, homeopathy, psychics, anti-vaccination messages, climate change denial, intelligent design, miracles, and all the rest of the irrational nonsense bandied about online? What about the vast array of deceptive marketing and stealth advertising that is core to Facebook’s business model?

As of this writing, Facebook doesn’t even have an option to report misleading advertisements.

What is Facebook to do?

Facebook’s strategy is vacuous, evanescent, lip service; a public relations exercise that makes no substantive attempt to address a serious problem.

But the problem is not unassailable. The key to reducing inaccurate perceptions is to redesign technologies to encourage more accurate perception. Facebook can do this by developing a propaganda filter — something like a spam filter for lies.

Facebook may object to becoming an “arbiter of truth”. But coming from a company that censors historic photos and comedians calling for social justice, this sounds disingenuous.

Nonetheless, Facebook has a point. To avoid accusations of bias, it should not create the propaganda filter itself. It should simply fund researchers in artificial intelligence, software engineering, journalism and design to develop an open-source propaganda filter that anyone can use.

Why should Facebook pay? Because it profits from spreading propaganda, that’s why.

Sure, people will try to game the filter, but it will still work. Spam is frequently riddled with typos, grammatical errors and circumlocution not only because it’s often written by non-native English speakers but also because the weird writing is necessary to bypass spam filters.

If the propaganda filter has a similar effect, weird writing will make the fake news that slips through more obvious. Better yet, an effective propaganda filter would actively encourage journalistic best practices such as citing primary sources.

Developing a such a tool won’t be easy. It could take years and several million dollars to refine. But Facebook made over US$8 billion last quarter, so Mark Zuckerberg can surely afford it.

Paul Ralph, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Auckland

Misinformation on social media: Can technology save us?

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If you get your news from social media, as most Americans do, you are exposed to a daily dose of hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories and misleading news. When it’s all mixed in with reliable information from honest sources, the truth can be very hard to discern.

In fact, my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information.

Many are asking whether this onslaught of digital misinformation affected the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election. The truth is we do not know, although there are reasons to believe it is entirely possible, based on past analysis and accounts from other countries. Each piece of misinformation contributes to the shaping of our opinions. Overall, the harm can be very real: If people can be conned into jeopardizing our children’s lives, as they do when they opt out of immunizations, why not our democracy?

As a researcher on the spread of misinformation through social media, I know that limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads, as recently announced by Google and Facebook, is a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives.

Exploiting social media

About 10 years ago, my colleagues and I ran an experiment in which we learned 72 percent of college students trusted links that appeared to originate from friends – even to the point of entering personal login information on phishing sites. This widespread vulnerability suggested another form of malicious manipulation: People might also believe misinformation they receive when clicking on a link from a social contact.

To explore that idea, I created a fake web page with random, computer-generated gossip news – things like “Celebrity X caught in bed with Celebrity Y!” Visitors to the site who searched for a name would trigger the script to automatically fabricate a story about the person. I included on the site a disclaimer, saying the site contained meaningless text and made-up “facts.” I also placed ads on the page. At the end of the month, I got a check in the mail with earnings from the ads. That was my proof: Fake news could make money by polluting the internet with falsehoods.

Sadly, I was not the only one with this idea. Ten years later, we have an industry of fake news and digital misinformation. Clickbait sites manufacture hoaxes to make money from ads, while so-called hyperpartisan sites publish and spread rumors and conspiracy theories to influence public opinion.

This industry is bolstered by how easy it is to create social bots, fake accounts controlled by software that look like real people and therefore can have real influence. Research in my lab uncovered many examples of fake grassroots campaigns, also called political astroturfing.

In response, we developed the BotOrNot tool to detect social bots. It’s not perfect, but accurate enough to uncover persuasion campaigns in the Brexit and antivax movements. Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found that a large portion of online chatter about the 2016 elections was generated by bots.

In this visualization of the spread of the #SB277 hashtag about a California vaccination law, dots are Twitter accounts posting using that hashtag, and lines between them show retweeting of hashtagged posts. Larger dots are accounts that are retweeted more. Red dots are likely bots; blue ones are likely humans.
Onur Varol, CC BY-ND

Creating information bubbles

We humans are vulnerable to manipulation by digital misinformation thanks to a complex set of social, cognitive, economic and algorithmic biases. Some of these have evolved for good reasons: Trusting signals from our social circles and rejecting information that contradicts our experience served us well when our species adapted to evade predators. But in today’s shrinking online networks, a social network connection with a conspiracy theorist on the other side of the planet does not help inform my opinions.

Copying our friends and unfollowing those with different opinions give us echo chambers so polarized that researchers can tell with high accuracy whether you are liberal or conservative by just looking at your friends. The network structure is so dense that any misinformation spreads almost instantaneously within one group, and so segregated that it does not reach the other.

Inside our bubble, we are selectively exposed to information aligned with our beliefs. That is an ideal scenario to maximize engagement, but a detrimental one for developing healthy skepticism. Confirmation bias leads us to share a headline without even reading the article.

Our lab got a personal lesson in this when our own research project became the subject of a vicious misinformation campaign in the run-up to the 2014 U.S. midterm elections. When we investigated what was happening, we found fake news stories about our research being predominantly shared by Twitter users within one partisan echo chamber, a large and homogeneous community of politically active users. These people were quick to retweet and impervious to debunking information.

In this graph of echo chambers in the Twittersphere, purple dots represent people spreading false claims about the Truthy research project; the two accounts that sought to debunk the false information are in orange on the far left.
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, CC BY-ND

Viral inevitability

Our research shows that given the structure of our social networks and our limited attention, it is inevitable that some memes will go viral, irrespective of their quality. Even if individuals tend to share information of higher quality, the network as a whole is not effective at discriminating between reliable and fabricated information. This helps explain all the viral hoaxes we observe in the wild.

The attention economy takes care of the rest: If we pay attention to a certain topic, more information on that topic will be produced. It’s cheaper to fabricate information and pass it off as fact than it is to report actual truth. And fabrication can be tailored to each group: Conservatives read that the pope endorsed Trump, liberals read that he endorsed Clinton. He did neither.

Beholden to algorithms

Since we cannot pay attention to all the posts in our feeds, algorithms determine what we see and what we don’t. The algorithms used by social media platforms today are designed to prioritize engaging posts – ones we’re likely to click on, react to and share. But a recent analysis found intentionally misleading pages got at least as much online sharing and reaction as real news.

This algorithmic bias toward engagement over truth reinforces our social and cognitive biases. As a result, when we follow links shared on social media, we tend to visit a smaller, more homogeneous set of sources than when we conduct a search and visit the top results.

Existing research shows that being in an echo chamber can make people more gullible about accepting unverified rumors. But we need to know a lot more about how different people respond to a single hoax: Some share it right away, others fact-check it first.

We are simulating a social network to study this competition between sharing and fact-checking. We are hoping to help untangle conflicting evidence about when fact-checking helps stop hoaxes from spreading and when it doesn’t. Our preliminary results suggest that the more segregated the community of hoax believers, the longer the hoax survives. Again, it’s not just about the hoax itself but also about the network.

Many people are trying to figure out what to do about all this. According to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest announcement, Facebook teams are testing potential options. And a group of college students has proposed a way to simply label shared links as “verified” or not.

Some solutions remain out of reach, at least for the moment. For example, we can’t yet teach artificial intelligence systems how to discern between truth and falsehood. But we can tell ranking algorithms to give higher priority to more reliable sources.

Studying the spread of fake news

We can make our fight against fake news more efficient if we better understand how bad information spreads. If, for example, bots are responsible for many of the falsehoods, we can focus attention on detecting them. If, alternatively, the problem is with echo chambers, perhaps we could design recommendation systems that don’t exclude differing views.

To that end, our lab is building a platform called Hoaxy to track and visualize the spread of unverified claims and corresponding fact-checking on social media. That will give us real-world data, with which we can inform our simulated social networks. Then we can test possible approaches to fighting fake news.

Hoaxy may also be able to show people how easy it is for their opinions to be manipulated by online information – and even how likely some of us are to share falsehoods online. Hoaxy will join a suite of tools in our Observatory on Social Media, which allows anyone to see how memes spread on Twitter. Linking tools like these to human fact-checkers and social media platforms could make it easier to minimize duplication of efforts and support each other.

It is imperative that we invest resources in the study of this phenomenon. We need all hands on deck: Computer scientists, social scientists, economists, journalists and industry partners must work together to stand firm against the spread of misinformation.

Filippo Menczer, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics; Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Indiana University, Bloomington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Royal Bank of Scotland Shuts Down RT News’ Bank Account

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Popular news outlet Russia Today, funded by the Russian Federation, was sent a letter from the Royal Bank of Scotland to close their account

Apparently, the Royal Bank of Scotland does not like Russia Today.

Their subsidiary, NatWest bank, through which popular Russian funded news website Russia Today does their banking, sent Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, a letter today saying they were no longer interested in doing business with RT. Simonyan broke the news earlier today through her twitter account, and RT gave a more thorough explanation soon afterwards. Simonyan also shared excerpts from related letters through her facebook account showing solidarity from Steven Hedley, Senior Assistant Secretary General of the Trade Union of Transport Workers (RMT) regarding the brash decision of the bank.

Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris, John Laughland told RT reporters that the British government owns 75% of the Royal Bank of Scotland and feels there is obvious political inspiration behind the move.

“My suspicion is that it’s part of a coordinated and Europe-wide policy of harassment against organizations that are associated with Russia. We must understand this policy of harassment and hostility within the context of the decision taken about six months ago at a European Union summit, at which it was decided on the EU-level to combat ‘Russian propaganda and disinformation’ as it’s being called. The EU has even established a special unit specifically designed to combat so-called Russian disinformation and, particularly RT, which more than any other news outlet has irritated people in the West because it has a very muscular editorial policy..”

Boris Johnson, the United Kingdom’s new Foreign Secretary, was heard speaking to a Tory Party conference with words along the lines that, although Britain was leaving the EU, it “wouldn’t abandon being in the forefront of sanctions against Russia.”

A copy of the NatWest letter found on RT’s site is below:

Нам закрыли счета в Британии. Все счета. 'Решение пересмотру не подлежит'. Да здравствует свобода слова!

— Маргарита Симоньян (@M_Simonyan) October 17, 2016

UK move on RT 'part of EU policy of harassment against Russia-linked organizations' (Op-Edge) https://t.co/Zq6MpPXvdz

— RT (@RT_com) October 17, 2016

Common Confusion About Voter Fraud vs. Election Fraud Helps Rigged Elections To Continue

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If you look up election fraud in any search engine, you’ll see numerous articles from mainstream media regarding voter fraud instead, making it difficult for the general public to understand the difference.

Election rigging, as I’ve stated in a previous article, is as old as democracy itself. Today, a major part of the problem with discussing the issue is the confusion the general public in the distinction between voter fraud and election fraud, and the mainstream media really doesn’t help.

From the New York Times to Politico to even PBS, the first results you see in Google for “election fraud” related queries are all from mainstream news sources referring primarily to “voter fraud” in the current 2016 presidential election and how it’s “rare” — and I’m inclined to agree. That’s because voter fraud isn’t primarily how the elections are being rigged. And the reason why it happens so rarely is because it’s easy to catch, so people don’t do it. But before we get into this in depth, let’s first go over the difference between voter fraud and election fraud.

The distinction is easily missed because voter fraud is a type of election fraud. Election fraud encompasses quite a few acts of election rigging. For example, voter suppression can be election fraud, such as the case of the 120,000 voters mysteriously purged from Brooklyn, NY this year, to which the New York Board of Elections said was “an accident”. Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the Board of Elections’ chief clerk, was suspended without pay for the supposed mishap, but the voters who couldn’t vote were not satisfied because it was such an obvious disenfranchisement stunt that it really should have been investigated as election fraud. Another form of voter suppression that caused disenfranchisement within the Democratic party this year was switching people’s party affiliation to independent or republican, some cases even involving forged signatures on the registration application. Again, this is a form of election fraud, but is not voter fraud, yet mainstream news continues to use the terms interchangeably.

Voter fraud is when votes are faked. An example would be, as Fox News’ Eric Shawn pointed out, absentee ballots being filled out by the same person on behalf of multiple people. In Shawn’s report, he actually spoke to people whose votes had been robbed and they explained on camera that it’s not their handwriting and that they did not fill out the ballots — this isn’t voter fraud, it’s . He also reported on vote bribery and unauthorized proxy voting. (see video below)

The most shocking form of election fraud also is not voter fraud: voting software that is rigged for a predetermined winner, otherwise known as electronic election fraud. And it’s become a major method of rigging both primaries and general elections.

In my interview with Ohio election fraud lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, he explained that there was a 25-33% difference between the exit polls and the machine totals. To make matters worse, the data that he and Bob Fitrakis, another lawyer from Ohio, had requested from the exit poll takers hasn’t yet been delivered. With only a couple months left before the general election, it’ll be surprising if their RICO lawsuit actually comes through in time.

What’s worse, however, is the latest anti-trump campaign that we’ve seen from Democrats all the way through the White House, with President Obama stating that election rigging is a conspiracy theory, an obvious attempt to discredit Trump as a kook. The fact that there’s a 100-page report proving all the forms of election fraud that happened this primary season shows that even the POTUS will lie to the press on behalf of his party, ultimately becoming a propagandist himself. This was in retaliation for Trump’s statements made recently that Democrats would exploit “weak identification laws” in order to rig the general election for Hillary Clinton. This may actually be true, considering all the evidence we have of a rigged primary, but it isn’t even the real issue we should be talking about, which is electronic election fraud.

I used to have a love/hate relationship with the mainstream media’s coverage of election fraud, but it’s recently turned to only hate. The Washington Post, for example, can give us an important piece about election fraud that is well written — that’s only 150 words long. Really, guys? A RICO lawsuit in the works regarding electronic election fraud and you can only come up with 150 words about it? They then bury it deep within the site, don’t promote the article, and focus more energy on writing articles about how voter fraud rarely happens and Trump needs to shut up about it. It also doesn’t promote an article like the one I’m writing here today to help readers understand the difference between the terms. I’m not even sure the outlet knows or cares, and what we’re left with is a fundamental lack of understanding that while voter fraud itself is rare, election fraud is running rampant and has been for quite some time. Our elections, based on the evidence we have since the 2000 Presidential Election, are getting increasingly worse in terms of election fraud.

Perhaps the worst aspect about this confusion is the fact that people keep saying election fraud doesn’t happen and then point to studies proving voter fraud is rare. This fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between election fraud and voter fraud is what continues the propaganda we hear from the Democratic party, who pushes for lax laws regarding voter identification at every turn. Lax laws, they argue, are to reduce racist voter suppression, but for some odd reason they never seem to want to talk about all the other forms of election fraud for which there is so much evidence of. At the end of the day, both the Republican and Democratic parties seem to engage in extremely dirty, dishonest politics in order to win, win, win, and all it does is allow criminals to become decision makers on behalf of the rest of us.

Zachary Paul
Zachary Paul is an independent investigative journalist living in New York City.

Media Conducts Major ‘Booed’ Smear Campaign Against Bernie Sanders

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Despite there being no actual sources, an array of mainstream media falsely reported that House Democrats ‘booed’ Bernie Sanders in a close-door meeting the other day.

Once again, a massive smear against Bernie Sanders has occurred in the mainstream political news with no actual citation for the claim that presidential hopeful was ‘booed’ at a House Democrat meeting in Washington.

CNN reported “roughly a dozen members booed him inside the room” according to “three Democrats who attended the meeting”, yet doesn’t name who reported this.

They go on to say that House Democrats, Rep Steny Hoyer told reporters he was sitting in the front row during the meeting with Sanders and didn’t hear anyone booing, and that Rep Gerry Connolly tweeted “Bernie was respectfully received by Caucus. Some disagreements, yes, but a friendly venue” and “Sanders was reflective and thoughtful in responses. Expressions of disagreement are NOT booing.”

Despite this, other “news” outlets are also spreading the lie.

Politico wrote, “Some Democrats booed Sanders” while not reporting who or how many.

The L.A. Times said “boos erupted” despite having no sources for this claim.

The Washington Post also claimed booing without any sources.

When using simple critical thinking skills, one can easily deduce that no booing actually occurred since nobody is saying who did the booing and nobody is giving their name to the press besides two people who said there was no booing. (Three, if you count Sanders himself).

WATCH: Here’s What Bernie Really Said On MSNBC This Morning

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Once again, MSNBC pretends that Bernie Sanders is done with his campaign, twisting what he said out of context in order to spread disinformation and urge him to concede (Hint: he’s not conceding before July 25th).

If you didn’t think a “reputable” news source like MSNBC could stoop to the level of Fox News this year, you’re naive.

This entire presidential election season has been riddled with a media blackout against Bernie Sanders of unprecedented proportion, blowing the minds of millennials and re-igniting the call to revolution by Baby Boomers and Generation Xers who believe in his message that crony capitalism and an eroding middle class has got to stop. Between ridiculously large super PACs and a hidden agenda predetermined since at least early 2015, when superdelegates were polled to the tune of almost 100% of them pledging for Hillary Clinton before the race even started, it’s obvious that the mainstream media has been bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign.

That’s why, when asked if he would vote for Hillary Clinton in November to defeat Trump and Bernie Sanders gave a hypothetical “yes” to the newscasters at MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, I was not shocked to see the channel immediately post “BREAKING NEWS — SANDERS: ‘YES’ I’LL VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON” at the bottom of the screen. This is the sort of sound bite they’ve been foaming at the mouth for since long before the California primary and, in their minds, they finally got it.

What did he actually say? In the video below, you can see he was clearly talking about voting for her to beat Donald Trump, not because he wants her as president. He clearly goes on to explain his stance in detail, even saying,

“My job is to fight for the strongest possible platform in the Democratic convention and, as we speak, in St. Louis that is going on right now. And that means a platform that represents working people, that stands up to Big Money interests. I don’t want to parse words. What I am trying to do right now is to make sure that the Democratic Party becomes a party that represents working people, not Wall Street, that is prepared to have an agenda speaks to the need of creating millions of jobs, raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, dealing with climate change, dealing with pay equity.”

And even after saying this, they STILL pressured him for an answer to whether or not he would be officially conceding. He answered in his well-recognized firm and asserted political stance with,

“Why would I want to do that when I want to fight to make sure we have the best platform that we possibly can, that we win the most delegates that we can. The goal of our campaign was to transform this nation.”

The sad part is that any loyal fans of the news station tuning in without their volume up wouldn’t have heard Sanders go on to explain how, right now, the importance should be on turning the Democratic Party in a party that actually represents the people.

What’s worse is that the newscasters asked if he thought the “disunity” within the party would put Hillary at a disadvantage against Donald Trump in the general election. The REAL ISSUE here is within the Senator’s answer to the question, an issue they really don’t seem to care much about,

“You talk about ‘disunity’, I’m talking about involving the American people in the political process and wanting to have a government and a party that represents all of us. When you have disunity, what we’re talking about is kids can’t afford to go to college, or leaving college $50,000 in debt, people dying because they don’t get to a doctor when they should. Talk about disunity is the fact that we have 47 million people living in poverty.”

WATCH: Get the context for Bernie’s conversation about fixing the DNC, restoring the middle class, and the negative effects of corporate globalization in the video below:

The newscasters have a hard time moving on from Bernie’s answer, and that’s because they don’t want to talk about what he’s talking about. All they care about is ratings, and that’s because they make more money than the average working class American. This attitude from the mainstream media makes Bernie’s very presence only that much more defiant and strengthens his platform. They are giving him a medium in which to reach a very large audience, something they’ve barely done over the course of the 2016 primary season.

Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.

The Great Bernie Blackout: How To Turn It Around

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“Yes, we get it, the mainstream news isn’t covering Bernie Sanders enough, Ok, moving on,” Bill Maher quipped at journalist Amy Goodman on his show Real Time a couple weeks ago. I was floored. Here was one of the left’s biggest allies, co-founder of Democracy Now!, a long-running news program a fighter of the good fight, specifically brought on to the show for her liberal point of view regarding democracy, and she was basically told to “shut up” by Maher, a supposed liberal and Bernie-supporter himself. Needless to say, I had a tough time swallowing the rest of the show, and Goodman herself barely made a peep for the duration of the program after that.

Merely a few days later, Rachel Maddow decided to rant about how fantastical (“Not to be confused with fantastic,” she said) a Bernie primary win would be, saying his assertion that a contested convention would never happen in reality. If you’re a Bernie supporter, you’ve most likely done the math a dozen times yourself and know that she’s wrong. What’s worse, Maddow compared Obama’s 4% lead at the end of the 2008 primary to Hillary’s current 11% lead and used that obviously wrong comparison (the race isn’t over) to somehow prove that Sanders has no chance. That’s when I realized this wasn’t a liberal issue at all but a class issue.

Rachel Maddow’s rumored annual salary from MSNBC is $7 million dollars a year. Bill Maher’s rumored net worth is around $30 million, so his HBO salary is most likely around the same as Maddow’s. With all that money, you’d think they wouldn’t need to worry about their financial future, but the fact is most rich people only want more. So, for a guy like Bernie Sanders to come along and tell them their taxes are going to skyrocket (to about 45% in federal taxes alone for people in their income bracket), it makes sense that they, too, would not be psyched about him becoming president.

Another liberal talking head, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, generally stays away from the real issues in his monologues altogether, instead focusing on what the mainstream media is saying is an issue (like Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump) and only gives a fraction of his time to Bernie. And with Jon Stewart virtually non-existent, it begs the question…. is ANYONE in the mainstream media on Bernie’s side?

The short answer is: probably not.

That’s why it’s absolutely crucial, for the good of the American psyche, for all of us to turn off the mainstream media and tune-in to smaller media groups like RT America, The Young Turks, Democracy Now! and others. If there’s one thing I learned about business in my 40 years on the Earth, it’s that boycotting works. If you are running a business and nobody wants to buy your product, you don’t have a business.

The problem is that America has an addiction to the mainstream. We were brought up on it and it’s embedded into our technology, especially our phones. If you don’t like Google, for example, you can’t escape it. And it’s so convenient to get your news from Google News, why use an alternative? At least that’s what so many of us think.

What’s even worse is that the amount of money and resources the media conglomerates have makes it easy for them to cover stories that the smaller groups can’t. But this is even more of a reason for people to become the media and produce their own investigative reports. If you have a degree in journalism but can’t get a job as a journalist, then you should be blogging. It’s a disservice to us all if you aren’t.

With enough independent media groups working together, we can overcome our addiction to the mainstream and force them to change with the tide. And that tide is just starting to come in….