Eleven Minutes of Media Falsehoods, Just On One Subject, Just On One Station - MATT ORFALEA AND MATT TAIBBI

[Geee]

Racket

The plan was a comprehensive count. With a sizable team of smart temporary hires, each looking into a different area of the #TwitterFiles, we thought counting all the mainstream news stories that would need retracting or correcting in light of information found in Twitter documents would make for an easy little sidebar, something simple for the public to digest.

The idea seemed easy. We would take a Twitter doc raising questions about a news story and write a suggested note for the story’s editor. In a lot of cases it wasn’t clear the piece was wrong exactly, but that new information might require a call or two to clear up a quote, add an update about a source, correct a fact or two, etc.

In the Files there were around a few dozen discrete incidents in which Twitter had concerns internally, and where the public might want to know what those were. The “Hamilton 68” fiasco, in which a think-tank called the Alliance for Securing Democracy purported to track 600 Twitter accounts linked to “Russian influence activities” but turned out to mostly be following ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British, was an example of a relatively easy fix for an editor. If you used the Hamilton “dashboard” of accounts as a source for a story about “Russian bots,” you probably needed either to retract altogether, or add a note saying the Russian-ness and bot-ness of those accounts has since been called into question.

In a few cases, news organizations have already added editor’s notes as threads were released — we should commend Mother Jones for adding such updates to many of their articles which referenced Hamilton — which gave cause for optimism. Maybe we could convince other reporters and editors to make the corrections ahead of time. How big of a job could that be?

[Valin]

@Geee

More Here

Substack has become a Go To site for me. Substack/Unheard remind  me of when I could get The Atlantic/The New Yorker and know there was a Real Good chance I was going to see something Interesting something I didn't know. That was then, this is now.

[Geee]

1 hour ago, Valin said:

Substack has become a Go To site for me

I have posted quite a few articles from Substack here. They have some good articles that are not the daily same old same old.

[Valin]

32 minutes ago, Geee said:

I have posted quite a few articles from Substack here. They have some good articles that are not the daily same old same old.

Well Said

Wet I  retired I was going to spend the day listening to Talk Radio, to get The Real News.  What I realized  was it  was All The Same. The only one who is different is Dennis Prager, because he doesn't deal with The  News of the day. I still wake up to Hugh Hewitt, but there are days  just shut it  off.

[Valin]

2 hours ago, Valin said:

@Geee

More Here

Substack has become a Go To site for me. Substack/Unheard remind  me of when I could get The Atlantic/The New Yorker and know there was a Real Good chance I was going to see something Interesting something I didn't know. That was then, this is now.

Today, This is what we are talking about

Sports Betting Is the ‘New Oxycontin’[

The online gambling industry is profiting off addiction ‘the same way the Sackler family profited off of opioids.’ Only this time the pushers include state governments.

Eric Spitznagel

April 27, 2023

Brian misses the old days of gambling, when it was still illegal and the worst that could happen was some goon might have your legs broken.

That was five years ago.

The 27-year-old network engineer from Queens, New York—he declined to share his last name out of fear of losing his job—would bet a few grand every week. A little poker. Maybe the casinos. Usually, it was the NBA or Major League Baseball. He’d win, he’d lose. The most he ever owed was $30,000 to a loan shark with ties to a Chinese crime syndicate. “He definitely wasn’t somebody you wanted to owe money to,” Brian told me. They hashed out a payment plan so Brian could keep betting—with the understanding that a late payment might land him in a cast.

All that seems quaint compared to the new era of legal sports betting. No longer does one require an under-the-table bookie to place a bet. Now, you can lose staggering amounts of money just by downloading an app.

“A few weeks ago, I was out with friends at a restaurant, and while they were telling stories, I was staring at my lap and betting on my phone,” Brian messaged me. (I’d found him the same way I found other gambling addicts, on Reddit, which offers a forum for problem gamblers.) 

The ease with which gamblers can place bets means they’re wagering a lot more than they used to. “I was 300k in debt not too long ago,” he said. “I was up 200k just last month but I lost it all and now I’m over 100k in debt again.”

(Snip)

He seemed to have a hard time making sense of how he had lost control of everything way back when. He sounded almost bored with sports.

He recalled the first time he placed a bet. He was watching a basketball game with friends, and someone asked him if he thought the score would be over or under 115.5 at halftime. He didn’t know what that meant. (It means the combined scores of both teams divided by two.) “I did some quick math in my head,” Brian said, “picked over, and won $1,000 in about fifteen minutes.” 

He didn’t really care about the money, either. The excitement came from outsmarting the system—or, at least, believing he had. “I won $112,000 just last month, and there was nothing I wanted to buy,” he said. “It was just a number, like a video game.”

 

[Valin]

10 hours ago, Geee said:

I have posted quite a few articles from Substack here. They have some good articles that are not the daily same old same old.

 

10 hours ago, Valin said:

Well Said

Wet I  retired I was going to spend the day listening to Talk Radio, to get The Real News.  What I realized  was it  was All The Same. The only one who is different is Dennis Prager, because he doesn't deal with The  News of the day. I still wake up to Hugh Hewitt, but there are days  just shut it  off.

 

Why Ii listen to Hugh.