Minutus

A short eye-opener of a video:

Roger Bird

Dear Roger

I want to thank you for this.

Soroush
From: minutus@yahoogroups.com [mailto:minutus@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: 25 June 2015 06:22
To: minutus@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Minutus] Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
A short eye-opener of a video:

Roger Bird

I rarely watch YouTube videos (even TED ones); they strike me as an inefficient way to obtain information. But I watched this and thought it so valuable that I transcribed the meatiest parts of it for anybody's use; see below. The parts I didn't transcribe were equally interesting, and largely concerned a hypothetical drug and how its manufacturers convey the impression of an overwhelming scientific consensus in its favour that in reality doesn't exist.
I hope some readers may find these excerpts useful. The speaker is CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson.
John

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Astroturfers seek to controversialise those who disagree with them. They attack news organisations that publish stories they don't like; whistleblowers who tell the truth; politicians who dare to ask the tough questions; and journalists who have the audacity to report on all of it. Sometimes astroturfers simply shove, intentionally, so much confusing and conflicting information into the mix that you're left to throw up your hands and disregard all of it, including the truth. Drown out a link between a medicine and a harmful side-effect — say, vaccines and autism — by throwing a bunch of conflicting, paid-for studies, surveys, and experts into the mix, confusing the truth beyond recognition.
And then there's Wikipedia: astroturf's dream come true. Billed as the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, the reality can't be more different. Anonymous Wikipedia editors control and coopt pages on behalf of special interests. They forbid and reverse edits that go against their agenda. They skew and delete information, in blatant violation of Wikipedia's own established policies, with impunity — always superior to the poor schlepps who actually believe anyone could edit Wikipedia, only to discover they're barred from correcting even the simplest factual inaccuracies. Try adding a footnoted fact, or correcting a fact error on one of these monitored Wikipedia pages, and -- poof! -- sometimes within a matter of seconds, you'll find your edit is reversed.
In 2012, famed author Philip Roth tried to correct a major fact error about the inspiration behind one of his book characters, cited on a Wikipedia page. But, no matter how hard he tried, Wikipedia's editors wouldn't allow it. They kept reverting the edits back to the false information. When Roth finally reached a person in Wikipedia, which was no easy task, and tried to find out what was going wrong, they told him he simply was not considered a credible source on himself.
A few weeks later, there was a huge scandal, when Wikipedia officials got caught offering a P.R. service to skew and edit information on behalf of paid [sic] publicity-seeking clients, in utter opposition to Wikipedia's supposed policies.
All of this may be why, when a medical study looked at medical conditions described in Wikipedia pages and compared it to actual peer-reviewed published research, Wikipedia contradicted medical research 90% of the time. You may never fully trust what you read on Wikipedia again; nor should you.
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Couple of things struck me about that. First, I recognised the phrase "Ask your doctor" as a catchphrase promoted by the pharmaceutical industry. They know that if they can get your foot through the door of the doctor's office to mention a malady, you're very likely to be prescribed the latest drug that's marketed. Second, I wondered how serious an epidemic of sleeplessness could really be if we don't even know that we have it.
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I reported the study as CBS News asked, but of course I disclosed the sponsorship behind the non-profit and the survey so that viewers could weigh the information accordingly. All the other news media reported the same survey directly off the press release, as written, without digging past the superficial. It later became an example written up in the Columbia Journalism Review, which quite accurately reported that only we at CBS News had bothered to do a little bit of research and disclose the conflict of interest behind this widely reported survey.
So now you may be thinking: "What can I do? I thought I'd done my research. What chance do I have separating fact from fiction, especially if seasoned journalists with years of experience can be so easily fooled?".
Well, I have a few strategies that I can tell you about, to help you recognise signs of propaganda and astroturf. Once you start to know what to look for, you'll begin to recognise it everywhere.
First, hallmarks of astroturf include use of inflammatory language, such as "crank", "quack", "nutty", "lies", "paranoid", "pseudo", and "conspiracy". Astroturfers often claim to "debunk myths" that aren't myths at all. Use of the charged language tests well. People hear something's a myth -- maybe they find it on Snopes -- and they instantly declare themselves too smart to fall for it. But what if the whole notion of the myth is itself a myth, and you and Snopes fell for that?
Beware when interests attack an issue by controversialising or attacking the people, personalities, and organisations surrounding it rather than addressing the facts; that could be astroturf.
And, most of all, astroturfers tend to reserve all of their public skepticism for those exposing wrongdoing rather than the wrongdoers. In other words, instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority.
… I hope that I've given you some information that will at least motivate you to take off your glasses and wipe them and become a wiser consumer of information in an increasingly artificial paid-for reality.
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"Sometimes astroturfers simply shove, intentionally, so much confusing and conflicting information into the mix that you're left to throw up your hands and disregard all of it, including the truth."

This is one of the problems with so-called evidence based medicine. I personally solved this problem for myself by simply abandoning evidence based medicine for paleo thinking or functional medicine or looking at the vital force or prana of a particular food. Occasionally I will look at so-called scientific evidence, but only to fine tune my more intuitive observations/assumptions.

According to some evidence based studies, free range eggs are bad for me. But I can't stop wondering how a cute little chick comes from basically 99.9999% non-living tissue if that non-living tissue doesn't have an enormous amount of prana and physical nutrients.

"Try adding a footnoted fact, or correcting a fact error on one of these monitored Wikipedia pages, and -- poof! -- sometimes within a matter of seconds, you'll find your edit is reversed."

I have actually had this happen to me. I don't recall the subject, but the changes snapped back to the old version within a matter of seconds. I didn't know that people could read and type so fast.

I call Wikipedia "WickedPedophilia", and somehow everyone knows what I am talking about. (:->)
Roger Bird

Sharyl Attkisson in the video above says the same thing about Astroturf. Very interesting to listen to.
Christine

This is well worth watching, as it pertains to efforts to demonize homeopathy. There is, however, something Ms. Atkisson omitted: viz., beware the full-court press, like a sudden spate of articles on the values of vaccination when there's no apparent news peg for them. You can be sure someone's been burning up the PR firm's copying machine.
Peace,
Dale

Hi, Dale --

I thought Sharyl Attkisson covered what you've called the "full-court press" pretty well with the scenario of the fictional drug, the range of media positively referring to it sounding like a media blitz to me. But maybe you mean something more.

Cheers --

John

Sharyl did a lovely job analyzing the promotional forces behind a fictional drug. That's may be easier for people to recognize as a media blitz than a sudden outpouring of articles whose message is less overt. Here's an example:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/0 ... e-pr-blitz
Peace,
Dale

Dale, thank you very much for that. The Friends of the Earth report (Spinning Food) that this Common Dreams piece announces looks like being a very handy resource, very readable. It includes a swathe of visual examples, some of them very funny, of the tobacco science that the Big Ag and Big Chem front groups are using to sway public opinion back toward poisons.

The report itself is downloadable from .

Cheers --

John

Thanks, John. The group at our co-op that's fighting for GMO labeling will be happy to see this. One more arrow in the quiver.
Peace,
Dale