NY Times wants to eliminate "Fake News"

The Elites are Crapping Their Pants

How dare the peasants publish their 

own news on the Internet.

(Daily Sheeple)  -  It appears they are going to just keep beating this drum until they get their way. Not sure which is worse, straight up government censorship, or a “Ministry of Truth” run by corporations (like Google). It’ll likely be both.

On Monday, Mark Thompson, President and CEO of The New York Times Company, delivered remarks to members of the Detroit Economic Club.

Thompson threw around the idea of government censorship of “fake news.”

What can we do about it? The first thing that springs to some people’s minds is some form of censorship or regulation. I note in my book how the 17th century British political thinker Thomas Hobbes came, at least in part, to blame extremist sermons and tracts – tracts which could be mass-produced and disseminated widely within hours thanks to the still relatively new technology of printing – for England’s descent into civil war. He later argued that the war might never have happened if a few thousand of the extremists had been rounded up and executed.

Now, while I don’t suppose that even the sternest critic of fake news would advocate the death penalty, there are certainly some who favor a kind of functional censorship, with fake news sites identified and taken down, and fake news somehow filtered out of search and social media by human or algorithmic means.

Thompson then admits this is unrealistic. Besides, there is a thing called the First Amendment.

And who said that the public should only be allowed to read the facts anyway? The First Amendment essentially says they should be allowed to write, distribute and read anything they damn well please. If some of them turn out to prefer churning out and eagerly consuming lies and fantasies, so be it.

He then suggests a Ministry of Truth, of sorts, run by corporations, but admits this is worrisome.

If we imagine the tools that might be used to excise fake news from the web and social media – a mighty algorithm combing every sentence, every image for any trace of falsehood, aided perhaps by legions of human scrutineers employed by some of the world’s biggest corporations – they sound suspiciously like the means of control employed by the world’s most repressive regimes. They are probably not practical and, even if they were, they would be worrisome or worse in our free societies.

Th

Read More . . . .

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"Journalism" for Profit
TV and print media work overtime to scare the living shit out of
people for ratings or to sell newspapers.

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Nothing has changed.
In the eternal search for money the Media Machine always paints foreigners with their strange ways and funny looks as evil and bloodthirsty beasts.
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The Media says "Just let the government go to war with them and then you will be safe."  The fact that the Media Machine will make more money covering the war is not mentioned.