Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

We’ve all heard about the “fact-checking” nonsense but…

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Legacy media want us to believe their crap because it has been “fact-checked”

From O’Leary for News: I dove out the window of the media bus on “fact-checking” many years ago when a “fact check” revealed that late-aborted babies would have died anyway if no one did anything to help them so abortion of viable babies and leaving them to die in soiled utility rooms wasn’t really any big deal…

(I had met a nurse for whom dying babies were the last contact with fellow humans. No one else would touch them in the “soiled utility room” in which — as “medical waste” — they were left to die. She risked her career to hold them while they were dying. She refused to treat them like the garbage they were consigned to.)

Oh, and much later the Babylon Bee got “fact-checked” for an obviously satirical story in which socialist US representative in Congress was supposed to have claimed on The Price Is Right that “everything is free.” Everyone knew it was satire so why fact check it?

That twigged me: Fact-checking merely amounts to ensuring that media are toeing the Correct line. Nothing to do with facts as such, like the nurse risking her career to hold the dying baby.

Now this:


We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta.

In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.

The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.[1]

But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]


Hey, guys, trust the Science !

Comments
Thanks, Kairosfocus! We tend to think it couldn't happen but all it takes is tolerance of evil. Hey, lighten the mood: When some of my great grandparents were crossing the Atlantic to western Canada, there was a scam going on. People assembled for their dinners but were not given dinners on shipboard. My great grandfather started to raise Cain down in the steerage and finally, the purser came down from the bridge to see what the row was about. The purser surveyed the scene and said "This is a British ship. No one goes unfed on a British ship." So he commanded that the dinner be served immediately, which meant one heck of a clatter in the kitchen... Rule, Britannia... That's why Canadian schoolchildren used to sing Rule, Britannia, Britannia rule the waves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPZOOhzql7w You've no idea what that meant to us.News
January 4, 2022
January
01
Jan
4
04
2022
04:50 PM
4
04
50
PM
PDT
Read: https://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/lul/Readings/Reading%2011B.pdf >>The man with the whip who stood calmly on the platform directing human traffic in “Arrival at Auschwitz” was the infamous Dr. Mengele. He and several other doctors were in charge of the selection process when prisoners arrived. They also supervised the selections that were carried out regularly at the roll calls and in the barracks. The purpose was to weed out “excess” or “unnecessary” people who were “non-productive.” The term used by the Nazi doctors for these people was “life unworthy of life.” It was borrowed from a medical book written in 1920 and became the phrase that allowed physicians to conduct horrible experiments on human beings and decide who would live and who would die. “Life unworthy of life” also best captures the heart of the Nazi philosophy toward the Jews and other unfortunate groups who became the victims of the Third Reich. As early as 1933, respected physicians were involved in a program of sterilization—making people incapable of reproducing. The victims of this program were people whom the doctors decided were mentally deficient. The doctors’ endorsement of this program then led to their support of the Nazi proposal for the killing of mentally and/or physically handicapped children, and then mentally and/or physically handicapped adults in the so-called “euthanasia” program. “Euthanasia” is usually defined as “mercy killing.” In Germany, in 1933, the term was applied to people who were considered “unworthy of life.” The doctors believed that mental illness, drunkenness, other mental and physical disabilities could be passed on genetically. What mattered most to them was the so-called health of the “Aryan race.” Consequently they saw it as their duty to remove those who would, according to their theories, “weaken the race” through reproduction. Over 450,000 people were sterilized or killed in special institutes and through and hospitals before the program was ended. These places were often equipped with gas chambers. After 1941, a state policy of “euthanasia” and forced sterilization easily changed into a state policy for mass murder. This policy was carried out in death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz. Those subjected to gassing in the “euthanasia” program during the 1930s were said to have received “special treatment,” Sonderbehandlung. The same phrase would be used as a euphemism, a substitute word to hide the real meaning, to refer to gassing of Jews in death camps. The doctors who had formerly worked in the special hospitals of the “euthanasia” and sterilization programs now appeared at the death camps.>> Do we really want to go back there? (And don't anyone dare try stunts like, alleging fallacy of consequences.) KFkairosfocus
January 4, 2022
January
01
Jan
4
04
2022
08:24 AM
8
08
24
AM
PDT
The Ciceronian first duties:
1: to truth, 2: to right reason, 3: to warrant and wider prudence, 4: to sound conscience, 5: to neighbour, 6: so too to fairness, and 7: to justice, . . . , x: etc.
See why we desperately need to go back there? For our souls, and just maybe if it is not already to late, our civilisation. Are we all nazis now, discarding Lebensunwertes Leben? KFkairosfocus
January 4, 2022
January
01
Jan
4
04
2022
08:16 AM
8
08
16
AM
PDT
For what it is worth, all above, the information I have passed on was given to me in Canada. It was never, to my knowledge part of any government-sponsored testimony. It was provided privately by immigrants to Canada from Britain, where it happened (why they left). Of course, the same thing could have happened in Canada. It takes the US Supreme Court to make it worldwide big-media-popular LAW: Roe v. Wade 1973. It will destroy you too, by the way. It's a juggernaut. I remember sitting on the steps in a home in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1972 with an American doctor. He told me: Brace yourself: The news could not be worse for the right to life. (Because he knew what the Court was hatching at the time.) If you want to live, do not count on the government.News
January 3, 2022
January
01
Jan
3
03
2022
09:34 AM
9
09
34
AM
PDT
@Seversky@2 You’ve excelled yourself, Seversky. Stanek gave her evidence before a Senate Committee. No one from the hospital challenged it. Personal testimony works like that, you know. You use an OPINION PIECE she authored to challenge her testimony in the senate. That’s not how you challenge testimony. If someone leafs through all your non-sequiturs, your boo-boos, your raves that have appeared here over the years to challenge your accuracy or truth when you write that 2+2 = 4, it would be wrong, but it would be no worse that your comment today.Belfast
January 3, 2022
January
01
Jan
3
03
2022
12:24 AM
12
12
24
AM
PDT
One should wonder who fact checks the fact checkers. There is clearly something going on that should not be happening for subjects that should be straight forward. Dr. Robert W. Malone, the one who invented the mRNA vaccine, is being treated horribly by the press who claim all sorts of lurid things about one of the foremost experts on vaccinations in the world. It is not just a problem with the fact checkers, but Google's algorithm. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/did_banned_mrna_vax_inventor_robert_w_malone_md_just_break_the_google_algorithm.htmlBobRyan
January 2, 2022
January
01
Jan
2
02
2022
11:42 PM
11
11
42
PM
PDT
From O’Leary for News: I dove out the window of the media bus on “fact-checking” many years ago when a “fact check” revealed that late-aborted babies would have died anyway if no one did anything to help them so abortion of viable babies and leaving them to die in soiled utility rooms wasn’t really any big deal… (I had met a nurse for whom dying babies were the last contact with fellow humans. No one else would touch them in the “soiled utility room” in which — as “medical waste” — they were left to die. She risked her career to hold them while they were dying. She refused to treat them like the garbage they were consigned to.)
If you are referring to nurse Jill Stanek, I assume you relieved yourself of the burden of fact-checking her story when you "dove out the window of the media bus on “fact-checking”. Were you ever able to check whether her story about comforting an aborted fetus left alive in a soiled laundry utility room? It's certainly a highly-emotive story and, if it happened, the hospital should have been held to account. However, it was also alleged she wrote an article for the WorldNetDaily website titled "Michael J. Fox is a cannibal".
In her May 10 senate meeting, Krawiec also referred to “Jill Stanek, a nurse [who] has testified before numerous committees.” Jill Stanek is now an activist, blogger, and columnist for WorldNetDaily, a news and opinion website criticized for alleged “fear-mongering and outright fabrications” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2004, Stanek posted an article on that site with the headline “Michael J. Fox is a cannibal,” in which she accused the actor of “ingesting” fetuses “in an effort to cure his own ailments.” Stanek first attained national prominence in 2001, after alleging she’d been fired from a Chicago hospital for reporting that an infant who survived an abortion there had been left to die “in a soiled laundry room.” Variants of that phrase have been used in unsubstantiated anecdotes by anti-abortion advocates ever since.
I checked that fact myself and WND did indeed publish an article under her byline with that title in October 20, 2004. In it she writes:
So we learned through Fox's affliction that he has either extremely poor judgment or a diabolical character flaw. He supports human embryonic stem-cell experimentation, thus contending that some humans are subhuman and expendable for others' personal gain. […] If you think that, your sympathies are misplaced. Fox advocates killing certain people to experiment on them "for the greater good" simply because those people don't look like we do – yet. This is odd, because some day Fox won't look like most people either. […] And in an altered past, Fox would have allowed the dissection of his days-old embryonic children so he could surgically ingest them in an effort to cure his own ailments – high tech cannibalism.
I don't suppose WND bothered to fact-check her claims about Fox. The fact-checking diligence of the "legacy media" may be less than ideal but is leaving it the hands of sites like WND any improvement?
In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.
As for the BMJ article by investigative journalist Paul Thacker, if anything it is a measure of a decline in their editorial standards. Anyone who actually wants to see more of a more detailed fact-checking of this piece, something which a leading medical journal like the BMJ should have performed should look here. If they're interested.Seversky
January 2, 2022
January
01
Jan
2
02
2022
03:29 PM
3
03
29
PM
PDT
That's a powerful story. "Medical waste" pretty much says it all.polistra
January 2, 2022
January
01
Jan
2
02
2022
12:40 PM
12
12
40
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply