RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite the denials, the stories about Facebook’s bias are real. But the bias isn’t there because of the company’s new technology. Facebook is biased because of its reliance on the biased old media.

Facebook’s trending topics wasn’t the automatic system that the company wanted people to think it was. Instead it hired young journalists with new media experience to “curate” its news feed. And plenty of them proved to be biased against conservative news and sources. Meanwhile someone at the top of Facebook’s dysfunctional culture wanted to play up Syria and the Black Lives Matter hate group.

Mark Zuckerberg’s fundamental mistake was recreating the biases and agendas of the old media in a service whose whole reason for existing was to allow users to create their own experience. The big difference between social and search is that social media is supposed to let you be the curator.

But, like Facebook’s trending topics, social curation was another scam. Facebook users don’t really define what they see. It’s defined for them by the company’s agendas. This includes the purely financial. It would be foolish to think that the fortunes that Buzzfeed spends on Facebook advertising don’t impact the placement of its stories by Facebook’s mysterious algorithm. And there is the more complex intersection of politics and branding in an age when business relevance means social relevance.

Twitter piggybacked on the Arab Spring to seem relevant. Facebook has used Black Lives Matter. Social media needs to be associated with political movements to seem more important than it is. Zuckerberg doesn’t want to head up a shinier version of MySpace that was originally set up to rate the attractiveness of Harvard girls. Being socially relevant is better for business. Especially when the business is vapid at its core.

Social media needs social relevance to disguise the narcissism at the center of its appeal.

Finally, a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars is not about to let users define their own experience even if that’s what they signed up to do. Facebook does not empower users. It seeks to shape and control their experience for its own power and profit. Facebook’s news feed is just as curated as its trending topics. The news feed depends more on algorithms, but those are still shaped by agendas even if they aren’t as simple as overworked left-wing journalism majors spitefully purging stories about IRS corruption from the trending topics on the right.

Although feminists have claimed to seek equality – in education, employment, sexual and civil rights – a curious acceptance of patriarchal condescension still meets with their approval and demands. They won the battle to bare their breasts in public since men are entitled to do the same (see the painted topless ladies of Times Square), but when it comes to accepting equal responsibility for the consequences of drunken excess, they plead special protection. On campuses throughout America, women who claim to have been sexually molested while they were blotto are considered victims of a crime, not cooperating partners. Men, on the other hand, are never excused for molesting a woman (anything from a grope to rape) because they were drunk. Title IX and university administrations give women a pass and they willingly accept it.

Similarly, the media has traditionally withheld the names of women who claim to be victims of rape or molestation while they publish the names of men who are accused but have not been tried. Now,, in the strangest extension of this macho protectiveness, both Lincoln Center and the NY Times have admitted that Jed Bernstein, the former president of Lincoln Center, was forced to resign because he had a consensual affair with a woman on his staff, violating the company policy of no dating of subordinates. Mr. Bernstein had promoted this 30-something woman but so had his predecessor – twice. Both Mr. Bernstein and his subordinate were single and the affair was over by the time the relationship came to the attention of the Center’s higher-ups. Nevertheless, Lincoln Center did not divulge the name of the employee in order to “protect” her. Since she consented to flouting company policy, why was she not named and asked to resign as well? Is the assumption that an adult woman capable of performing in a high-powered job is nevertheless helpless to withstand the seduction of her much older employer? Does this sit well with Gloria Steinem? It’s not what Hillary thought of that 21 year old “narcissistic loony toon” who nearly brought down the president.

I’m done with Fox News By Patricia McCarthy

When Fox News debuted in 1996, it was a breath of fresh air, seemingly unadulterated by the leftist bias that had long characterized the three mainstream networks and CNN. But that initial commitment to balance has gone by the wayside, sacrificed on the altar of Donald Trump.

Fox News, as Mark Levin has observed, has become a Trump super-PAC instead of a news organization. From morning throughout the day and night, it is Trump, Trump, Trump.

Many of us who have depended on Fox for “fair and balanced” news feel betrayed. While Trump’s rants at his rallies are a form of repetitive mass hypnosis of an angry public by a fraudster, Fox has set out to convince its viewers that Trump is a legitimate candidate, not a spoiler for Hillary – that he is a conservative when he is clearly not. His millions of supporters who have hitched their hopes for a better future, a return to American strength and values, to him will be sorely disappointed. Trump has no core values beyond his own ego and accumulated wealth.

Has Fox News changed its nature at the command of Rupert Murdoch or Roger Ailes? Are large amounts of money involved? Who knows?

Megyn Kelly sure got in trouble for challenging Trump and had to go grovel before him at Trump Tower. Now she is about to interview him; it will most likely be a carefully orchestrated love-fest. She has capitulated. Greta is clearly his good friend of long standing, so she will not address his candidacy honestly. Hannity has become, as one cartoonist drew it, Trump’s ventriloquist’s dummy. And Giuliani! What can one say about his support of Trump?

Meanwhile, O’Reilly speaks as though Trump is already the Republican nominee. Maybe he will be; maybe he will not. But he is not yet. These folks are betraying the country for the friendship of a rich celebrity.

So I am finished with Fox News. The channel has sold out to the lowest common denominator and actively sabotaged the one qualified candidate, the constitutional scholar, the Reaganesque guy. While I greatly respect Bret Baier, Catherine Herridge, Jennifer Griffin, and a few others, the rest of them can wallow in their Trumpaphilia to their hearts’ content.

A paper published Wednesday in the journal Studies in Contemporary History alleges that the Associated Press had a close relationship with the Nazi propaganda office in the 1930s. Historian Harriet Scharnberg writes that the AP was able to continue operating in Germany long after most other media outlets had been booted out.

USA Today:

The AP agreed to abide by the Nazi “editor’s law,” forbidding any publication “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home,” according to The Guardian, which first reported on the research Wednesday. The news agency also hired reporters who worked in the Nazi party’s propaganda division, including photographer Franz Roth, who was in the propaganda unit of the SS and whose photos were approved by Hitler himself.

Scharnberg also contends the AP allowed the use of its photographs in antisemitic propaganda, including the publications “The Sub-Human” and “The Jews in the USA.”

By working with the Nazis, the AP helped that totalitarian regime “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war,” the historian said in the interview with The Guardian. For example, Roth’s photos following the 1941 Nazi invasion of Lviv in western Ukraine focused on the atrocities carried out by Soviet troops before the arrival of the Nazis, and ignored the violence of the German forces against the Jewish residents.

“The pictures played their part in disguising the true character of the war led by the Germans,” Scharnberg said. “Which events were made visible and which remained invisible in AP’s supply of pictures followed German interests and the German narrative of the war.”

The Associated Press said in a statement that Scharnberg’s research “describes both individuals and their activities before and during the war that were unknown to AP.” The news agency says it is conducting a review “to further our understanding of the period.”