Fact checking parody

Facebook and Politifact have teamed up to warn the social media giant’s users that parody is not reality.

par·o·dy/ˈperədē/:

noun

an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.

verb

produce a humorously exaggerated imitation of (a writer, artist, or genre)

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MoreMonmouthMusings and ShoreNewsNetwork Join Forces

Update: MMM and ShoreNewsNetwork ended their affiliation after the 2018 election.

Two Jersey Shore local news sites are joining forces in an effort to provide Monmouth and Ocean County residents informative alternatives to legacy media outlets.

Phil Stilton, publisher of ShoreNewsNetwork.com and Art Gallagher, publisher of MoreMonmouthMusings.net announced today that they have created a strategic alliance and content sharing agreement.  Together, the two publishers expect to reach 300,000 Monmouth and Ocean County readers per week through their websites and social media platforms.

“Phil has built and impressive audience in Ocean County,” Gallagher said. “I’m looking to expand my reach in northern Ocean County and southwest Monmouth County. Teaming up with ShoreNewNetwork makes perfect sense.”

“The legacy media in New Jersey offers readers filtered and often slanted reports on what goes on in our community,” Stilton said. “For almost 10 years, we have offered our readers the news without the mainstream media spin.”

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Bill O’Reilly is officially out at Fox News

Fox News has officially cut ties with its biggest prime time star, Bill O’Reilly, following sexual harassment claims lodged against him. “After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the Company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel,” 21st Century Fox said in a statement.… Read the rest of this entry »

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Anatomy of a Media Fabricated News Story – Gannett Style

By Tom DeSeno

This morning (March 2^nd 2016) people in the shore area in the central part of New Jersey woke up to an editorial in the Asbury Park Press, the only daily newspaper that serves two large counties, viciously attacking Governor Christie and demanding his resignation.

“Wow” the people of Monmouth and Ocean counties must have thought.   “This editorial staff must have really put a great deal of independent thought into this, to be this hard on the Governor,” they must have thought.

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‘State of the News Media’: New report tracks changing business

‘State of the News Media’: New report tracks changing business (via NJ.com)

Online news sites have added 5,000 full-time jobs to the news business over the last few years, while employment in the newspaper industry continues to decline, according to a new accounting by the Pew Research Center, a non-profit group. Pew released…

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A New Christie For A New Normal

If Governor Chris Christie’s presidential prospects have been damaged by the Bridgegate scandal and associated investigations, you wouldn’t know it by the amount of television cameras at the Town Hall Meeting in Port Monmouth this morning.  Middletown officials estimate the crowd was about 500 people. There was easily 50 members of the media including reporters, photographers and videographers.

There was no swagger from the Governor today.  No fist pumps, no snazzy introductory video, no in your face insults to hostile questioners.  Christie dodged the only hostile question he heard.  The Youtube moment came not from an idiot or thin skinned reporter, but from a three year old girl who said her house is still broken.

Bridgegate, the controversy over the September lane closures at the George Washington Bridge that has spurred investigations by the U.S. Attorney and a Special Legislative Committee never came up.  The people who came to today’s meeting would gladly trade places with the Bergen County residents who were inconvenienced by traffic jams for four days.  They been without their homes for 16 months.

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Media continues to give Menendez cover in prostitution, ethics violation scandal

State Senator Sam Thompson, as Chairman of the Middlesex GOP, files an ethics complaint against US Senator Bob Menendez

Media ignores the whole affair

In case you missed it while the lights were out, Senator Bob Menendez has been accused of accepting luxury travel to and lodging in the Dominican Republic where he participated in sex parties with prostitutes and short changed his concubines from their agreed upon fees.

Menendez responded by calling the accusations, which were first reported by the conservative website Daily Caller, “a product of the right wing smear machine.”

However, the far left wing website, Gawker, followed Daily Caller’s story with a report from “someone who was unfortunate enough to live in the unit below Menendez’s Washington, DC apartment,” who said “he would bring home a different young, attractive lady almost every night, put on a little jazz, and f**k loudly until 3 a.m.”

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School Days, School Daze

Thanks to the left stream media America is learning that while a student at an elite Michigan prep school, Mitt Romney was a prankster who sometimes went too far.  At least two of his pranks were cruel bullying incidents.  He lead a blind teacher to walk into a closed door and he traumatised an apparently gay classmate, who later came out, by forcefully cutting off his bleached blond hair, according to a poorly sourced exposé in the Washington Post.

Thanks to the right stream media, sourced in part by Barack Obama himself, we are learning, four years late, that while in high school the President was a heavy drinker, pot and cocaine user, who hung out with communist radicals.   He bullied a “plump, dark” Black girl.

In recent weeks we’ve also learned that Romney transported his dog to a family vacation on the roof of his car and that Obama ate dog.

We’re likely to be in for a lot more of these types of stories over the next six months.  We’ll also be in for disingenuous complaining from both the right and left about each others tactics.   All of this is a positive development for America.

Especially at the presidential level, it is the duty of political opponents to do thorough opposition research and to pitch what they find to the media.  If the free media doesn’t run with the findings, it is the duty of political opponents to buy media to expose their opponent’s foibles.  Then the free media will investigate, report and opine on the veractity of the charges.   It is the duty of responsible journalists to verify or debunk opposition research pitched to them and the public and report accordingly.

The traditional media, which is leftist for the most part, took a break from its presidential vetting duty in 2008.  Likewise, Barack Obama’s political opposition, the Clintons and John McCain, took a pass on vetting Obama.  The Obama camp and the traditional leftist media brilliantly employed the race card to thwart Obama’s vetting.

Both Obama and Romney should be vetted, by each other’s campaign and by the media, over the next six months.  It is not unprecedented for the media to vette an incumbent President.  CBS’s Dan Rather famously got in wrong and lost his job over Memogate during George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. 

As we enter the vetting season, one of the side benefits will be that the biases of the vetters will be revealed to a skeptical public.   As the Internet continues to transform how we get our information and plays a more significant role in political campaigns, the truth that there is no such thing as an unbiased media source will become more and more apparent.

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Gannett to start charging to read its websites

Gannett, publisher of The Asbury Park Press and 79 other community newspapers throughout the country, announced today that they will emulate The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal by charging their readers to access their websites, according to multiple news outlets, not including The Asbury Park Press.

Readers will be able to read between five and fifteen articles each month before being charged, according to Forbes who covered the investors conference where Gannett announced the news.

The company also announced that they will shed $1.3 billion in cash, distributing it to shareholders through dividends and a $300 million stock buy back.

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SLedger Defends Naked Freeholder

By Art Gallagher

The Star Ledger Editorial Board says the blogger who published the nude photos that former Freeholder Louis Magazzu emailed to a mystery woman he never met is a cyber-bully.

Magazzu was a Cumberland County Freeholder, former Freeholder Director and former Chairman of the Cumberland County Democratic Party.  He resigned under pressure from other Democratic party leaders when his Weineresque photos became public.

The blogger who took Magazzu down, Carl Johnson, admits his problem with the power broker was personal.  Johnson says Magazzu used the power of his positions to attempt to silence his political criticism and make his life miserable including having him arrested for failing to pay child support.

Yet Magazzu’s demise was not a political assassination, as the SLedger states.  It was a political suicide.

Magazzu’s photos weren’t taken by someone else in a setting where he might expect privacy.  He took the photos himself, just as former Congressmen Christopher Lee and Anthony Weiner took photos of themselves.  Like the congressmen, Magazzu voluntarily transmitted the photos to a stranger.   That was stupid. 

The SLedger laments the pre-Internet days when the media elite were the gatekeepers of what the public learned about its elected officials:

Photos and racy e-mails that Magazzu sent to a mysterious woman over the internet — a woman who has yet to appear, but who both sides believe exists — were refused by several local newspapers on the grounds they weren’t news. They were evidence of Magazzu’s private relationship. And deserved to be private.

If the photos weren’t news, i.e. of interest to the public, no one would have paid attention to them and Magazzu would still be in office.  The photos were not of Magazzu gardening, fishing or playing golf. They were photos he took of himself, nude, in a bedroom and a bathroom.  They weren’t evidence of a private relationship. He sent the photos himself to a stranger, a “mystery woman.”   If the photos were evidence of a private relationship, Magazzu would have shared them with someone who would have kept them private.

With the possible exception of President Priss, the media elite are no longer the arbiters of what the public knows about it’s public figures.  Long gone are the days when the electorate doesn’t know they have a president with polio or one that philanders with movie stars. Long gone are the days that an Assemblyman collecting a police disability pension can be physically fit and the public won’t know about it.  Long gone are the days that any public figure can share nude photos of themselves with strangers and expect that the public won’t learn about.

The public rightfully doesn’t trust the media elite to decide what is relevant because the media elite is often driven by its own bias as to what is news and what isn’t news.  My bias tells me that the Sledger editorial board would have a very different take on this story if a high ranking member of the Christie administration, a Republican Freeholder from any county or a Republican member of the legislature had been involved, rather than a Democratic power broker.

The Sledger contributes to the demise of its own influence by taking a hyperbolic leap in lamenting the power of the blogosphere:

We’ve created a whole new class of political assassins, and any target is now fair game — not just the biggest-name politicians anymore. Tabloid stalking has trickled down to the next-door neighbor level. Any small town sex scandal can be international news.

Really?  Did I miss something?  I ran “next door neighbor small town sex scandal” through google news.  The only “news” there was the Sledger editorial. 

The hyperbole continues in the Sledger’s conclusion:

Political figure or not, blogging these photos amounts to cyber-bullying. Attacking your opponent on legitimate political or legal grounds is one thing. But publicizing his private life to destroy his reputation crosses the line into virtual stalking.

I don’t buy it.  Magazzu wasn’t stalked, virtually or otherwise. He took the photos himself and pushed the send button himself.   Cyber-bullying a Freeholder and former County Chairman?  Please!

We’ll have to wait until the next time a Republican does something stupid in his/her “private” life to see if the Sledger really means what it says and lives up to its own standards.

In the meantime, public figures of both parties and from all walks of life should refrain from sending nude photos of themselves to anyone and should be careful about everything they do when cameras are present, which is pretty much anytime they are anywhere in public.

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