By Craig Silverman and Ruth Talbot – – In late 2021, the right-wing site Conservative Beaver published a story falsely claiming the FBI had arrested Pfizer’s CEO for fraud. It wasn’t Conservative Beaver’s first brush with fabricated news. The site had falsely claimed Barack Obama was arrested for espionage, Pope Francis was and “human trafficking, 
It looks like a miracle considering where Americans get their information – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Uh, oh. It’s been one week since Election Day, and it appears Republicans are on the verge of winning the 218 seats they need in the House to take majority control in…
By Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies – ProPublica – Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found. The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the…
Staff Report – As the legal and financial heat continue to rain down on Mark Zuckerberg at Meta-Facebook, the tech giant has caved at the last minute and agreed to settle a massive lawsuit seeking billions in damages for allowing Cambridge Analytica to access the private data of tens of millions of users, data used…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Where should a wary public turn for reliable information? Too bad it’s not working out to try turning the clock back to the 20th century to trust in newspapers and television news. The Gallup Poll became the gold standard for public opinion back then,…
The latest public opinion on gun control, white nationalism and the future of democracy – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Here’s a novel theory: What if people at least tried to be nicer? Boring, I know. And of course it won’t work, because so many people are, let’s face it, basically dumbasses…
Full text of “John Brown. An address by Frederick Douglass, at the fourteenth anniversary of Storer College, Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, May 30, 1881”: source text edited from print style to web press style JOHN BROWN: AN ADDRESS FREDERICK DOUGLASS, FOURTEENTH ANNIVERSARY, STORER COLLEGE, Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, May 30, 1881. DOVER, N. H.: MORNING…
The Insurrection – The Effort to Overturn the Election – By Craig Silverman and Jeff Kao, ProPublica, along with Craig Timberg and Jeremy B. Merrill, The Washington Post — Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S.…
Movie Review: ‘Don’t Look Up’ – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Some streaming movie fans are reeling away from the outrageous silliness of one of the top watched films on Netflix this year, “Don’t Look Up.” It’s an American satirical science fiction film written, directed and produced by Adam McKay, another in a…
By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – If ever there lived a scientist who came closest to figuring out the essence of human nature and what we need to do to survive on planet Earth, it was Edward Osborne Wilson from Birmingham, Alabama, who reached the zenith of the biological sciences at Harvard and provided…
By Clement Clark Moore – ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds; While visions of sugar-plums…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Ahh, did you have a nice break curled up on the couch watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on NBC? Or did you spend too much time arguing with relatives about politics while stuffing your face and drinking too much? For me, it was…
Staff Report – A week after Facebook Inc. announced its new corporate name Meta, along with a new logo as part of the company’s strategic shift toward focusing on the metaverse, the public’s initial reaction to the rebrand is less than enthusiastic, according to new data from Morning Consult. Americans feel even more unfavorably toward…
By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — For millions of people around the world, Facebook is simply another toy on the internet. Many people simply log in now and then and scan what’s on the home page news feed on their smart phones, maybe hit like on a post or video, and don’t engage on…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – CATOCTIN MOUNTAIN, Md. — The first day of autumn, 2021, started out with a pounding rain knocking the acorns out of the trees, landing on the media camper van roof with a loud pop, along with cooler temperatures that caused me to dig the portable heater out…
There is little doubt this is caused by political rhetoric and media coverage – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — If there are any communications scholars out there still trying to figure out how to accurately measure political and media influence on public opinion, look no further than a new survey out from the…
Staff Report – WASHINGTON, D.C. — A domestic terrorist from Oklahoma was arrested on Aug. 19 for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, which disrupted a joint session of Congress that was in the process of counting the electoral votes in the presidential election of 2020 that certified Joe…
Editor’s Note: As a media scholar, I have been writing about this for years. Guest Column – By Robert Reich – The mainstream media has historically tried to balance left and right in its political coverage, and present what it views as a reasonable center. That may sound good in theory. But the old politics…
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” – Thomas Jefferson By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — When Thomas Jefferson said that, newspapers were the only means of communicating with citizens about…
By Glynn Wilson – As Memorial Day Tribute, I am memorializing this here on the web to be archived in a more prominent and permanent place than Facebook. This is a picture of my dad, Eschol Wilson, who served as a corporal in the U.S. Army near the end of World War II. He was…
