Building trust in media

Ep 203: How Corporate Think Tanks Function as Influence Laundromats

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this is a very liberal demand which is like can you at least disclose the people know and I think that’s really where you give the game away because if they did that they would be far far less funded and far less influential because they kind of nominal or widely perceived neutrality or or kind of Academia Sheen or branding is what gives them power

14th Amendment: Validity of Debt Shall not be Questioned

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After the Civil War, Southerners objected strenuously to the fact that Union debts were repaid, while Confederate debts were repudiated. Fear that Congress might lack the votes to pay interest on the debt or repay principal, due to Southern obstinacy, led to the addition of an obscure clause to the Fourteenth Amendment preventing this from happening. It states: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

When Republicans came very, very close to defaulting on the debt 10 years ago, a number of legal scholars argued that the Fourteenth Amendment and the president’s inherent constitutional authority could be used by President Obama to simply ignore the debt limit and sell whatever bonds were necessary to finance the spending Congress had already authorized. These included Garret Epps of the University of Baltimore, Michael Abramowicz of George Washington University, Eric Posner of the University of Chicago and Adrian Vermeule of Harvard, Neil Buchanan of the University of Florida and Michael Dorf of Cornell, Jacob Charles of Duke University, and numerous others. Former President Bill Clinton agreed.

Why do people call things “the real McCoy”?

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The Guardian has an article about the origin of the term “The Real McCoy”.

The article says the term may come from a Canadian inventor named Elijah McCoy, who in 1871, came up with a lubricating device for steam engine locomotives.

Because McCoy’s invention spawned imitators, customers asked for his version by name: I want the Real McCoy”.

The article also describes a second possible origin relating to a boxer named Norman Selby:

In the late 1800s, American welterweight champion Norman Selby boxed under the name “Kid McCoy.” Two stories about Selby give a possible explanation for the phrase. In the first story, Selby was challenged by a drunk in a bar, who questioned whether he was really the legendary fighter he claimed to be. In response, Selby socked the drunk, sending him sprawling to the floor. When the man got to his feet, he announced that he was convinced the man who’d hit him was “the real McCoy.”

 

Note that this article demonstrates two types of custom citations:

  1. To see a inline contextual popup, click on the link: came up with a lubricating device for steam engine locomotives
  2. To see a contextual blockquote, click on the arrows surrounding the Norman Selby blockquote.

 

 

Brewster Kahle’s “State of the Net”: The Importance of Citations in Achieving Consensus

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Internet archive founder Brewster Kahle gave the Keynote at the “State of the Net” Conference on January 28, 2020.
In his speech, Kahle referenced Kathyrn Maher:

at the end of the evening Kathryn Maher the executive director from Wikipedia she said something that frightened me she said she was worried that truth might fracture

Maher’s said that Wikipedia is built on the idea of consensus, rather than alternative truths.

Consensus is achieved on Wikipedia through citation wars, which are won on the weight of citations.  They bias towards things that you can click on and see.  Unfortunately a lot of the free stuff (advertising supported) is not the best content available.  Much of the best stuff available is not freely available on the net.
  • Archive.org fixed 11 million broken links and prioritizes the cited
  • Next priority is journal literature.
Much of this information isn’t available because of:
  1. Copyright problems
  2. Institutions not doing the right thing.

 

28:14

misinformation disinformation how can future researchers distinguish the good from the bad and the good from the nonsense and the evil context so how can you tell what you’re looking at whatever it’s crap or not it’s how we teach our kids it’s how we   learn what’s we’re growing up it’s what’s the context of it sometimes that’s a little hard to tell because things get disembodied  from where they came from but if you can then take something and find out where it did come from that helps a whole heck of a lot

Content moderation perspective about just what you want to be in there because what I’m hearing is kind of like
everything except for stuff that’s illegal is that really what it is or is there so content moderation can I jump in I’ve
cussed in moderation is usually an issue around some of these platforms that are putting things out more actively so the internet archives are record of them so let me speak on things that I’m not running these organizations that do that the Twitter’s and the Facebook’s and the like those guys are in a really tough bind okay I don’t like some of them right some of the technologies are kind of crap but they on they’re in a tough bind they’ve built systems that were really designed to maintain small communities and keeping them in touch with each other you know when is the soccer game what how do you go and do these things and based on their business models they invited in celebrities and news and then political larger scale distribution of of information I think that was a mistake it was a very advertising driven to be able to go and do these things they make a lot of money I mean these presidential campaigns alone are on the order of a billion dollars each that are going to be spent in the order of six months the corrupting influences of that much money is something that most people’s technologies cannot withstand a much you if we’re starting to record radio red state radio and also a blue state radio and it is wacky out there um and it is flooded with money to go and corrupt these systems so if you’re talking to just don’t nail the the Facebook’s and the like there’s a wider corruption of our of our media ecosystems so what do we do about it I’m going and asking these guys to just take down bad stuff is really hard for them to do and it doesn’t put them in the right positions in fact um so how I think we try to build some of these platforms so that they do have references so if they go and make it so that you’re just mouthing off you can tell and that’s easier to sort of know to ignore as a reader or as an editor on these platforms enable communities to go and do their own moderation as opposed to just saying oh Mark Zuckerberg you fix it um that’s not a prescription that’s gonna work very well we’ll run out of ways of doing that but I think we need also a bit more slack and investment in our digital infrastructure and ecosystem the level you know as I said the budgets on these things they’re tiny the things that maintain our underlying not the Facebook’s those guys have big budgets but the underlying Internet infrastructure is massively under invested in when there’s a question why is the Internet Archive an independent nonprofit why are we part of a university why are we part of a National Lab when I was growing up that’s where all this stuff was but they aren’t anymore why not as we’ve now started to
really depend on these systems the funding for them is not is not there so I think the idea of just whacking Apple on the side of the head and saying you fix it ain’t gonna it’s not gonna lead the results you imagined Oh their question was the question was what about content that it’s on the archive if there are illegal things on it then we take it down especially in the countries in which it’s illegal so if China had gone and said you can’t have those videos up because it breaks our laws we and we offered to just block it for those in
China they said no it has to be blocked for everybody we said that’s not what we do so they  blocked us all right we are out of time but I really I’m gonna take my moderator Prague in for a minute and say this has been such an honor because not only is Internet Archive so amazing but Brewster is also a hero of mine and getting to watch what he’s built for the world and for all of us is just so amazing so Thank You Brewster thank you and thank you [Applause]

 

New York Times: “institutional lack of skepticism”

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Judith Miller says the New York Times found that the paper had lacked skepticism, but they did not interview any of the editors or name specific reporters as responsible.

Miller disagrees that there was insufficient skepticism, but that we were accurately conveying wrong information.