Sacred cows inhibit thinking because they have no straightforward relationship with the discipline in which they find pasture.
Read More ›
Canadian media that accept Trudeau’s handouts must please the regime more than inform the public. Indies are under heavy fire.
Read More ›
Cancel Culture at universities aims to protect a set of core beliefs from challenge by new evidence. If a discipline is to thrive, it must defeat the Cancel mob
Read More ›
Last week, Richard Stevens wrote about the new fad in information control known as prebunking — setting about to destroy the reputation of a news source among the unwary. The tactic seems popular among a newer type of journalist for whom there is no other side to a story, who views alternative takes as a threat. That sort of journalism is currently associated with a huge decline in mainstream media readership even among stalwarts such as the Washington Post, which is currently facing a top-drawer upheaval as a result. Stevens demonstrated how a chatbot could provide free prebunking copy, using Mind Matters News‘s About page and Introduction as the subject. Anything can be prebunked in principle and sometimes chatbots may Read More ›
Journalists who advocate prebunking to discourage audiences from seeing alternative information are helping propagandists defeat the search for truth.
Read More ›
As we find out what really happened, the credibility of our public-health systems has been shattered and “Trust the science!” is becoming a joke.
Read More ›
The story highlights once again, the way X (Twitter) is one of the few important social media to resist government censorship.
Read More ›
It might make more sense to have conversations about age limits with TikTok. Like nicotine, should it be reserved for those above the age of 18?
Read More ›
Canada is a comparatively peaceful country, so onlookers might puzzle over the assumption that draconian measures are needed to fight poorly defined “hate.”
Read More ›
Canadians lost the right to post news links to Facebook and Instagram. And, amid media layoffs, Google did not give media the sum they hoped for.
Read More ›
TV personalities — ones you might not have expected — have begun to notice the way mainstream media now drop the ball on news coverage. The usually apolitical TV psychologist Dr. Phil, for example, was recently holding forth to podcaster Joe Rogan on their inability to report honestly on many sensitive political subjects. Medical doctor Drew Pinsky, who has offered relationship advice in a number of media venues, is saying similar things. News about every cultural flashpoint now seems to be managed in the way that facts about COVID-19 were at the height of the pandemic scare. Why fight censorship if you can just censor yourself? An inevitable outcome of the strategic lack of curiosity among journalists is a marked Read More ›
The disinformation experts claim to be defending democracy — and yet their principal weapon is indoctrination.
Read More ›
The bee in the bonnets of the researchers who received the funding for the internet censorship program is that Americans can’t tell fact from fiction.
Read More ›
Last week we looked at the way censorship in the age of the internet is typically invisible. It’s not the police raiding bookstores; it’s — for example — sudden downranking of posts so that information that might have reached millions of people reaches only dozens. Constantly suppressed, it can’t go viral. We can see the change more clearly if we look at the difference between how books (and other information) used to get banned and how they get banned today. Book banning before the internet When the word “book bans” is used today, it usually means something different from what it meant even a few decades ago. Ulysses, a groundbreaking work by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) was indeed banned Read More ›
Today’s censorship depends in part on the fact that failing mainstream media don’t want to know. Stories are increasingly broken by independent writers.
Read More ›
Science is as dependent on the concept of public truth as the great religions are. Thus, when private truth rapidly gains power, it is just as vulnerable.
Read More ›
Berger’s confidence about homo Naledi’s intelligence rankles colleagues but he is as entitled to a documentary for his case as they are to oppose it.
Read More ›
It won’t be long before serious proposals are floated in the United States for government to fund legacy media, which would make them PR for government.
Read More ›
As Tablet editor Jacob Siegel shows, truth or falsehood is irrelevant to disinformation, which is whatever government does not want you to know.
Read More ›
The rise and fall of intellectual movements may well now depend on their ability to use new media successfully to express their views.
Read More ›