I try to remain as unbiased as possible when I am being critical of modern journalism because I think all too often people these days are simply critical of the news that is produced by the political side they are not affiliated with. For me, I try to stay on the level and recognize that "fake news" is not just a liberal thing, it's not just a conservative thing: To suggest that it is, is to have blinders on and remain willfully ignorant. While I do believe that liberal publications are more guilty of this than conservative ones are, I think it is glaringly obviously that both sides engage in deceptive stories on a regular basis.
The fact that news aggregates are now the norm is not a good thing either and the amount of people that i know personally that allow their world-view to be formed by social media is upsetting.
Fearless Report is another one of those media aggregates that doesn't actually write most of the stories that they feature and are a skeleton crew of less than a dozen people in total. Instead of actually writing articles, they link to them while creating their own blurb and picture that will hopefully entice people to click on the article so they can make a few fractions of a cent per click. Believe it or not, this results in millions of dollars in revenue and it is probably precisely because of their devious tactics that this actually works for them.
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If you've never heard of Fearless Report that's probably a good thing. They really go out of their way to distance themselves from whatever articles they are linking to probably to limit how liable they could be held in libel suits. One news story they featured recently really made me upset though, because there are certain lines you simply don't cross and they crossed it.
This was a couple days ago and the only reason why I stopped was probably because of the same reason everyone else did. You remember how we are supposed to hate Nancy Pelosi? Well there she is, front and center right under the headline stating that a "Party Leader has Passed Away." All disingenuous journalism aside, what is going on with their choices for punctuation? Do we just capitalize almost everything these days? Are all of these the titles of books? My professors in journalism school would have a heart attack with these headlines.
Anyway, you can see there that that fearless has a little visible link with their own URL in it, but that is not where the article leads to, it is an external link that has nothing to do with Fearless. The actual article is a lot more genuine and is also pointing to the person that actually did die, not Nancy Pelosi
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his name is Charles Rangel and before anyone gets out the tissues to dry their eyes over his passing away, he was 94. You know many people that are 94? I don't. I think that once you get to that advanced of an age you are surprised to still be alive and probably don't really want to be anymore.
I have also never heard of him even though he was in Congress for 40 years. 40 friggin years! That's too long man, we need to reform that crap. Anyway, it is understandable that people would have never heard of the guy because unless you live in New York, you wouldn't have. Who can possibly keep track of the 73,000 people that have been in Congress in the past 50 years?
I don't have an opinion about Rangel but I wouldn't speak ill of the dead anyway. Fearless doesn't do so either and neither does the Conservative website that their link redirects to. But the imagery that they are implying by putting Nancy Pelosi in the center of the picture with Rangel over to the side, is just despicable. I don't care for Pelosi either. I think she is a crook and a waste of space that should have been filled with someone else quite some time ago just like nearly everyone that has been in Congress for most of their lives. However, despite my personal feeling about her, it is flat out WRONG to put her picture in an article that is talking about someone that died.
The left does this as well I am sure but I cannot think of a specific example right now because things like this are heavily frowned upon even in the practically worthless journalism environment that we currently have today.
Another aspect of this article that kind of boils my blood is that the people who wrote it put no effort into it and it reads like something that was written by AI. Someone said, something like "compile an list of people that wrote something on "X" about Ragel" and that is exactly what the article is. They wrote almost nothing personally, but instead just featured the comments of rather famous politicians and what they had to say about Rangel.
I apologize for forgetting who you are but recently someone said in the comments that today's journalism is about speed, not accuracy, and this is exactly what this article is. they probably got this out within a couple hours of his death being reported, and perhaps there wasn't even a single person that worked on it other than finding a picture of the now deceased that has him standing with someone that we want our readers to "wish was dead."
The devious action succeeded though, as I am sure million upon millions of people clicked on that ambiguous link, morbidly hoping that Pelosi was the one being put in the ground.
Despicable and ....
