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You might argue that I’m no better than Mike by filtering the stories I don’t like from sites I don’t agree with. The big difference, though, is that the only news I consume on Facebook is related to the babies, pets, and baby pets of my friends and family. If you want to discuss politics then you’ll have to buy me a drink first so we can talk face to face. See, Facebook doesn’t care about the veracity of the political news being shared just so long as people spend lots of time viewing ads while sharing it. That’s fine for cat videos, gadgets, and recipes, but surely political news requires a different set of personalization algorithms. Baseless conspiracy theories and outright lies should be downranked just as quickly as the clickbait articles Facebook demoted in August. If Google News can introduce a nonpartisan fact checking feature then surely Facebook could do the same. It would go a long way in helping Mike and I, and the nation, to become friends again....
The cover of Time’s Oct. 24th issue, hitting newsstands soon, features an image trumping its Aug. 22nd cover, literally. Both feature versions of similar illustrations by artist Edel Rodriguez -- the first featuring a single-word cover line,“Meltdown; the second featuring two words: “Total Meltdown.” The covers are striking for another reason. Time magazine usually reserves black background covers for extremely important stories.
Debate strategies leaked by insiders in advance
We were able to speak with campaign insiders on both sides and can now disclose in advance their debate strategies and key messages for tonight. You read it here first!
It suddenly hit me while listening to another Trump tirade. What happened next nearly blew my mind.
Not to give The Donald too much credit for his undisciplined tweeting but suddenly I realized that his entire campaign is built on a foundation of clickbait.
The very same linkbait that drives millions of spam pageviews online daily is also what allowed him to outfox 16 other serious Republican presidential candidates.
And when the presidential campaign debates take place, Hillary won’t have a chance!...
Hillary Clinton is devouring briefing book after briefing book about Donald Trump's policy positions, personality and politics. She's watching highlight reels, taking notes and studying his style -- particularly when he's in attack mode. Trump, meanwhile, is doing his thinking out loud -- mulling over policies and strategies in rolling conversations with top campaign aides and a band of informal advisers that includes Roger Ailes and Rudy Giuliani. Less than four weeks from the first of three presidential debates -- on September 26 at Hofstra University in New York -- the candidates are preparing for an unpredictable, high-stakes night....
These past three weeks have been tough for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. That's reflected in the new Time magazine cover featuring an orange Trump melting down.
Trump's campaign has been unconventional since the get-go -- which has resulted in a number of standout magazine and tabloid newspaper covers. Here are some of the most memorable so far...
Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.
Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,” including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting....
A new clip from the executive producers of The Simpsons finds Homer and Marge contemplating their votes. WHY WE CARE: The Simpsons does not shy away from making political statements. The show has been openly critical of its Fox network overlords at News Corp for decades, roasted every sitting president since 1989, and outsourced a couch gag to Banksy that criticized the makers of Simpsons merchandise. Now the producers behind the show are weighing in on the impending November election. Contrary to The Simpsons' long-ago prophecy that Donald Trump would be president someday, it seems like an orange White House is something our beloved yellow friends do not want—or at least Marge doesn't. The fact that the political ad in this short clip that sways her is "paid for by Americans who really are starting to miss Obama" further clarifies just where the show's creators are coming from. Watch another short Simpsons video, "Trumptastic...
The Times reporters Nick Confessore, Maggie Haberman, Adam Nagourney and Alan Rappeport provided real-time analysis of the final night of the Democratic National Convention, featuring Chelsea andHillary Clinton. Check out the highlights.
Since he lost his TV reporting job last year, Jarrett Hill has been looking for his next opportunity. It presented itself in an unexpected way. Hill was sitting at a corner table Monday night in a Culver City Starbucks, drinking a venti iced coffee and watching the Republican National Convention on an MSNBC live stream. As Melania Trump spoke, she uttered a phrase that the 31-year-old California native had heard once before — from First Lady Michelle Obama. “… the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams …,” Melania Trump said during her address to the Republican National Convention. Instinctively, Hill finished the phrase aloud to his laptop screen: “… and your willingness to work for them.” “Kind of like a song that you haven’t heard in a long time and you remember the lyrics as you hear them. Or a movie that you know the line to and you kind of respond to it,” he said. He recalled the words from Michelle Obama’s speech because, he said, he had thought to himself at the time that it was “really beautifully written.” “I believe I even wrote it down or typed it,” Hill said. “Obviously having no idea that eight years later I’d hear them again from a woman who wanted to be first lady speaking at a convention in front of 40 million people.”...
Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention was only 8% specific policy promises. On the other hand, by my word-for-word calculation, 20% of it was criticism of Trump’s opponents, 21% was fearmongering, and the rest was mostly vague generalities and cheerleading. Based on this speech, you really can’t identify what you’ll be getting if this guy gets elected — but you certainly know what to be afraid of it he doesn’t. Let me break it down for you. I used the Washington Post’s version of the planned text of the speech. Then I marked it up in different colors to represent different elements: vague promises, passive promises that something will magically happen, overarching proclamations, criticism of opponents and elites — and the few actual promises. You can see my analysis in the color-coded graphic at the end of this post, and you can see the color-coded text in my Google Document of the speech....
Parts of Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention are strikingly similar to Michelle Obama’s speech from eight years ago. How does this happen? Plagiarism at this level is typically the result of sloppiness, not outright theft. If you don’t want this to happen to you, then you need to change how you work. What Melania Trump said sounds awfully familiar. In 2008, here’s what Michelle Obama said, in part (most of the highlights in these passages, which show the similar parts, are from a Wall Street Journal article about the plagiarism). Like my family, they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities they never had themselves. And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children—and all children in this nation—to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them....
It was early evening in Politico’s newsroom, four days before the Iowa caucuses. Reporters were working sources and checking TV screens as a presidential debate was about to get under way. But tonight, January 28, Politico’s biggest story was about itself. Outside news organizations were reporting a massive, unexpected overhaul of the company’s leadership. Now executives were scrambling to respond. In a glass-enclosed office at the far end of the newsroom, CEO Jim VandeHei was hunkered down alongside chief operating officer Kim Kingsley and chief revenue officer Roy Schwartz, hurriedly crafting a statement announcing that they—along with marquee reporter Mike Allen—were leaving the company. After months of behind-the-scenes drama, Washington’s most successful media partnership in a generation was busting apart. And all the players had to get their stories straight....
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Excitement is building for the final of the three US Presidential debates.
We’re excited to have a scoop about Donald Trump’s final debate strategy courtesy of a leaked email shared with Sean Hannity and me (The PR Coach) from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Polling reveals Trump opportunity
Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway’s secret polls have turned up some potentially explosive insight that could help the Trump campaign mount a PR and political comeback according to the email from Conway to Trump.
The secret national poll of registered voters found BBQ was more popular than Hillary Clinton by a whopping margin of 76% to 24% nationally....
There’s a Word for Using Truthful Facts to Deceive: Paltering Virtually everyone lies when we interact or communicate with others. Hard to believe? Well, here is what the evidence tells us: people (you and me included!) tell, on average, one or two lies per day. Many of these lies are harmless: e.g., giving a spouse or friend a compliment we really don’t mean. Others, however, when mixed in with actual facts, have important consequences. Take politics, where candidates all too frequently employ such distortions to influence voters.For example, in the U.S. vice-presidential debate between Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence, Kaine pushed Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, to release his tax returns. (Trump has said he’d do it once the Internal Revenue Service completed an ongoing audit.) Kaine asserted that “Richard Nixon released tax returns when he was under audit,” leaving the impression that Nixon, a Republican, did so while running for re-election, creating a precedent for Trump. But as the New York Times pointed out, “Mr. Nixon released his taxes while under audit — but it was not until a year after his 1972 re-election.” Another recent example is Trump’s response in the September 26 presidential debate to a question about a federal lawsuit that charged his family’s company with housing discrimination. His answer was: “When I was really young, I went into my father’s company. We, along with many, many, many other companies, throughout the country — it was a federal lawsuit — were sued. We settled the suit with zero — no admission of guilt. It was very easy to do. But they sued many people.”...
More than 60% of US cable TV political ad spending is coming from political action committees (PACs) and issues advertisers, according to data from Viamedia on ads served on its platform between January and August 2016. Twice as much political ad spending is coming from PACs and issues advertisers than from down-ballot campaigns, which mostly includes spending by candidates for the US House of Representatives and Senate. And more than six times as much spending is coming from PACs and issues advertisers than from presidential campaigns. TV is still the dominant destination for political ad spend, and research from Nomura Securities indicates that cable TV, which makes up the second-largest share, is estimated to see $1.10 billion this year, or 10.8% of total US political ad spend.Generally, internet users learn most about politics from TV. Indeed, a survey from YuMe revealed that 69% of US internet users find TV news to be the most effective political marketing channel. And while TV may be a significant channel for candidates to advertise on, not everyone is doing so....
If you want some light reading for eternity, Google the question “is the media biased.” The question is a staple of both the political right and the socialist left. Either The Media is partisan against Republicans as part of our obvious liberal agenda, or the Corporate Media insidiously perpetuates the status quo by shutting out dissenting voices and uncomfortable narratives in favor of crony capitalism and entrenched privilege. Choose your favorite. They’re both idiotic....
It looked like a garden-variety promotional tweet, designed to attract attention to the AP’s big investigation into allegations of conflict of interest on the part of the Democratic presidential candidate. But by trying too hard to drum up interest in the piece, the wire service made itself the target instead.
The post made a significant, and startling, claim. Namely, that “more than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.” Surely this was compelling evidence of a conflict.
As sharp-eyed reporters for competing news outlets noted within minutes of the tweet and article being posted, however, this statistic was only true if you ignored the thousands of government officials, dignitaries, and so on that Clinton met in her capacity as Secretary of State....
He might not have much chance of winning, and he may not command the same attention in the news cycle, but there's another hopeful in the 2016 presidential election besides Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump: libertarian Gary Johnson, a socially liberal, fiscal conservative whose campaign rests on the idea that he can bridge the divide between the left and the right. Unfortunately, the branding of the Johnson campaign wasn't getting that idea across, so as a fun exercise, the Florida-based branding agency Spark decided to mock up an identity for him.
Then things got weird. Without crediting Spark or paying for the work, a contractor for the Johnson campaign stole Spark's brand identity wholesale. To add insult to injury, the contractor didn't even steal the work correctly. The execution was so bad, Spark felt obliged to publicly release a style guide to its own pilfered work, in the hopes that the Johnson campaign would start using it right.
In a statement to Co.Design, the Johnson campaign acknowledged the screw-up. "At the senior level of the campaign, we were completely unaware until receiving a media inquiry Saturday evening that our website contractor had seen and clearly used the concept and design ideas posted on the web by Spark," said Joe Hunter, communications director for the Johnson campaign. "Upon seeing the obvious connection, we immediately contacted Spark and have since had a very constructive conversation with them—hopefully with no hard feelings. It was never our intent to use anyone's creative work, spec or otherwise, without giving appropriate credit, and we regret that our contractor apparently failed to communicate our desire to use Spark's work. It won't happen again, and we look forward to continued conversations with Spark about putting their excellent work to good use in the campaign."...
Designed by Alicia Parlapiano and Adam Pearce for the New York Times, this short series of data visualizations tell a very clear story about how Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees For the 2016 Presidential election. The United States is home to 324 million people. Each square here represents 1 million people.103 million of them are children, noncitizens or ineligible felons, and they do not have the right to vote. 88 million eligible adults do not vote at all, even in general elections. An additional 73 million did not vote in the primaries this year, but will most likely vote in the general election. The remaining 60 million people voted in the primaries: about 30 million each for Republicans and Democrats. But half of the primary voters chose other candidates. Just 14 percent of eligible adults — 9 percent of the whole nation — voted for either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton....
I didn’t think it was possible for Donald Trump to say anything more despicable than he has already served up in this campaign. But this weekend the GOP presidential nominee did just that twice.
First, he went after Ghazala Khan, the mother of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan who had received a Purple Heart for bravery after being killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And then stunningly Trump equated his work as a businessman as being a “sacrifice” akin to the sacrifice made by the brave women and men who have served in our nation’s armed forces.
With respect to Mrs. Khan, Trump was asked by Maureen Dowd on Saturday what was his reaction to ”the poignant appearance of Muslim lawyer Khizr Khan and his wife” at the DNC. Did Trump respond by acknowledging Captain Khan’s sacrifice or offer words of support for these Gold Star parents? Nope, instead he answered with one sentence: “I’d like to hear his wife say something.” (How would his wife saying anything change in any way Capt. Khan’s sacrifice or his parents’ loss?!)
Social media is playing a transformative role in this presidential election. Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton are heavily utilizing social media platforms to connect with voters. And it’s working.Millions of people follow Trump and Clinton on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the numbers are growing every day. Via these platforms, people are tuning in to see what the candidates have to say, whether Clinton and Trump’s platforms align with their views. People are invested in the Clinton and Trump brands. After rising to the top of the political social sphere, it’s safe to say Trump and Clinton can teach us a few things about using social media to boost our own personal branding. Here are five social media takeaways from Clinton and Trump’s social media campaigning....
Below are Donald Trump's remarks accepting the Republican nomination as delivered. Where text is in bolded, it denotes a place where Trump's comment deviated from the original draft that leaked to the press. Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States....
Boris Johnson’s latest column for the Telegraph is a marvellous specimen of an emergent school of political thought: Bloody Brilliant Brexit Britishism. Here’s a snippet:
And that gives us a chance not just to do new trade deals, but to think of ourselves once again as a truly global Britain using our unique voice — humane, compassionate, principled — to do good around the world, and to exploit growth markets to the full. link
How splendid. Here’s another cracking example of the genre: Priti Patel‘s got some cracking news, just wait til you hear this, guys!
We are already seeing our friends in the Anglosphere sending us positive messages on future trade deals, and it is clear that the US wants us at the front of the queue rather than the back…As a beacon of global free trade and enterprise, we should go into our negotiations with the EU with confidence that we can achieve fair terms of withdrawal. link
Cool! What are you all worrying about, you idiots, we’re a beacon! We’ve got confidence! And, and and and, we’ve got some amazingly positive messages, and — holy shit! — have you seen how big these imaginary trade deals are?!...
Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated.
Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ”
Schwartz had ghostwritten Trump’s 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint byline on the cover, half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list, thirteen of them at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought, generating several million dollars in royalties. The book expanded Trump’s renown far beyond New York City, making him an emblem of the successful tycoon. Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”
Starting in late 1985, Schwartz spent eighteen months with Trump—camping out in his office, joining him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings, and spending weekends with him at his Manhattan apartment and his Florida estate. During that period, Schwartz felt, he had got to know him better than almost anyone else outside the Trump family. Until Schwartz posted the tweet, though, he had not spoken publicly about Trump for decades. It had never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter, and he had been glad to move on. But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.”
It seemed improbable that Trump’s campaign would succeed, so Schwartz told himself that he needn’t worry much. But, as Trump denounced Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” near the end of the speech, Schwartz felt anxious. He had spent hundreds of hours observing Trump firsthand, and felt that he had an unusually deep understanding of what he regarded as Trump’s beguiling strengths and disqualifying weaknesses. Many Americans, however, saw Trump as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business—a mythical image that Schwartz had helped create. “It pays to trust your instincts,” Trump says in the book, adding that he was set to make hundreds of millions of dollars after buying a hotel that he hadn’t even walked through....
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Very interesting analysis of Facebook and fact checking.