Fact Checking

Curdling the Milk of Human Kindness

Sometimes it takes some digging to get to the truth I guess you might call this the era of fake news, so our biggest challenge as informed citizens is to get real and not live life like a reality show. It’s about exploiting our biases with adulterated or downright phony stories that get passed along until they amass hundreds of thousands, even millions, of believers. The 21st Century version is nurtured and promulgated by social media and [...]

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Trying to Stem an “Epidemic of Lying”

Staying ignorant of the truth is literally a no-brainer. We live in an epidemic of lying. Research shows that about 60 percent of adults lie at least once in a ten-minute conversation. About 40 percent lie on their resumes, and 90 percent lie on their online dating profiles. — Dr. Amit Sood, Director of Research, Mayo Clinic’s Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why people lie, and why some seem incapable [...]

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Fact-Checking More Important Than Ever to Voters

I didn’t get out much the last half of February and much of March so, as I recovered from my surgery. I watched a lot of television, read a lot of news and opinions. Much of it was fueled by people campaigning for president, and its tough to sort through the bombardment so many self-serving lies and exaggerations. It’s as if politics itself has become reality television, which means it isn’t real at all. Two of Donald Trump’s adult [...]

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By |2022-01-24T09:10:39+00:00June 8, 2016|Discrimination, Elections, Fact Checking, Fairness, Politics|

Feasting on Fake News and Loving It

I know a little something about fake news. I manufactured a news article years ago in an April 1st issue of another newspaper and stirred up a storm of controversy. Anyone who read beyond the headline and the introductory paragraphs would recognize that it was not on the up and up. That’s on the up and up, as in factual and legitimate, and the article had become so outrageous by the final sentence, concluding, of course, with “April Fool!” [...]

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