Year: 2016

More Americans Want Trump to Focus on Healthcare First

Buck Banks

21%

Of Americans want Trump to focus on the healthcare system during his first 100 days in the White House, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Jobs took second place with 16% of Americans hoping it would be Trump’s first agenda item, while immigration came third – picked by 14% of Americans.

I Have My Facts, You Have Yours

Buck Banks

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“What people believe prevails over the truth.”
— Sophocles, from “Sons of Aleus”

Following Barack Obama’s election as president, there was talk about how the nation had entered a post-racial era, which proved not to be true. Following Donald Trump’s election as president, we have entered a post-truth era, and there’s little doubt about that fact.

We now have slid from “truthiness,” Stephen Colbert’s funny little noun that means “the quality of seeming to be true according to one’s intuition, opinion or perception without regard to logic, factual evidence or the like,” a short distance down a very slippery slope to “post-truth.” The Oxford English Dictionary has selected “post-truth” as its word of the year. It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.

Its selection follows June’s Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election.

[…]

Fake News Out-Performed Real News in Election Run-Up

Buck Banks

8,711,000

Number of shares, reactions and comments generated on Facebook by 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs. “In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and others,” a BuzzFeed News analysis found.

Straight-Ticket Voting Hit 100 Percent in 2016

Buck Banks

100%

The 2016 election saw the largest wave of straight-ticket results for president and the U.S. Senate since the 17th Amendment established the popular election of senators in 1913 — another indication of the intense political polarization in the United States, according to Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball. All 33 states with Senate elections decided this year backed the same party for president and Senate.

Rand Paul Has Reservations About Bolton, Giuliani

Buck Banks

I will tell you something I haven’t told anybody else. I’ve had some conversation with some other Republican senators and I’m not the only one with some misgivings over both Giuliani and Bolton. And I haven’t met a Democrat that’s for either one of them. But I’ve met several Republicans that aren’t.

— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), in an interview on Hardball, on who might be the next Secretary of State.

Fake News Writer Claims Responsibility for Trump Win

Buck Banks

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it. … My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

— From an interview in the Washington Post with Paul Horner, a guy who makes $120K a year writing fake news that gets shared on social media.