Previous Troubling Reports

The misinformation or fake news I found this week comes from the Daily Mail article titled, California Democrats Put on the Backfoot as Wildfires and Criticism Rage. Political fallout may affect federal aid for California. The article is misleading, as the title suggests an in-depth discussion of potential federal aid restrictions for California, yet the content barely addresses this. Only about 5% of the article touches on the topic, including a vague quote from a Democratic strategist about Trump potentially withholding aid. The rest of the article focuses on criticizing Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for their handling of wildfires, while also highlighting social media attacks by Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The piece devolves into recounting political feuds rather than providing any substantial analysis of policy or federal aid implications. This misleading framing qualifies as misinformation, as it promises a policy-driven narrative but instead delivers political drama with no evidence to support claims of federal aid fallout.

The misinformation or fake news I found this week comes from the Daily Mail article titled, California Democrats Put on the Backfoot as Wildfires and Criticism Rage. Political fallout may affect federal aid for California. The article is misleading, as the title suggests an in-depth discussion of potential federal aid restrictions for California, yet the content barely addresses this. Only about 5% of the article touches on the topic, including a vague quote from a Democratic strategist about Trump potentially withholding aid. The rest of the article focuses on criticizing Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for their handling of wildfires, while also highlighting social media attacks by Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The piece devolves into recounting political feuds rather than providing any substantial analysis of policy or federal aid implications. This misleading framing qualifies as misinformation, as it promises a policy-driven narrative but instead delivers political drama with no evidence to support claims of federal aid fallout.

A social media post in the form of a 12 minute video claimed that a leading drug manufacturer violently assailed an antivaccine activist.The video is a poorly edited slob which clearly has an AI voiced Anderson Cooper and cut footage that states a fixed narrative that Pfizer Employees burned down a car. Whereas the only evidence of this is that we see the video of a burning car. Followed by an AI "fake" voice of Anderson Cooper that claims it was Pfizer. The rest of the video shows the clips of the woman's video. The source of the video which is health beat is a small Facebook channel that is one of many poorly created content farms on social media that tries to disguises itself as an "Authentic News Source" and uses many click bait titles such as these posts to drive engagement to their platform.

A social media post in the form of a 12 minute video claimed that a leading drug manufacturer violently assailed an antivaccine activist.The video is a poorly edited slob which clearly has an AI voiced Anderson Cooper and cut footage that states a fixed narrative that Pfizer Employees burned down a car. Whereas the only evidence of this is that we see the video of a burning car. Followed by an AI "fake" voice of Anderson Cooper that claims it was Pfizer. The rest of the video shows the clips of the woman's video. The source of the video which is health beat is a small Facebook channel that is one of many poorly created content farms on social media that tries to disguises itself as an "Authentic News Source" and uses many click bait titles such as these posts to drive engagement to their platform.

The title alone contains emotional triggering words that strictly inflame Governor Newsom, along with the article itself. The article assumes negatively on particular actions that Newsom conducted, and cites evidence of these actions using their own news media articles. These articles are also personally opinionated and do not use any non-biased language when presenting facts about the situations it cites.

The title alone contains emotional triggering words that strictly inflame Governor Newsom, along with the article itself. The article assumes negatively on particular actions that Newsom conducted, and cites evidence of these actions using their own news media articles. These articles are also personally opinionated and do not use any non-biased language when presenting facts about the situations it cites.

This article attempts to highlight budget cuts in California's wildfire and forest resilience programs that amounted up to 100 million dollars. Whenever there is a natural disaster, some media sources may find it prudent to use their outlets to spur animosity towards certain officials. What this article then outlines (and conveniently leaves out of the headline) is that the California FIRE budget has nearly doubled from 2 billion to 4 billion dollars in the last 7 years, most of which under Gavin Newsoms leadership. Even though the article does eventually state this, I always find it troubling when articles have headlines like this for the sake of clickbaiting.

The article is troubling because it uses a very concrete voice when expressing subjective claims. For example, the article calls the UK's Reform party as far-right, a title the party has rejected and even sued the BBC for using. Furthermore, it calls Tommy Robinson a fascist in the sub-heading, typically a place for an objective truth - not an opinion or a subjective claim.

The author uses crime cases in his advocation for stricter border policies, writing, "...the death of Laken Riley, a Georgia college student, would bring the issue of migrant crime back to the headlines. Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal immigrant...was charged with her murder. In July, two illegal immigrants were arrested on capital murder charges in the death of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston. The men are accused of luring her under a bridge, tying her up and killing her before throwing her body into a river...While immigration activists would point to stats suggesting that immigrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens, those talking points appeared to do little to stem the outrage about the deaths of people at the hands of illegal immigrants who conservatives argued shouldn't have been let into the country in the first place." The author seeks to create negative emotions in the reader, and use these emotions to make the reader biased against illegal immigrants.

The article has a bias in favor of Trump. This is seen when the author writes, "Gray said there are clear strategic reasons for the US to be interested in acquiring Greenland, which is why Trump’s comments about it deserve special attention." The author justifies Trump's idea of obtaining Greenland, and does not address any negative views of this idea.

The content is basically based on the perspective of suburban commuting drivers, which persuasively criticizes the policy but disregards the merits of the congestion pricing policy brought to service vehicles, bike commuters, pedestrians, etc. who live in the heart of Manhattan or Queens.

A misleading title that makes it seem that the Democratic party is pro "White" and "far-right" terrorism, even though the article focuses on the hypocrisy of select democratic party individuals believing that white terrorism is more damaging versus ISIS/al-Qaeda. This is misleading as it frames the party to excuse ISIS/al-Qaeda and only focus on white supremacy, even though there is no evidence presented to show the democratic party excusing ISIS/al-Qaeda. The article also only references quotes made previously to the New Orleans attack, yet uses those quotes as links to the New Orleans attack. A more accurate approach would be to, instead, pull quotes of certain Democratic party individuals' responses to the attack.