~pt: The post-truth is marching pwn

Trump on the cover of Spy Magazine in 1998. Don’t @ me.

Welcome back, dear readers. For real this time.

—Legal commentators missold Trump-Russia

The FBI suspected Donald Trump of secretly working on Russia’s behalf against US interests and opened a counterintelligence investigation targetting him that was soon after taken over Special Council Robert Mueller, the New York Times reported last night.

That means Trump’s efforts at obstructing that investigation would themselves fall under the investigation because they harm US counterintelligence and thereby benefits Russia, argues Ben Wittes of Lawfare. That means there was never any real line separating the “collusion” and “obstruction” parts of the investigation, nor separating its criminal and counterintelligence parts.

“What if the obstruction was the collision?” he writes.

Intelligence and foreign policy commenters were saying this all along. But, Trump’s people insisted on the distinction, for obvious reasons, and many mainstream legal commentators backed them up. The narrative — with obstruction-but-no-collusion as the default prediction — more or less became the mainstream. The Wittes’s piece then constitutes a huge admission of error on behalf of the media, writes Martin Longman in Washington Monthly.

We still don’t know what evidence prompted the FBI to react in such an extreme way, so maybe all this will look different in retrospect. Watch this space.

Charts from the study

— “Fake news” sharing is rare. Olds share almost 7x as much “fake news” as youngs

Scientists analyzed a year of Facebook activity of 3,500 survey takers and compared the links they shared to a list of known “fake news” domains. They found that only about 10 percent of people in their sample shared any “fake news” links at all, and, of those, the great majority shared very few.

Conservatives were more likely to link to “fake news” sites, which is to some extent explained by the fact that those sites generally favored pro-Trump content during the sample year, 2016.

The older a respondent was, the more likely he or she was to share the links.

— Fact-checkers sparred with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over their alleged ‘bias.’ But it ended on a high note. (Poynter)

Stories per week of every major outlet I could think of. Between all of them, 20,000 per week, or a million a year.

Steve King (R-IA) asked an interviewer when “white supremacy” became offensive. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said at a rally that her party should “impeach the motherfucker,” referring to Trump. [Media Matters]

The website of the American Reader, the hottest new literary magazine in town just a few years ago. SEO spammers have apparently purchased the site. Note the body text. I wrote a story a while back about this phenomenon.

AP posted this embarrassingly bad ‘both sides’ take on the government shutdown. Critics called them on it and they apologized.

Trump often edits in his own favor when he quotes already-favorable opinion TV hosts. [via Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star]

Not new, but I think this is a clever way to use social media

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