~pt: The post-truth is marching pwn
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.
— “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)