L’oppression mentale totalitaire est faite de piqûres de moustiques et non de grands coups sur la tête. (…) Quel fut le moyen de propagande le plus puissant de l’hitlérisme? Etaient-ce les discours isolés de Hitler et de Goebbels, leurs déclarations à tel ou tel sujet, leurs propos haineux sur le judaïsme, sur le bolchevisme? Non, incontestablement, car beaucoup de choses demeuraient incomprises par la masse ou l’ennuyaient, du fait de leur éternelle répétition.[…] Non, l’effet le plus puissant ne fut pas produit par des discours isolés, ni par des articles ou des tracts, ni par des affiches ou des drapeaux, il ne fut obtenu par rien de ce qu’on était forcé d’enregistrer par la pensée ou la perception. Le nazisme s’insinua dans la chair et le sang du grand nombre à travers des expressions isolées, des tournures, des formes syntaxiques qui s’imposaient à des millions d’exemplaires et qui furent adoptées de façon mécanique et inconsciente. Victor Klemperer (LTI, la langue du IIIe Reich)
Parmi les hommes, ce sont ordinairement ceux qui réfléchissent le moins qui ont le plus le talent de l’imitation. Buffon
La tendance à l’imitation est vivace surtout chez les sauvages. Darwin
Comme la faculté d’imitation dépend de la faculté d’observation, elle se développera d’autant plus chez les animaux qu’ils seront plus intelligents. George John Romanes
Presque aucun des fidèles ne se retenait de s’esclaffer, et ils avaient l’air d’une bande d’anthropophages chez qui une blessure faite à un blanc a réveillé le goût du sang. Car l’instinct d’imitation et l’absence de courage gouvernent les sociétés comme les foules. Et tout le monde rit de quelqu’un dont on voit se moquer, quitte à le vénérer dix ans plus tard dans un cercle où il est admiré. C’est de la même façon que le peuple chasse ou acclame les rois. Marcel Proust
Pour qu’il y ait cette unanimité dans les deux sens, un mimétisme de foule doit chaque fois jouer. Les membres de la communauté s’influencent réciproquement, ils s’imitent les uns les autres dans l’adulation fanatique puis dans l’hostilité plus fanatique encore. René Girard
Les journalistes moyens à qui nous parlons ont 27 ans et leur seule expérience de journaliste, c’est de suivre les campagnes politiques. C’est un changement radical. Ils ne savent littéralement rien. (…) Nous avons créé une chambre d’écho. Ils disaient des choses qui validaient ce que nous leur avions donné à dire. Ben Rhodes (conseiller-adjoint à la sécurité extérieure d’Obama)
Media feeding frenzies have become almost commonplace in recent years, as Gary Hart, Oliver North, Vice President Dan Quayle and Speaker of the House Jim Wright, among many others, could readily attest. But in McMartin, the media seemed especially zealous–in large part because of the monstrous, bizarre and seemingly incredible nature of the original accusations. More than most big stories, McMartin at times exposed basic flaws in the way the contemporary news organizations function. Pack journalism. Laziness. Superficiality. Cozy relationships with prosecutors. A competitive zeal that sends reporters off in a frantic search to be first with the latest shocking allegation, responsible journalism be damned. A tradition that often discourages reporters from raising key questions if they aren’t first brought up by the principals in a story. In the early months of the case in particular, reporters and editors often abandoned two of their most cherished and widely trumpeted traditions–fairness and skepticism. As most reporters now sheepishly admit–and as the record clearly shows–the media frequently plunged into hysteria, sensationalism and what one editor calls « a lynch mob syndrome. » On so volatile an issue in an election year, defense attorneys maintain, that helped make it all but inevitable that the case would be prosecuted on a scale greater than the actual evidence warranted. There were stories about child prostitution and massive child pornography rings, stories about children being exchanged between preschools for sexual purposes, stories about a connection between alleged molestation at McMartin and a murder eight years earlier. None of these charges was ultimately proved, but the media largely acted in a pack, as it so often does on big events, and reporters’ stories, in print and on the air, fed on one another, creating an echo chamber of horrors. The LA Times
La presse accréditée à la Maison-Blanche est-elle victime du syndrome de Stockholm? Dans un livre devenu un classique du reportage politique américain, The Boys on the Bus, le reporter de Rolling Stone Timothy Crouse comparait en 1973 le convoi de la presse présidentielle sous Nixon à «un affreux petit camp de prisonniers de guerre, le chouchou du commandant, un officier débutant bien dressé et trop zélé, persécutant les prisonniers, étudiant leurs failles, récompensant leurs échecs, les punissant pour leurs succès et les encourageant à se dénoncer mutuellement». Jean-Marie Pottier
Les experts politiques ne sont pas un groupe très diversifié et ont tendance à accorder beaucoup de confiance aux opinions de leurs confrères et des autres membres de l’establishment politique. Une fois établi, le consensus tend à se renforcer jusqu’à et à moins que ne viennent l’interrompre des preuves absolument irréfutables. Les médias sociaux, Twitter en particulier, ne peuvent qu’aggraver encore le phénomène de pensée de groupe jusqu’à la création d’une véritable chambre d’écho. (…) Depuis au moins l’époque des « Boys on the bus, » le journalisme politique souffre d’une mentalité de meute. Les événements tels que les conventions et les débats rassemblent dans la même salle des milliers de journalistes; il suffit d’assister à l’un de ces événements pour presque littéralement sentir la nouvelle doxa se fabriquer en temps réel. Nate Silver
Political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber. James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” argues that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions: Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.” Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.” Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.” Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.” Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation. While Surowiecki usually has something like a financial or betting market in mind when he refers to “aggregation,” the broader idea is that there’s some way for individuals to exchange their opinions instead of keeping them to themselves. And my gosh, do political journalists have a lot of ways to share their opinions with one another, whether through their columns, at major events such as the political conventions or, especially, through Twitter. But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably along those dimensions. Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much. And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971. The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views — and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment — there’s been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media. Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, I’ve found the reception of “data journalists” by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions. Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of “The Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality. Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time. (Consider how a consensus formed that Romney won the first debate in 2012 when it had barely even started, for instance.) Social media — Twitter in particular — can amplify these information cascades, with a single tweet receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions and shaping the way entire issues are framed. As a result, it can be largely arbitrary which storylines gain traction and which ones don’t. What seems like a multiplicity of perspectives might just be one or two, duplicated many times over. Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesn’t necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as we’ve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives — for instance, that they were “decreasingly representative of contemporary America” — and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasn’t more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially. There was once a notion that whatever challenges the internet created for journalism’s business model, it might at least lead readers to a more geographically and philosophically diverse array of perspectives. But it’s not clear that’s happening, either. Instead, based on data from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, the top news sources (such as the Times, The Washington Post and Politico) have earned progressively more influence over the past decade: The share of total exposure for the top five news sources climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure, this is one sign the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late ’aughts either folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations. Thus, blogs and local newspapers — two of the better checks on Northeast Corridor conventional wisdom run amok — have both had less of a say in the conversation. All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. Likewise, improving diversity is liable to be a challenge, especially because the sort of diversity that Surowiecki is concerned with will require making improvements on multiple fronts (demographic diversity, political diversity, diversity of skill sets). Still, the research Surowiecki cites is emphatic that there are diminishing returns to having too many of the same types of people in small groups or organizations. Teams that consist entirely of high-IQ people may underperform groups that contain a mix of high-IQ and medium-IQ participants, for example, because the high-IQ people are likely to have redundant strengths and similar blind spots. That leaves independence. In some ways the best hope for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment: Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, it’s foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly — and yet has so often been wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way. Nate Silver
Dans les médias de la communication, une chambre d’écho, ou chambre d’écho médiatique est une description métaphorique d’une situation dans laquelle l’information, les idées, ou les croyances sont amplifiées ou renforcées par la communication et la répétition dans un système défini. Il s’agit d’une analogie avec la chambre d’écho acoustique, ou chambre réverbérante, dans laquelle les sons sont réverbérés par les murs. À l’intérieur d’une chambre d’écho médiatique, les sources ne sont généralement pas remises en question et les points de vues opposés sont censurés ou sous-représentés. John Scruggs, lobbyiste chez le cigarettier Philip Morris, décrit en 1998 deux mécanismes de ce qu’il appelle les «chambres d’écho». Le premier consiste en la répétition d’un même message par différentes sources. Le second mécanisme consiste en la diffusion de messages similaires mais complémentaires par une seule source. Scruggs décrit la chambre d’écho comme stratégie pour augmenter la crédibilité de certaines informations au regard d’une audience cible. Avec la démocratisation de l’internet et l’arrivée des médias sociaux, les chambres d’écho se sont multipliées. Les algorithmes des réseaux sociaux agissent comme des filtres et engendrent ce qu’on a nommé des bulles de filtres. L’utilisateur à l’intérieur d’une telle bulle obtient de l’information triée à son insu en fonction de son activité sur un réseau. L’accessibilité accrue aux informations correspondant aux opinions des individus fait que ces derniers sont moins exposés à des opinions différentes des leurs. Dans les chambres d’échos, les opinions opposées à celles de la majorité sont peu diffusées et, lorsqu’elles le sont, sont souvent la cible d’attaques par cette majorité pour les discréditer. Lorsqu’une information est reprise par de nombreux médias, elle peut être déformée, exagérée, jusqu’à être plus ou moins dénaturée. En augmentant l’exposition à une fausse rumeur, sa crédibilité a tendance à augmenter. À l’intérieur d’une chambre d’écho, il peut ainsi arriver qu’une majorité d’individus croient en une version dénaturée d’une information véridique, ou en une information carrément fausse. Wikipédia
With ten people shot and four killed, this obviously meets the media’s current definition of a mass shooting. So where was the outrage? Where were the calls for new gun control laws? How did this tragedy turn into a non-story? First of all, the victims were all adult males from the Hmong community. And while police said they didn’t find any ties to gang activity among the victims, they were looking into a recent “disturbance” between some of them and members of one of the local Hmong gangs. (Fresno has had problems with gang violence, including Hmong groups, for quite a while now.) Another factor is the fact that police reported the assailants using semiautomatic handguns. The event was reportedly over pretty quickly, so they probably weren’t using collections of extended magazines. In other words, this mass shooting is uninteresting to much of the media because it fails all the normal tests and doesn’t fit in with the narrative. Had the men at least been using “assault rifles” they might have merited a bit more coverage. But those events are vanishingly rare because most gang members are well aware that it’s tough to hide a long gun when walking down the street to attack someone or while fleeing the scene afterward. Further, if initial reports prove accurate, this was an incident of adult Asian people shooting other adult Asian people. And most of the press has about as much interest in that story as one where black gang members are shooting other black people. In short… basically none. It’s reminiscent of the Bunny Friend Park shooting in New Orleans back in 2015. It was the second-largest mass shooting of the year in the United States. Seventeen people were shot in the middle of a public festival but if you didn’t live in New Orleans or subscribe to the Times-Picayune, you probably never heard about it. Why? Because it was two rival gangs composed primarily of African-Americans settling a turf war. Unfortunately, they were such poor marksmen that almost all of the victims were bystanders, including a young boy who was shot through the spine and will likely spend his life in a wheelchair. So the Fresno shooting has effectively already gone down the memory hole, while the last school shooting (that claimed fewer victims) is still popping up in the news a week later. Hot air
Les États-Unis ont « le plus haut taux d’enfants en détention au monde ». Est-ce que ça vaut la peine d’être signalé ? Peut-être, peut-être pas. Néanmoins, l’Agence France-Presse, ou AFP, et Reuters l’ont signalé, attribuant l’information à une « étude des Nations Unies » sur les enfants migrants détenus à la frontière entre les États-Unis et le Mexique. Puis les deux agences sont revenues sur leur déclaration. Supprimée, retirée, démolie. S’ils avaient pu utiliser l’un de ces hommes en noir, ils l’auraient fait. Les deux agences de presse ont expliqué que, voyez-vous, les données de l’ONU dataient de 2015 – dans le cadre d’une répression à la frontière qui avait commencé des années auparavant. Nous savons tous qui était le président en 2015. Ce n’était pas ce monstre maléfique qu’est le président Trump. C’était ce gentil, compatissant, monstre de garderie qu’était le président Barack Obama. Zap. L’histoire a fait passer Obama pour le méchant. Donc l’histoire a été retirée. Pas mise à jour ou corrigée, supprimée. Je sais que c’est un environnement médiatique dense. Qui peut suivre ? Mais essayez de vous souvenir de celle-ci, car elle est instructive. Les gens croient que les organes de presse fabriquent délibérément des fausses nouvelles, mais c’est rarement le cas. Les fausses nouvelles sont un problème qui surgit ici et là, mais les attaques beaucoup plus systématiques et profondément ancrées contre la vérité sont les distorsions quotidiennes et désinvoltes des journalistes. L’AFP et Reuters ont supprimé une histoire qui était, dans un sens strict, vraie – une étude de l’ONU a affirmé que les États-Unis avaient quelque 100 000 enfants en détention liée aux migrations. L’ONU est horriblement partiale contre l’Amérique et l’Occident. Pourtant, sur le plan du journalisme paresseux et axé sur la diffusion de communiqués de presse, l’histoire des enfants enfermés n’avait qu’une validité minimale. Ce que les agences ne semblaient pas apprécier, c’était l’implication de l’histoire : Obama, plutôt que Trump, a enfermé beaucoup d’enfants. C’est ce qui est important : non pas que l’AFP et Reuters aient supprimé une histoire, mais que l’implication de l’histoire signifie quelque chose pour eux. Chaque fois que vous lisez quelque chose de l’AFP et de Reuters (et de CNN et du Washington Post), vous devriez penser non pas ‘C’est une fausse nouvelle’ mais : ‘Quel est l’ordre du jour ?’ Pour paraphraser le commentaire tristement célèbre et instructif de Chuck Schumer sur la CIA, les médias ont six façons de vous faire penser ce qu’ils veulent que vous pensiez, dont aucune ne consiste à inventer des choses. L’une d’elles consiste à ne pas communiquer les choses. Les nouvelles qui ne sont pas mentionnées n’arrivent pas au public. Les cotes d’approbation d’Obama étaient pour la plupart très basses, comparables à celles de Trump, généralement dans les 40%. Les sondages le disaient, et les Ron Burgundy ne le signalaient tout simplement pas. Trump ne bénéficie pas de cette courtoisie. Il ne peut pas non plus être associé à de bonnes nouvelles. Un récent sondage de Newsbusters a révélé que, sur une récente période de six semaines, même pas un pour cent des médias ayant rapporté des nouvelles sur l’administration de Trump ont mentionné des mesures économiques positives. Une autre astuce consiste à rapporter sobrement les propositions politiques du politicien un, mais en se concentrant entièrement sur les mésaventures et les controverses mesquines du politicien deux. Vous pourriez, si vous êtes un consommateur d’actualités, avoir l’impression que la sénatrice Elizabeth Warren a un ensemble de plans sobres et bien raisonnés. Ces plans sont, cependant, si farfelus qu’ils sont à couper le souffle. Elle a promis 20,5 billions de dollars en nouvelles dépenses fédérales, soit une augmentation de 40 % par rapport aux montants actuels. Et pourtant, Warren n’est pas une candidate que les médias dépeignent comme déséquilibrée. Pendant ce temps, les gaffes des démocrates suscitent très peu d’intérêt . (…) Une autre astuce consiste à décider qu’une affaire qui fait avancer le mauvais récit est simplement une « nouvelle locale », et ne mérite donc pas l’attention des grands médias. Tout crime commis par des migrants illégaux peut être ignoré sans problème par CNN, mais tout crime associé à l’aile droite devient une cause de consternation nationale et d’introspection. Cette semaine, CNN a fait un reportage de grande envergure impliquant les talents de cinq reporters après que personne de l’Université de Syracuse ait envoyé un manifeste de la suprématie blanche à « plusieurs » téléphones portables et que des graffitis racistes aient été découverts dans une résidence. Auparavant, des incidents similaires sur le campus s’étaient avérés être basés sur des canulars. En cas de dissipation de cette histoire, CNN peut affirmer avec justesse: nous ne faisions que rapporter que les étudiants étaient effrayés. L’impression créée par un millier de récits de ce genre – que l’Amérique de 2019 est un cauchemar de la suprématie blanche – persistera tout de même. Utiliser ou ignorer les faits selon qu’ils créent ou non l’impression souhaitée est le principal objectif des médias d’aujourd’hui. NY Post
Séparer les enfants de leurs parents, comme cela a été fait par l’administration Trump, même de jeunes enfants, à la frontière avec le Mexique (…) constitue un traitement inhumain à la fois pour les parents et pour l’enfant. Manfred Nowak
Plus de 100 000 enfants sont actuellement détenus en lien avec l’immigration aux Etats-Unis. Ce total comprend les enfants détenus avec leurs parents et les mineurs détenus séparément, a affirmé lundi 18 novembre l’ONU. Plus précisément, « le nombre total des (enfants) détenus est de 103 000 », a déclaré à l’AFP Manfred Nowak, principal auteur de l’Etude globale des Nations unies sur les enfants privés de liberté. Il a qualifié de « prudente » cette estimation, basée sur les chiffres officiels ainsi que sur des sources complémentaires « très fiables ». Au niveau mondial, ce sont au moins 330 000 enfants qui sont détenus dans 80 pays pour des raisons liées aux migrations, selon cette étude. « Un traitement inhumain à la fois pour les parents et pour l’enfant » Selon Manfred Nowak, le nombre de 103 000 enfants détenus aux Etats-Unis comprend les mineurs non accompagnés, ceux qui ont été arrêtés avec leurs proches, et ceux qui ont été séparés de leurs parents avant la détention. L’étude examine notamment les violations de la Convention des droits de l’enfant, qui stipule que la détention des enfants ne doit être utilisée « que comme une mesure de dernier recours et pour la durée possible la plus courte ». Les Etats-Unis sont le seul pays membre des Nations unies à n’avoir pas ratifié la convention, entrée en vigueur en 1990. Mais Manfred Nowak a souligné que cela n’exonérait pas l’administration du président Donald Trump de la responsabilité de ses actes en matière de détention d’enfants migrants à sa frontière avec le Mexique. France info
Étude : 1/3 des enfants immigrés détenus dans le monde le sont aux États-Unis Triste record pour les États-Unis. Alors que l’administration Trump mène une politique unique dans l’histoire des USA en matière d’immigration, l’on apprend via un rapport que le nombre d’enfants détenus dans le cadre de la lutte contre l’immigration atteint un sommet comparé aux statistiques mondiales. Et pour cause, avec un total de 330.000 enfants détenus dans le monde pour des raisons migratoires, les États-Unis de Donald Trump tiennent le haut du pavé avec un total de plus de 100.000 enfants détenus pour les mêmes raisons. La Nouvelle tribune
The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about a claim about the number of children being held in migration-related detention in the United States. The story quoted an independent expert working with the U.N. human rights office saying that over 100,000 children are currently being held. But that figure refers to the total number of U.S. child detentions for the year 2015, according to the U.N. refugee agency. A substitute version will be sent. The AP
AFP is withdrawing this story. The author of the report has clarified that his figures do not represent the number of children currently in migration-related US detention, but the total number of children in migration-related US detention in 2015. We will delete the story. AFP
Correction: Report Withdrawn Because Of Error In Study Data An updated report about the study and the author’s error has been posted here. We have withdrawn this story about U.S. incarceration rates of children because the U.N. study’s author has acknowledged a significant error in the data. We will post a revised article with more complete information as soon as possible. Because of an error by the study’s author, NPR removed its original story about a study of U.S. incarceration rates of children. NPR has published a new story about the study here. NPR
Vous avez dit « fake news » ? (recette incluse)
Sortez un titre choc (« United States has the world’s highest rate of children in detention”, « Les États-Unis, champions du monde de la détention de mineurs », Étude : 1/3 des enfants immigrés détenus dans le monde le sont aux États-Unis) …
Ou plus factuellement subtil (« Plus de 100 000 enfants en détention aux Etats-Unis en lien avec l’immigration« ) …
N’hésitez pas à forcer la dose avec un chiffre ahurissant (en fait, le total accumulé de tous les enfants détenus en une année) …
Attribuez le aux seuls Etats-Unis (Corée du nord comprise !)
Citez un rapport de l’ONU (une étude de 2005 fera l’affaire) …
Sortez l’info massivement dans toutes les agences de presse internationales (AFP, Associated Press, Reuters)
Et même pour faire bonne mesure les organes de presse nationaux (National Public radio, France info) …
Comme les quotidiens de référence (NYT) …
N’oubliez pas une photo bien larmoyante d’enfants manifestants contre ledit traitement inhumain (ou au pire une photo de barbelés) …
Enfin en cas d’impair …
Entre un dessin antisémite et une rétention d’information …
Retirez tranquillement l’info (un simple 404 ou au besoin trois lignes de communiqué sur Twitter ou un site de journal) …
Et, le tour est joué, …
Ne rappelez surtout pas …
Qui était président des Etats-Unis en 2015 (pour les mémoires chancelantes, Donald Trump arrive au pouvoir en janvier 2017) !
Plus de 100 000 enfants en détention aux Etats-Unis en lien avec l’immigration
Au niveau mondial, ce sont au moins 330 000 enfants qui sont détenus dans 80 pays pour des raisons liées aux migrations.
Lors d’une manifestation contre la politique de Donald Trump sur l’immigration, le 9 juin 2019, à Los Angeles (Etats-Unis). (DAVID MCNEW / AFP)
Voir aussi:
Then the two agencies retracted the story. Deleted, withdrew, demolished. If they could have used one of those Men in Black memory-zappers on us, they would have. Sheepishly, the two news organizations explained that, you see, the UN data was from 2015 — part of a border crackdown that had begun years earlier.
We all know who the president was in 2015. It wasn’t evil, child-caging monster President Trump. It was that nice, compassionate, child-caging monster President Barack Obama.
Zap. The story made Obama look bad. Hence the story was removed. Not updated or corrected, removed.
I know it’s a heavy news environment. Who can keep up? But try to remember this one, because it’s instructive. People think news organizations flat-out fabricate stories. That isn’t often the case. Fake news is a problem that pops up here and there, but the much more systematic and deeply entrenched attack on truth is the casual, everyday bias of reporters.
AFP and Reuters deleted a story that was, in a narrow sense, true — that a UN study claimed the United States had some 100,000 children in migrant-related detention. The United Nations is horribly biased against America and the West. Still, on the level of lazy, news-release-driven journalism, the locked-up-kids story was minimally valid.
At any rate, what the agencies didn’t seem to like was the story’s changed implication: That Obama, rather than Trump, locked up a lot of children. This is what’s important: Not that AFP and Reuters deleted a story, but that the implication of the story meant everything to them.
Every time you read something from AFP and Reuters (and CNN and the Washington Post), you should be thinking not “This is fake news” but: “What’s the agenda?” To paraphrase Chuck Schumer’s infamous, and instructive, comment on the CIA, news outlets have six ways from Sunday of getting you to think what they want you to think, none of which involve making up stuff.
One is simply not reporting things. News that isn’t mentioned didn’t really happen to that outlet’s consumers. Obama’s approval ratings were mostly really low, comparable to Trump’s, typically in the low to mid-40s. Polls would come out saying this, and the Ron Burgundys would simply not report it.
Using, or ignoring, facts in accordance with whether they create the desired impression is the principal agenda of today’s media.
Trump doesn’t enjoy this courtesy. Nor can he be associated with good news. A recent Newsbusters survey found that, over a recent six-week period, not even 1 percent of network news reporting on the Trump administration even mentioned positive economic news.
Another trick is soberly reporting the policy proposals of Politician One but focusing entirely on the miscues and petty controversies of Politician Two. You might, if you are a news consumer, be under the impression that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a sober, well-reasoned set of plans. These plans are, however, so far-fetched as to be breathtaking. She has vowed $20.5 trillion in new federal spending, an increase of 40 percent on top of current levels. Yet Warren isn’t the candidate the media habitually portray as unhinged.
Meanwhile, the gaffes of Democrats attract very little interest; network news basically ignored the mini-scandal involving Pete Buttigieg, who promoted a list of black supporters, many of whom either were not black or did not support him. The networks declined to cast Buttigieg as racially insensitive.
Still another trick is deciding that a matter that advances the wrong narrative is simply “local news,” hence not worthy of attention from the major outlets. Any crimes committed by illegal immigrants can be safely ignored by CNN, but any crimes associated with right-wingers become cause for national dismay and soul searching.
CNN did a massive story this week involving the talents of five reporters after someone at Syracuse University sent out a white supremacist manifesto to “several” cellphones and racist graffiti was discovered in a residence hall. Previously, similar outbreaks of campus fear turned out to be based on hoaxes. Yet if this story dissolves, CNN can accurately claim, hey, we were just reporting that students were scared.
The impression created by a thousand stories like this — that America in 2019 is a white supremacist nightmare — will linger all the same. Using, or ignoring, facts in accordance with whether they create the desired impression is the principal agenda of today’s media.
Voir également:
Surprise! Reports claiming US has ‘more than 100,000 children’ currently in migration-related detention facilities are bogus
Becket Adams
The Washington Examiner
November 19, 2019
Various news outlets, including Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, National Public Radio, and Reuters, reported this week that a United Nations study showed that there are « more than 100,000 children in migration-related U.S. detention.”
That sounds pretty bad. It means America has “the world’s highest rate of children in detention,” in violation of “international law.”
Except, oops! It is total nonsense.
First, the number of minors currently detained in the United States is more like 6,500: 1,500 detained by the Department of Homeland Security and 5,000 detained by the Department of Health and Human Services, as attorney and Washington Examiner contributor Gabriel Malor helpfully notes.
Second, newsrooms wrongly blamed the Trump administration for what was actually a study of the cumulative (not current) number of migration-related detentions for the year 2015. The 100,000 figure cited in the U.N. study includes everything from minors who were held for a day to minors who were held for several months. Further, you might recall — if you are not suffering too severely from « Trump derangement syndrome » — that Trump was not even sworn in to the White House until January 2017. In fact, in 2015, nobody thought Trump would ever be president.
That “100,000” figure should have never made it past the editing process, let alone launch a handful of headlines declaring the U.S. the leader in detained children. That figure requires not just shoddy math but also a total suspension of disbelief regarding what goes on in the darker, more tyrannical corners of the world. To say the U.S. is a world leader in detained minors would mean that America is measured against all countries, including China, Russia, and North Korea. If you believe U.N. investigators have reliable figures from any of those countries, then, oh boy, have I got a bridge to sell you.
To the surprise of absolutely no one with even an ounce of skepticism, the supposedly shocking news report has fallen apart. A few of the outlets that misreported the U.N. study have announced since that they are withdrawing their respective articles.
“AFP is withdrawing this story,” the French newsgroup announced Tuesday. “The author of the report has clarified that his figures do not represent the number of children currently in migration-related U.S. detention, but the total number of children in migration-related U.S. detention in 2015. We will delete the story.”
Voir de plus:
Étude : 1/3 des enfants immigrés détenus dans le monde le sont aux États-Unis
Sam Boton
La Nouvelle tribune (Maroc)
19 novembre 2019
Triste record pour les États-Unis. Alors que l’administration Trump mène une politique unique dans l’histoire des USA en matière d’immigration, l’on apprend via un rapport que le nombre d’enfants détenus dans le cadre de la lutte contre l’immigration atteint un sommet comparé aux statistiques mondiales.
Et pour cause, avec un total de 330.000 enfants détenus dans le monde pour des raisons migratoires, les États-Unis de Donald Trump tiennent le haut du pavé avec un total de plus de 100.000 enfants détenus pour les mêmes raisons.
STORY REMOVED: BC-EU–UN-US-Detained Children
GENEVA
The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about a claim about the number of children being held in migration-related detention in the United States. The story quoted an independent expert working with the U.N. human rights office saying that over 100,000 children are currently being held. But that figure refers to the total number of U.S. child detentions for the year 2015, according to the U.N. refugee agency.
A substitute version will be sent.
The AP
Voir encore:
Posted on Nov. 20 at 5:15 p.m. ET
An updated report about the study and the author’s error has been posted here.
Posted on Nov. 19 at 6:53 p.m. ET
We have withdrawn this story about U.S. incarceration rates of children because the U.N. study’s author has acknowledged a significant error in the data. We will post a revised article with more complete information as soon as possible.
Correction Nov. 20, 2019
Because of an error by the study’s author, NPR removed its original story about a study of U.S. incarceration rates of children. NPR has published a new story about the study here.
Why you’re not hearing more about that mass shooting in Fresno
This particular bit of awful news out of Fresno, California broke on Sunday evening and at first, it caused quite a stir in the media. A mass shooting had taken place in the back yard of a family home where a group of people had gathered to watch football. Multiple gunmen entered the yard through a side gate and without saying a word began firing into the crowd. When they fled there were four dead and six more injured. People were justifiably horrified. (Associated Press)
A close-knit Hmong community was in shock after gunmen burst into a California backyard gathering and shot 10 men, killing four.
“We are right now just trying to figure out what to do, what are the next steps. How do we heal, how do we know what’s going on,” said Bobby Bliatout, a community leader…
“Our community is in mourning, and we still don’t know what’s going on, or who are the suspects,” said Pao Yang, CEO of the Fresno Center, a Hmong community group.
This shooting qualified for multiple Breaking News announcements on cable news and announcements arriving in people’s email inboxes. And then a strange thing seemed to happen. By Monday morning there was almost no additional coverage. I think I saw it mentioned briefly twice on CNN, and then it was back to the impeachment hearings pretty much non-stop
With ten people shot and four killed, this obviously meets the media’s current definition of a mass shooting. So where was the outrage? Where were the calls for new gun control laws? How did this tragedy turn into a non-story?
First of all, the victims were all adult males from the Hmong community. And while police said they didn’t find any ties to gang activity among the victims, they were looking into a recent “disturbance” between some of them and members of one of the local Hmong gangs. (Fresno has had problems with gang violence, including Hmong groups, for quite a while now.)
Another factor is the fact that police reported the assailants using semiautomatic handguns. The event was reportedly over pretty quickly, so they probably weren’t using collections of extended magazines.
In other words, this mass shooting is uninteresting to much of the media because it fails all the normal tests and doesn’t fit in with the narrative. Had the men at least been using “assault rifles” they might have merited a bit more coverage. But those events are vanishingly rare because most gang members are well aware that it’s tough to hide a long gun when walking down the street to attack someone or while fleeing the scene afterward.
Further, if initial reports prove accurate, this was an incident of adult Asian people shooting other adult Asian people. And most of the press has about as much interest in that story as one where black gang members are shooting other black people. In short… basically none. It’s reminiscent of the Bunny Friend Park shooting in New Orleans back in 2015. It was the second-largest mass shooting of the year in the United States.
Seventeen people were shot in the middle of a public festival but if you didn’t live in New Orleans or subscribe to the Times-Picayune, you probably never heard about it. Why? Because it was two rival gangs composed primarily of African-Americans settling a turf war. Unfortunately, they were such poor marksmen that almost all of the victims were bystanders, including a young boy who was shot through the spine and will likely spend his life in a wheelchair.
So the Fresno shooting has effectively already gone down the memory hole, while the last school shooting (that claimed fewer victims) is still popping up in the news a week later. There’s no real underlying lesson here that we didn’t already know about. I only bring it up as a useful data point for future reference. The police still have no suspects identified in the Fresno shooting, but hopefully, progress will be made. We should send out our thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families.
jcdurbant 