believe

6May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POLITICS, SOCIETY

Journalists Believe News And Opinion Are Separate, But Readers Can’t ’t Tell The Difference

The New York Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned recently after the paper published a controversial opinion essay by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton that advocated using the military to put down protests. The essay sparked outrage among the public as well as among younger reporters at the paper. Many of those staffers participated in a social media campaign aimed at the paper’s leadership, asking for factual corrections and an editor’s note explaining what was wrong with the essay. Eventually, the staff uprising forced Bennet’s departure. Cotton’s column was published on the opinion pages – not the news pages. But that’s a distinction often lost on the public, whose criticisms during the recent incident were often directed at the paper as a whole, including its news coverage. All of whic...

Don’t Believe What You See On Crime Shows – Psychopaths Can Feel Emotions And Can Be Treated

27Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

CULTURE, TOP FOUR

Don’t Believe What You See On Crime Shows – Psychopaths Can Feel Emotions And Can Be Treated

On any given day, millions of Americans curl up to watch their favorite crime shows. Whether it is “FBI” on CBS, “Dexter” on Showtime, “Mindhunter” on Netflix, “Killing Eve” on BBC, reruns of “Law & Order,” or any of a myriad of other similar shows, they draw huge audiences with their vivid portrayals of villains whose behaviors are perplexingly cruel. I’ll confess: I am part of that audience. My students even make fun of how much crime television I, a researcher who studies criminal behavior, watch. I justify some of my TV time as work, providing material for my undergraduate lecture course and for my seminars on the nature of the criminal mind. But I am also captivated by the characters in these dramas, despite – or because of – how unrealistic many of them are. One of the most com...

We Didn’t Believe It Before The Capitol Insurrection – American Support For Conspiracy Theories And Armed Rebellion Isn’t New

6Jan

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, POLITICS

We Didn’t Believe It Before The Capitol Insurrection – American Support For Conspiracy Theories And Armed Rebellion Isn’t New

Americans had to confront a new reality when an angry mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Some of their fellow citizens were in the grips of a false reality and had resorted to violence to support it. Conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and the strange alternate universe of QAnon helped drive the attack, which has prompted concerns about further domestic upheaval. In the year since, a flurry of studies and analyses have tried to gauge the American appetite for conspiracy theories and the likelihood of more violence – even civil war. As someone who has studied the conspiracy theories that followed the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I keep revisiting a May 2013 poll about gun control that found widespread doubts about that shoot...

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism, VIDEO REELS

Why do people believe con artists?

What is real can seem pretty arbitrary. It’s easy to be fooled by misinformation disguised as news and deepfake videos showing people doing things they never did or said. Inaccurate information – even deliberately wrong information – doesn’t just come from snake-oil salesmen, door-to-door hucksters and TV shopping channels anymore. Would you buy medicine from this man? Carol M. Highsmith/Wikimedia Commons Even the president of the United States needs constant fact-checking. To date, he has made an average of 15 false or misleading public claims every day of his presidency, according to a tally from the Washington Post. The study of business history reveals that people everywhere have always had a sweet tooth for the unreal, enthralled by what should be taken as too good to be true. Cogn...

Political hashtags like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter make people less likely to believe the news

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

Political hashtags like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter make people less likely to believe the news

News outlets sometimes use hashtags to promote their stories. 13_Phunkod/Shutterstock.com Eugenia Ha Rim Rho, University of California, Irvine Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, you have most likely come across a political hashtag in an article, a tweet or a personal story shared on Facebook. A hashtag is a functional tag widely used in search engines and social networking services that allow people to search for content that falls under the word or phrase, followed by the # sign. First popularized by Twitter in 2009, the use of hashtags has become widespread. Nearly anything political with the intent of attracting a wide audience is now branded with a catchy hashtag. Take for example, election campaigns (#MAGA), social movements (#FreeHongKong) or calls for supporting or oppo...