Our current search engines are flat out liars, and have been for years, now.

They do not actually provide anything resembling an actual search result. What they do is lock onto keywords in your search term and fetch an agenda-driven result set based on that keyword — you can — literally — enter in an actual headline for an article and not have it come up at all in the first several pages… if it isn’t within the guidelines of the agenda. The also tend to use only one word or term to provide that result, not combining anything to do more nuanced results. Consider that in the context of searches you make from now on.

As an obvious example, there is this search:
Jake Tapper Gets Fact Checked by Jake Tapper

This is the first eight words of a headline, and should be one of the first results returned by any search on Google, or Duck Duck Go (which happens to use Bing, FWIW).

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Jake+Tapper+Gets+Fact+Checked+by+Jake+Tapper&atb=v315-1&ia=web

No article by that name is provided, at least, not early and not to any depth I have checked. Note that this used to be different, as Google did not return it, but DDG/Bing did.

Not Any More

Here is the actual article, which is blatantly factual, given that it restates Tapper’s own tweets and public comments to show his direct and undeniable perfidy:
https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2020/10/01/jake-tapper-gets-fact-checked-by-jake-tapper-after-heated-exchange-on-trump-condemning-white-supremacy-n261084

Both Google AND BING now refuse to link to Red State. If you did not save a bookmark to any RS article of value, your only hope is to actually go to RS to search for it there. If you did not, already, know it existed? Well, you shall remain ignorant of it.

“Search engines” are now utterly unreliable and worthless.

I imagine others have noted this… but:

Wow, did you actually make this idiotic, incorrect, and ridiculous bloviation after watching the video? Clearly, the answer is “NO, I did not watch the video at all”.

SMH — you’re clearly a two bit partisan hack. Yeah, that’s probably vastly overvaluing your capacity to contribute at cents on the dollar.

You’re not in one of your liberal idiot echo chambers. Go somewhere else to troll.

2 weeks AFTER the election, everyone will know it was a total fake, but… on election day, it will sway too many people.

Remember in 1994 when Peter Jennings said “the voters threw a temper tantrum” and the Republican wins were uniformly attributed by the media to “angry white males”?

Remember when Cronkite said it was wrong to think the US might be closer to victory in Vietnam? And when he said in 2007 he wished journalists could emulate him and turn public against the war in Iraq like he did against Vietnam?

And of course Rather with his wholly-made-up TANG memos, which he never did repudiate. That was when “fake but accurate” was coined, in the New York Times headline describing the memos.

They had the only megaphone. They told you they were fair and balanced and you didn’t have anything to compare with.

There is no institution we’re going to able to trust to relieve us of the burden of critical thinking and carefully examining multiple sources of information before we accept a narrative.

Rathergate?

It could still be done and I’d like to see Cronkite and Rather and Russert and Jennings and the rest were dedicated to fair and balanced reporting. They had their failings, like Tet, but tried to retell the facts unvarnished by their own agenda.

How did yellow journalism get its name? (It was printed on yellow paper).

Most of the history of newspaper reporting in the US was very pov. Most towns that could support them had at least two papers which represented different parties. And the coverage was nasty.

The debate in j school over advocacy and even gonzo journalism was more of a thing on the broadcast side, rather than print side, at least at my school.

How is the different than today? You know when you picked up a paper what the pov would be. Unlike today, where the people acting like journalists still try and pass themselves off as objective– rather than just telling folks what they are.

This was only true during the postwar Democratic dominance of Congress, and only seemed fair because the acceptable range of publicly expressible opinion was narrower. At the Founding people got their facts from pamphleteers and anyone with a printing press. In the nineteenth century every little town, and every little political faction in every big town, had its own paper. Affectionately caricatured by Twain in “Journalism in Tennessee”:

…”Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.”

I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn’t have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:

SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains–or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.

That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.

We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.

Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement–it wants a jail and a poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about his business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.

“Now that is the way to write–peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”