Portside

• Every Friday until the Elections, The Washington Post Will Flood Social Media with Fact Checks – Alexios Mantzarlis (Poynter)
• Are Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, and Roger Ailes Cooking Up a Post-Election Media Empire? – Peter Dreier (Huffington Post)
• Jill Stein Reportedly Censored in PBS Interview – Robert Jonathan (Inquisitr)
• Why There’s a Media Blackout on the Native American Oil Pipeline Blockade – Nick Bernabe (Anti-Media)
• Facebook is Trying to Get Rid of Bias in Trending News by Getting Rid of Humans – Joon Ian Wong, Dave Gershgorn and Mike Murphy (Quartz)

Every Friday until the Elections, The Washington Post Will Flood Social Media with Fact Checks

By Alexios Mantzarlis
August 26, 2016
Poynter

Back in July, National Digital Editor Terri Rupar noticed traffic to the Republican National Convention liveblog "really spiked" when the Post announced on social networks that it would include analysis from in-house fact-checking duo Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee.
The convention bump led Rupar and her colleagues to launch #FactCheckFriday, a cross-platform effort to distribute fact checks to an audience clearly yearning for them. Every Friday, Fact Checker articles from the past week are collected in a Twitter Moment like the one below, presented in a Snapchat story and discussed on Facebook Live.

Are Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, and Roger Ailes Cooking Up a Post-Election Media Empire?

By Peter Dreier
August 19, 2016
Huffington Post

Before he became the chairman of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon worked in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department at Goldman Sachs. For the past year, Bannon has merged Breitbart News with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, hoping to acquire more and more influence as a frequent Trump advisor and, as of this week, as the campaign’s CEO.
After Trump loses, don’t be surprised to see Bannon join forces with Trump and Roger Ailes (the former Fox News guru deposed for engaging in sexual harassment of employees who recently jumped aboard Trump’s sinking ship) to create a new right-wing media conglomerate — Trump TV or Trump Media — linking Breitbart News to a new cable network that will almost make Fox News look tame and responsible. Together, Trump, Ailes and Bannon would run their media empire to advance their common goals: gaining political influence, massaging their massive egos, moving the Republican Party further to the right, attacking Democrats and liberal ideas, and promoting a neo-fascist agenda combining xenophobia, racism, sexism, government-bashing, and anti-immigrant nativism.

Jill Stein Reportedly Censored in PBS Interview

By Robert Jonathan
August 26, 2016
Inquisitr

A key chunk of the Green Party presidential candidate’s recent 15-minute interview with anchor Judy Woodruff on the PBS News Hour was apparently left on the cutting room floor. The section of the interview contained Stein’s criticism of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton.
Stein was in the process of responding to Woodruff’s inquiry about whether she thinks that Clinton and GOP nominee Donald Trump are equally “as bad” for the country. The differences between the two are insufficient to save American jobs, Stein answered, but the bulk of her analysis was edited out of the PBS broadcast (although the entire interview video appears on the PBS NewsHour Facebook page).

Why There’s a Media Blackout on the Native American Oil Pipeline Blockade

By Nick Bernabe
August 25, 2016  
Anti-Media

As the Lakota Sioux continue their peaceful blockade of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, the story’s absence from the national media narrative is palpable. Considering the corporate media’s chronic quest for controversial stories on government versus public standoffs, you’d think this situation would garner the typical media frenzy invoked during a right-wing militia occupation of a federal building.
But the confrontation unfolding in North Dakota, in particular, is strikingly similar to the recent standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which involved a right-wing militia advocating land rights against the federal government. The militia was led by the controversial Bundy family, which previously drew sensationalized coverage during a similar standoff in Nevada in 2014. So why were these stories covered extensively while the other — also centered around land rights — has been mostly ignored?

Facebook is Trying to Get Rid of Bias in Trending News by Getting Rid of Humans
By Joon Ian Wong, Dave Gershgorn and Mike Murphy
August 26, 2016
Quartz

Quartz confirmed from multiple sources that Facebook has laid off the entire editorial staff on the Trending team—15-18 workers contracted through a third party. The Trending team will now be staffed entirely by engineers, who will work to check that topics and articles surfaced by the algorithms are newsworthy.
Facebook maintains that trending items have always been selected by algorithms; the former editorial staff was only responsible for writing the story descriptions seen in the Trending section, according to the company. This was disputed by former contractors hired by the tech giant who told Gizmodo in May that they were instructed to manually add some stories by hand. Stories on conservative topics were routinely excluded from the Trending list even though they were popular among Facebook users, Gizmodo reported.