Propaganda

As a photojournalist, London Shearer Allen’s eyes act as her primary means of catching seemingly paltry details.  However, even in the midst of chasing around three boys all under the age of five, she heard something suspicious while listening to a radio broadcast by PRI’s The World a few days ago. 

The March 15 PRI broadcast discussed the growth of support by non-Muslims for the use of Sharia law to settle legal disputes in Britain. ...Go to full story

This week (through Sunday, February 28) NewsTrust, a public journalism rating site, is hosting a hunt for bad journalism. Working with students from a class at Stanford University, the NewsTrust blog will feature a new set of bad stories every day, seeking viewer participation to rate the site's choices as well as suggest others. The blog announced the hunt Monday, saying the exercise is intended to “highlight journalism with serious flaws: news reports and opinions that...Go to full story

Think that online media and “the low transaction costs to publishing [have] created a flood of low quality information”? You might be happy to know, then, that Plato’s Forms, a somewhat cryptic startup, is one step closer to launching their product--a “professional messaging platform focused on solving the problem of rapid proliferation of misinformation in online media.”  But what that product will actually mean in the flesh, and whether that...Go to full story

Unemployed journalists, check it out. Want to do enterprising, investigative journalism and get paid for it? Freedom, a magazine published by the Church of Scientology since 1968, is looking to hire experienced journalists to further their mission of "Investigative Reporting in the Public Interest," according to news site TrueSlant. The ad has been joke fodder for TrueSlant and Reddit among others, but it also raises a serious question; is Freedom actually journalism,...Go to full story

On October 9, on freerepublic.com, Vietnamese blogger DieuVan Nguyen argued that a news photo implicating two Vietnamese journalists was a fake: Nguyen reports that Dantri.com, a Vietnamese online paper, had published a story about two journalists arrested for assault.

The accompanying photo of an injured man features a timestamp dated 9/10/2009 (October 9, 2009—dates are traditionally written day/month/year in most countries, including Vietnam).  But,...Go to full story

The Quackometer, a blog commenting on pseudoscience, reported this week on such a blatantly bad story in the London-based Daily Mail, that it almost doesn’t seem real:  “Can this man cure cancer with his bare hands?” the paper asks of “psychic healer” Adrian Pengelly in its headline. The answer should be a decided “No he cannot,” according to scientific evidence.  Anecdotes from Pengelly's clients who feel they have been...Go to full story

In 2001, the Newseum in Washington DC first posted an ongoing online exhibition titled, "The Commissar Vanishes: The falsification of photographs in Stalin's Russia." They describe it as "a virtual exhibit exploring the censored history of the Soviet Union."

The Newseum describes itself as offering "visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits." In the...Go to full story

July 1, 2009, Korea Beat posts new photos of Kim Jong-il, from Chosun.com that bloggers claim are most likely Photoshopped. Korea Beat commenter, Teadrinker wrote: "They expect us to believe he’s gained 20 pounds and reversed 10 years of aging over the last two months?'   Allegations that the North Korean leader’s political stunts include fake photos have intensified since last year’s stories about his serious illness. Now with new information...Go to full story

Epoch Times reports Zhang Bin, the Director of China Photographers Association, discovered birds were added by Photoshop into a China's People's Daily photograph, June 26. Bin used pairs of colored circles to indicate where birds in the original photograph were duplicated and then inserted elsewhere in the picture to supplement the look of nature in a park scene. The original caption explains: “Nanning in Guangxi Province is honored as China’s green city....Go to full story

While news about Neda Agha Soltan's tragic death on the streets of Iran evoke global shock and sadness, questions also arise about the authenticity of the video. UK's Sky News posts a second video that seems to support the authenticity of the original video circulating the Internet. The video footage shows a woman and a man, with the same clothing and physical appearance as Neda and her music teacher.  Sky News writes: "Neda Agha Soltan's death was captured on...Go to full story