An Excuse, a Short Plug, and, a New Feature

I had another festival of government paperwork recently with regard to personal matters and that ate up a lot of the intellectual energy I put into this blog. As a result, there isn't going to be a "deep dig" or even much of an op ed this week. So instead I'm going to give a short plug for a service I subscribe to, and, explain a new feature to this blog that I'm starting this weekend.

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The other day I was foolishly reading Facebook and found the following post.

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I looked up the story, on the New York Post and the way it was covered was very carefully constructed to not imply that this allegation was actually true. The story was that Project Veritas reported this issue, not that it actually happened. 

 

What I want to point out is that if you look at the Facebook screen shot I posted above, right under the woman's picture there is a little green shield icon with a check mark in it---next to the caption "NYPOST.COM". That's my NewsGuard ranking application that sits in my web browser and checks everything I read on line against a list of known news sources and identifies the ones that pass or fail a set of minimum standards. 

 

Knowing that the original story came from Project Veritas, I then went to it's website to check what NewsGuard has to say about it. When I got there, I clicked on the NewsGuard icon on the upper right hand side of Fire Fox. Then a window popped up.

 

 

Here's a larger version of the the window that came out to describe Project Veritas.

 

And when I click on the "See the full Nutrition Label" link, I get several pages of very detailed information that the staff at NewsGuard have provided identifying the issues that they found with the site. These include things like who owns it, what it's sources of revenue are, it's credibility, what it's done in the past, and, a long list of links to news stories that talk about the site in detail. 

Since I've signed up with the service, I've found it absolutely invaluable to cutting through the nonsense on social media. I simply look at the "NewsGuard" icon. If it's green, I'll look at the story. But if it's red, I tend to just ignore it. The service costs about three dollars a month, but I think that it is well worth the money spent.

I suspect that for most people slinging around these fake news stories, things like NewsGuard fail to butter their parsnips. But this does help me better evaluate how much these people are really interested in finding the truth---and how they are often so committed to the conspiracy mythos that they are just looking for excuses to believe. For someone who does a lot of research on line, it helps me speed up the process of evaluation---which is very useful.

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But this is also yet another cost for publishing the Back-Grounder. Three dollars a month might not sound like much, but I'm only grossing about $60/month. In addition, I'm soon going to max out on the "freebie" posting that I can do on Sound Cloud for audio recordings, which will then cost me $20/month. As you can see, I'm not really raking in the dough. So why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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A while back I wrote an op ed titled What is the Point? that suggested, among other things, that people used to subscribe to newspapers for content that had nothing at all to do with news. In their greatest era---during the late 19th century---one of those features was syndicated fiction. If you were a student who wondered why writers like Dickens, Tolstoy, and, Dostoevsky wrote such long novels, it was because they published them first in the pages of newspapers---who paid by the word. 

Last year a good friend strongly encouraged me to put some time into writing fiction. I took this advice to heart and have spent months writing a novella, which I will start publishing as a "weekend feature". If you are charitable, you could think of it as me following in the steps of Charles Dickens. If you aren't, think of it as me trying to emulate the old Doug Wright cartoons (featuring "Little Nipper") that I used to look at as a kid when my dad bought the Saturday Star. 

 

Yup, 1960s newspaper humour in the Toronto Star. And, if I am being totally honest, we probably bought it for these cartoons more than the news and opinion. Used under the "Fair Dealing" copyright provision.

 

Either way, look for The Climate Trials on Sundays at this space.

 

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Furthermore, I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!