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Washington Post thumps Trump. After running a well regarded investigative series about the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol, the DC Post decided to avoid the fate of the Wall Street Journal by not running Donald Trump’s “response.”
The Post's series reported that Trump, his legal team and political allies pushed misleading claims about electoral fraud that led to the rioting.
The WSJ on Oct. 27 ran Trump’s letter complaining about its Oct. 25 editorial that was slugged “The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court.”
Trump’s 600-word broadside was packed with lies and misinformation pertaining to the “rigged election.”
In its editorial, the WSJ noted that Joe Biden beat Trump by 80,555 votes in Keystone State.
To which, Trump responded: “Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out.” He then served up bullet points of nonsensical claims about how the election was “stolen.”
The Wall Street Journal decision to publish Trump’s bogus letter undermined the work of its staff that had already reported that the ex-president’s charges were bunk.
In nixing the former president’s letter, WaPo backed its reporters who poured over thousands of pages of court documents, hundreds of videos and interviews with 230 people who played a role in the day that Trump supporters attempted to overthrow America’s democracy.
The paper did report that Trump’s letter claimed that the Post’s reporting was “fake news” and denied the rioters had anything to do with Trump.
But they sure did like to wave those Trump flags.
America’s democracy is no longer the envy of the world, according to a poll conducted by Pew Research.
Nearly six in ten (57) of people polled in 16 countries say “the US used to be a good example of a model democracy but has not been in recent years.”
My hunch is that four years of Donald Trump in office and his subsequent undermining of the 2020 election, which triggered the attack on the seat of America’s democracy has other countries down in the dumps over the Land of the Free.
South Korea (73 percent) was most turned off by recent political events in the US. It was followed by Canada (69 percent), Japan (67 percent), Singapore (66 percent) and Australia (64 percent).
At 32 percent, Italy took the top spot of the countries saying America’s democracy is a good example to follow. Greece (25 percent), Spain (22 percent), UK (20 percent), Netherlands (18 percent) and France (18 percent) ranked next. Those numbers are hardly a robust endorsement of the USofA.
New Zealand, France and Greece tied at 27 percent in believing the US was never a good example to follow.
The countries rated America’s technology, popular culture and military as “the best or above average” compared to other developed nations.
Two out of three respondents view America’s healthcare system as “the worst” in the developed world.
Facebook (aka Meta) has taken a tiny step to improve its corporate image by shutting down its facial recognition system due to “growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” according to a Nov. 2 blog post by Jerome Pesenti, VP-artificial intelligence at the company.
Facebook acknowledged “there are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use.”
In the upcoming weeks, Facebook will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.
More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users opted in to the Face Recognition setting.
Facebook hasn’t entirely pulled the plug. It will limit facial recognition to a narrow set of uses. Those categories include helping people get access to a locked account, or verifying their identity for financial accounts.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg still believes facial recognition “is both broadly valuable to people and socially acceptable, when deployed with care.”
Don’t blow it, Mark.
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