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Palmer Report

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Dr.Swag Lord, Ph.d (talk | contribs) at 21:27, 4 July 2021 (→Accuracy and ideology: add opinion). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This article is about the American political blog. For the UN Report on Israel's naval blockade of Gaza, see Geoffrey Palmer (politician) § UN Inquiry.

Palmer Report
Screenshot of the homepage of the Palmer Report on July 4, 2021
Type of site
Political blog
Available inEnglish
Predecessor(s)Daily News Bin
OwnerBill Palmer
URLwww.palmerreport.com Edit this at Wikidata
RegistrationNone
Launched2016 (2016)[1]
Current statusOnline

Palmer Report is an American left-wing and conspiratorial[2][3][4] political blog,[5] founded in 2016 by Bill Palmer, a political journalist.[6]

History

Palmer previously ran a site called Daily News Bin, described by Snopes editor Brooke Binkowski as "a pro-Hillary Clinton 'news site' designed to 'counter misinformation'".[7][8] A 2017 study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University found that the amount of misinformation stemming from Daily News Bin was comparable to that of InfoWars or The Gateway Pundit during the 2016 United States presidential election.[9][10] Daily News Bin reported falsehoods on Bernie Sanders,[11] and on voting machines in Wisconsin.[12] Daily News Bin was included in Le Monde's database of unreliable news sites.[13][14]

Content

The Palmer Report is a hyperpartisan site[15][16][17] that is known for making unsubstantiated or false claims[9][8] and publishing conspiracy theories,[5][18][19][20] especially on matters relating to Donald Trump and Russia.[21][22][23] Articles from the Palmer Report were shared almost exclusively by Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2016 presidential election.[24] After Trump was announced as the winner of the election, the Palmer Report published two articles claiming that the election was "rigged".[25] Statistician Andrew Gelman compared the Palmer Report's articles to claims made in the National Enquirer, and wrote that "the basis for these accusations is more perceived unfairness than actual statistics".[25][26]

In January 2017, the Palmer Report claimed that Trump posed for a fake speechwriting photograph at an auction house receptionist's desk, and included an Instagram photo of the receptionist. Snopes found that the photo in question had been taken at Mar-a-Lago and posted in December 2015, and that the receptionist was not an auction house employee.[27]

During the 2017 Syria missile strikes ordered by Trump, the Palmer Report suggested, without evidence, that Trump spared the runways of the Shayrat airfield due to Russian collusion.[28] MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell echoed a Palmer Report theory that Syria's chemical weapon attack was orchestrated by the Russian government in order to allow Trump to appear distant from Putin.[23][29]

In April 2017, the Palmer Report claimed that the FBI had intelligence that Russia had compromising information on Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz. The evidence for the claim came from a tweet from Louise Mensch, who, in turn, cited unnamed sources. Snopes found no evidence for this claim.[30][31] The Palmer Report also wrote a story claiming that Trump paid $10 million to Chaffetz, which was later shared by constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe.[8][32][22] The article pointed to a "report" from a tweet sent by a user with 257 followers.[8] In response to Tribe sharing the Palmer Report's article, political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote: "Is this a joke? This is tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff".[33]

In May 2017, Senator Ed Markey was forced to backtrack a false claim that a grand jury had been impaneled in New York in relation to the Special Counsel investigation; the source for the claim was the Palmer Report and Mensch's blog, according to one of his aides.[34][35] In the same month, the Palmer Report reported that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had ordered Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch to recuse himself from all Trump-related Russia hearings, with his only sourcing coming from a "single tweet from an anonymous Twitter account under the name 'Puesto Loco'".[23]

During the 2017 Niger ambush, where four US soldiers were killed by militants from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, the Palmer Report speculated that US troops in Niger were involved in a "secret Russian-controlled military operation" approved by Trump.[36] The Palmer Report also pushed a conspiracy theory that the Trump administration's travel ban against Chad was connected to the Niger ambush.[37]

In October 2017, the Palmer Report published a story claiming that Jared Kushner had "secretly" flown to Saudi Arabia "ahead of his possible arrest", citing a Politico article. The cited Politico article debunks the Palmer Report's own story, since it stated that Kushner had actually departed on a diplomatic trip two days prior to the announcement that Robert Mueller's team would begin issuing indictments in relation to the Special Counsel investigation, and that Kushner returned to Washington, D.C. to celebrate his wife Ivanka Trump's birthday before anyone had been taken into custody. Snopes rated the Palmer Report's story as false.[34] A few days after the story was published, Palmer acknowledged that Kushner returned home and was not arrested.[20]

Accuracy and ideology

In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations, the Palmer Report was ranked the fourth least trusted news organization by Americans, with Occupy Democrats, InfoWars and The Daily Caller being lower-ranked.[38] In an October 2020 study by the German Marshall Fund examining misinformation on social media during the 2016 election, the Palmer Report was one of the websites categorized as "false content producers" or "manipulators".[39] The Palmer Report is labeled a biased source in the Columbia Journalism Review's collected index of "fake-news, clickbait, and hate sites".[40]

Bethania Palma, writing for Snopes, stated that the Palmer Report "generally relies on supposition, often extrapolating conclusions from flimsy sourcing, to make rather explosive claims that have fooled many".[34] Snopes' managing editor, Brooke Binkowski, said that the stories were "nominally true" but sensationalized innocuous information.[7] In 2017, Zack Beauchamp of Vox said that the Palmer Report was "devoted nearly exclusively to spreading bizarre assertions".[22] Author Colin Dickey, writing in the The New Republic, said that the Palmer Report "routinely blasts out stories that sound serious but are actually based on a single, unverified source".[23] The Atlantic's McKay Coppins called the Palmer Report "the publication of record for anti-Trump conspiracy nuts who don't care about the credibility of the record".[5] Journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept wrote that the Palmer Report is "a classic Fake News site created by [...] a crazed fanatical follower of Hillary Clinton who got caught purposely disseminating fake news during the election".[26] In 2017, George Zornick, writing for The Nation, described the Palmer Report as "churn[ing] out Russia-related fake news by the pixel load".[41] Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank identified the Palmer Report as "part of a larger phenomenon that has already taken root online, where in some quarters full-blown cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome have already broken out."[29] Political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote that Trump's connection with Russia "has created a wide-open field for leftist conspiracy theorists to make one wild claim after another; nearly all of them...can be conveniently found on a website called the Palmer Report."[21] In a 2019 report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the Palmer Report was described as a "left-leaning dubious-content site" where many of the articles "range from the unsubstantiated...to the sophomoric."[20] David G. McAfee's The Curious Person's Guide to Fighting Fake News described the Palmer Report as a website that "provides skewed content featuring sensational headlines and stories with unverified conspiracy theories".[18]

Palmer Report's prediction that Susan Collins was "toast" in the 2020 United States Senate election in Maine — an election she won by nine points — was named one of "The Worst Predictions of 2020" by Politico.[42]

References

  1. ^ "About - Palmer Report". February 9, 2014. Archived from the original on February 9, 2014. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
  2. ^ Palma, Bethania (March 10, 2017). "FACT CHECK: Did an Eighth Russian with Ties to President Trump Die Suspiciously?". Snopes. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  3. ^ Hobbes, Michael (October 29, 2020). "What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers' Brains?". HuffPost. Archived from the original on June 30, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  4. ^ Cassidy, Chris (May 11, 2017). "Ed Markey issues mea culpa for grand jury claim". Boston Herald. Archived from the original on March 24, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  5. ^ a b c Coppins, McKay (July 2, 2017). "How the Left Lost Its Mind". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on December 23, 2017. Retrieved July 3, 2017.
  6. ^ Heldebrandt, Beth (September 22, 2019). "How a Popular Media Bias Chart Determines What News can be Trusted". Gateway Journalism Review. 48 (355): 20–22. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021 – via Gale OneFile.
  7. ^ a b Meyer, Robinson (February 3, 2017). "The Rise of Progressive 'Fake News'". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 3, 2021.
  8. ^ a b c d Bernstein, Joseph (May 11, 2017). "Why Is A Top Harvard Law Professor Sharing Anti-Trump Conspiracy Theories?". BuzzFeed News. Archived from the original on March 6, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  9. ^ a b Blake, Aaron (August 22, 2017). "Trump backers' alarming reliance on hoax and conspiracy theory websites, in 1 chart". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on January 5, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  10. ^ Faris, Robert; Roberts, Hal; Etling, Bruce (August 8, 2017). Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Berkman Center for Internet & Society. p. 72. OCLC 1048396744.
  11. ^ LaCapria, Kim (March 11, 2016). "Bernie Sanders Gives Bank of America Speeches?". Snopes. Retrieved July 4, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  12. ^ LaCapria, Kim (December 3, 2016). "FACT CHECK: Wisconsin Recount Observers Find Voting Machines with Broken Seals". Snopes. Retrieved July 4, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  13. ^ Davies, Jessica (January 25, 2017). "Le Monde identifies 600 unreliable websites in fake-news crackdown". Digiday. Retrieved July 4, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  14. ^ Elgan, Mike (January 28, 2017). "Why fake news is a tech problem". Computerworld. Retrieved July 4, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  15. ^ Benkler, Yochai; Faris, Robert; Roberts, Hal (2018). "The Architecture of Our Discontent". Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001/oso-9780190923624. ISBN 978-0-19-092366-2. This did not prevent a hyperpartisan site like the Palmer Report ...
  16. ^ Bennett, W. Lance; Livingston, Steven, eds. (October 15, 2020). The Disinformation Age: Politics, Technology, and Disruptive Communication in the United States. SSRC Anxieties of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 45–46. doi:10.1017/9781108914628. ISBN 978-1-108-84305-8. Archived from the original on January 26, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021. While we observed some hyperpartisan sites on the left, such as Occupy Democrats during the election or the Palmer Report in 2017 ...
  17. ^ Pennycook, Gordon; Rand, David G. (February 12, 2019). "Supporting information for 'Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality'" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (7): 2. doi:10.1073/pnas.1806781116. PMC 6377495. PMID 30692252. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  18. ^ a b McAfee, David G. (2020). The Curious Person's Guide to Fighting Fake News. Durham: Pitchstone Publishing. ISBN 978-1-63431-207-3. OCLC 1192499268. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  19. ^ Peyser, Eve (May 2, 2018). "Just Stop Listening to Celebs' Awful Political Opinions". Vice. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  20. ^ a b c Barrett, Paul (March 2019). "Tackling Domestic Disinformation:What the Social Media Companies Need to Do" (PDF). NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. p. 9. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 27, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  21. ^ a b Wolfe, Alan (August 22, 2019). The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-226-67911-2. OCLC 1089910327. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  22. ^ a b c Beauchamp, Zack (May 19, 2017). "Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia". Vox. Archived from the original on May 12, 2020. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
  23. ^ a b c d Dickey, Colin (June 8, 2017). "The New Paranoia". The New Republic. Archived from the original on June 8, 2021. Retrieved July 3, 2021.
  24. ^ Larson, Jordan; Read, Max (December 22, 2017). "'The Russia Story,' as It Happened on Social Media". Intelligencer. Archived from the original on November 9, 2020. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  25. ^ a b Gelman, Andrew (November 22, 2016). "Stop Saying the Election Was Rigged. Trump's Win Was Always an Option". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on June 2, 2021. Retrieved July 3, 2021.
  26. ^ a b Greenwald, Glenn (March 7, 2017). "Leading Putin Critic Warns of Xenophobic Conspiracy Theories Drowning U.S. Discourse and Helping Trump". The Intercept. Archived from the original on April 16, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  27. ^ LaCapria, Kim (January 19, 2017). "FACT CHECK: Did Donald Trump Steal a Receptionists Desk and Notepad to Stage Speechwriting Picture?". Snopes. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  28. ^ Qiu, Linda (April 11, 2017). "Syria Conspiracy Theories Flourish, at Both Ends of the Spectrum". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on March 9, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  29. ^ a b Milbank, Dana (April 10, 2017). "Don't fight Trump with conspiracy theories. What's there is damning enough". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on October 4, 2018. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  30. ^ Palma, Bethania (April 19, 2017). "FACT CHECK: Does Russia Have 'Kompromat' on Jason Chaffetz?". Snopes. Retrieved July 4, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  31. ^ Hunt, Albert (April 7, 2017). "Liberals Shouldn't Tolerate the Loony Left". Bloomberg News. Retrieved July 4, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  32. ^ Greenwald, Glenn (February 12, 2018). "Harvard's Laurence Tribe Has Become a Deranged Russia Conspiracist: Today Was His Most Humiliating Debacle". The Intercept. Retrieved July 4, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  33. ^ Kolowich, Steve (May 15, 2017). "What Is Seth Abramson Trying to Tell Us?". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on July 4, 2021. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
  34. ^ a b c Palma, Bethania. "FACT CHECK: Did Jared Kushner Go to Saudi Arabia Because it Doesn't Have an Extradition Treaty With the US?". Snopes. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  35. ^ Bump, Phillip (May 24, 2017). "Another elected official cites 'the Internet' in defense of his bad arguments". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on March 19, 2020. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  36. ^ Emery, David (October 21, 2017). "FACT CHECK: Was an Attack on United States Soldiers in Niger a Debacle 'Worse than Benghazi'?". Snopes. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 3, 2021.
  37. ^ Seay, Laura (October 20, 2017). "Liberals, Do Not Try to Turn Niger into Trump's Benghazi". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on May 26, 2021. Retrieved July 3, 2021.
  38. ^ Benton, Joshua (October 5, 2018). "Here's how much Americans trust 38 major news organizations (hint: not all that much!)". Nieman Lab. Archived from the original on December 8, 2020. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  39. ^ Alba, Davey (October 12, 2020). "On Facebook, Misinformation Is More Popular Now Than in 2016". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on June 24, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  40. ^ "CJR index of fake-news, clickbait, and hate sites". Columbia Journalism Review. Archived from the original on January 18, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  41. ^ Zornick, George (June 16, 2017). "Bernie Sanders Is a Russian Agent, and Other Things I Learned This Week". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Archived from the original on February 2, 2021. Retrieved July 1, 2021.
  42. ^ Stanton, Zack (December 29, 2020). "The Worst Predictions of 2020". Politico. Retrieved July 3, 2021.
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