Fake Barack Obama delivers a PSA about “deep fakes” using a deep fake video (opens in new tab)

Go back even further and pretty much every news source was a propaganda machine. Most of the major "trusted" new sources today started primarily in yellow journalism and political attack ads. Pulitzer was not a particularly nice man. Neither was Hearst.

It was a brief modern period when news sources decided to take themselves seriously and rise up ethically and appear "unbiased" to the public. It made the landscape more consolidated and monolithic, but it also drove sources to present relatively whole stories with what limited bandwidth they had to the largest population possible.

That being said, at the same time, radio hosts quite willingly went into the base-pandering and echo chambers. Conservative Talk Radio didn't crop up in the 2000s. They arrived after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine from the FCC in 1987.

TV and print news only later realized if you insert just enough bias to make their viewers feel comfortable and to differentiate from their peers, they could make a WHOLE lot more money. And with the creation of a lot more time to sell news via 24hr channels and the Internet, you had to room to add in fluff, opinion, and other material.

> News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit.

That's an over-simplication.

Sure, Jeff Bezos probably wants to make a profit with his purchase of the Washington Post. But the profits there are probably not his main objective as they are too small to make much of a difference to a person of Bezo's wealth.

Bezo's goal is to have a mouthpiece to push his agendas, such as pushing Amazon and trashing Musk properties. So you say that the purpose in doing that is to make more money. But the problem with that line of thinking is that you could reduce almost any action to "profit". You could reach further back and go a level lower and say that making profit is motivated by reproductive fitness, and thus "News organizations are entirely motivated by sex". But at some point you have to let go of the circuitous route from action to final motivation and focus on the immediate drivers of an action.

Politics, money, sex, job security, prestige, etc all all motivations for news organizations, as well as many other organizations.

As a political radio host I used to listen to once said (on air, paraphrased from a memory from the early 2000s): "You should doubt and check everything I say. My job is not to inform you or tell you the truth. My job is to keep you listening so advertisers will pay my employer to run their ads."

Turning 40 this year, so I remember the same media you do. As the Internet grew and options proliferated, I always wanted a particular kind of news that I haven't seen crop up yet. Just a feed. No commentary, no talking heads discussing what something might mean. Just a network which shows video of news events happening. If something is happening in the legislature, I want to watch the legislators doing it. I can get the interpretation and more information about what's going on somewhere else. But the bare "this is what happened" without the fluff just isn't something you can really get. And sure, there's still editorial influence in what they would choose to show and how its shown and other such things, but a countless number of times I've just wanted to see the thing that actually happened.

We have known for centuries that who says a thing cannot influence its truth. How a thing is expressed can't affect it either. An untreated schizophrenic hobo screaming into the street can be telling the truth, and an esteemed professor reporting on new findings in his field can be a liar. It has always been inadvisable to do anything other than analyze claims critically, and I suppose if deepfaking becomes widespread, that will have to be relied upon more than ever.

> I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news.

I wonder about this. Part of the reason you had to pay attention was that there were far fewer information sources to check against. No one was reporting on Martin Luther King's affairs, and no one was reporting on the FBI's attempts to get MLK to commit suicide over them either.

It's not even a question of partisan bias; it's a question of sensationalism. It doesn't begin and end with how news organizations cover events; it begins with what events they choose to cover.

Awesome interview, thanks for the link. The end of the interview where Chomsky describes the Internet as a double-edged sword and (correctly) suggests that it could turn into "a home-marketing service, and a way of marginalizing people even further" is particularly interesting.

https://youtu.be/suFzznCHjko?t=27m7s

The magnitude of incorrectness/malicousness in reporting is irrelevant to this: No single source will leave you with a broadly-informed understanding, even if by simple way of time/space constraints in their output.

Even the simplest of biases affects editorial decisions as to which content to prefer over others. Omissions of viewpoints or of counterpoint example stories means you don't get the big picture, even without some massive media scandal. People scream distrust at media channels for leaving out information they view as critical, and go elsewhere to find those details (for better or worse).

> To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal.

Caught how? You could show people the original video, but the reputable outlet and its allies would be pushing the narrative that the so-called "original" video is a deep fake produced and pushed by conspiracy theorists. After all, our outlet would never lie, would they?

I suspect the scandal would be less publication-ending than you think.

>>But when have they been corrupt? When have they manipulated their reporting?

I think this is your bias showing if you believe the New York Times, Washington Post, and WSJ are not just a manipulative in their reporting as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Do they outright lie, of course not, but they omit things, they choose not to run some stories that do not fit their narrative, they choose to "expose" the most extreme version of the story.

The Current Gun Rights debate highlights this nicely for all of them.

What does that mean? That my camera will embed a cryptographic certification into the video?

I suspect people would be able to disassemble a camera and cause it to certify video that originated in a fake news studio.

As an example:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...

My spouse, who is a native fluent speaker of the languages, follows a large number of Dari and Urdu language Facebook groups and friends. If you think Americans have a problem with reposting stupid things that can be easily debunked by Snopes, you would not believe the amount of naivete on display daily in those language formats. It's hard to explain unless you've seen it firsthand.

People who are one generation removed from subsistence farming are not less intelligent than others. However, they and the family have had a lot less time to view mass media bullshit (tv cable news, internet, etc) and develop the mental callouses necessary to understand the nature of media biases, who owns what media organizations. And in general have had less formal secondary education at the post high school level that teaches critical thinking, skepticism and gain some degree of innoculation against propaganda.

And, by the same token, there are surely well-educated people who use the internet (intelligently) and currently farm for sustinence.

Even "lately" is unfair, I think. They hired Mark Schoofs (ProPublica) in 2013 and have steadily been doing work since probably even before that.

It doesn't take much for people to panic.

What’ll really be interesting is if someone gets deep voice conversion to produce a plausible output, and combines it with this technique. As is, I think it’s still not enough to really fool people, at least with that particular voice actor... But people really tend to trust voices.

That’s using fully digital versions of those actors though. We’re a long way from being able to use AI for those kind of performances yet.