Daily Archives: May 1, 2022

One thing that really struck us as interesting is the fact that freedom of speech is protected even more here than it is in our home country. For example, unlike in America, denying the Holocaust is a criminal offense there. Also, freedom of the press goes further in the U.S. than in Germany: There, it is perfectly normal to send the shortened and edited transcript of an interview to the interviewee for authorization before publishing. That way, they can check whether the final print version of the interview stays true to what they meant to convey in the actual conversation. If interviewer and interviewee disagree, however, the interviewer still has the last word on what to publish. This procedure is not a legal obligation, but common practice. We were surprised to learn that this is utterly unusual in America. (Here, however, some journalists might refrain from publishing certain parts of an interview for fear of facing lawsuits. That, too, might impact freedom of the press.)

Like in the U.S., fake news have been on the rise in the past few years in Germany. Especially during the pandemic, many people started to distrust public broadcasters. Even though public TV and radio stations strive to be as politically independent as possible, they are often accused of reporting in a way that is too uncritical of the government. Commercial broadcasters, on the other hand, have a different credibility problem: In order to be able to compete with the heavily-funded public news outlets, headlines and push messages of many private media companies are becoming increasingly lurid. By appealing to the readers and viewers sensationalism, some hope to get more subscriptions or higher ratings. This is very dangerous: Many people do not read the entire article or watch the entire video, but only see the headline. Thus, without meaning to, television stations and newspapers can contribute to negatively influencing public opinion and dividing society.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, many viewers turned to commercial broadcasters, who are not funded by the German government. Some assumed that their reports might be more independent. And, indeed, many commercial news outlets were not afraid to criticize the federal governments decisions regarding pandemic response, some of them rather harshly. In a democracy, it is essential to have a variety of opinions and independent news sources to draw from.

However, many people who were critical of the governments crisis management began to look for alternative information and news on social media. A lot of them, among them vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists, gathered on the messenger app Telegram to share dubious articles and studies. While big tech companies like Facebook or Twitter are legally required to flag and/or remove false information, the German state has so far had no recourse against Telegram. The company is based in Dubai. Several attempts by the government to contact the operators of Telegram failed. The fact that more and more people are looking for alternative news on these platforms instead of relying on quality media poses a massive threat. Both commercial and public TV broadcasters as well as radio stations and newspapers must fight to win back the trust of this group of readers. Otherwise, our democracy may be at stake.

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Freedom of the press and fake news The Daily Egyptian - Daily Egyptian

Here's how you know you're watching your first Randy Rainbow video. For a few seconds, you're wondering whether you've played the wrong one, because some well-dressed talking head seems to be interviewing, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a politician you loathe. You're thinking,I thought this was supposed to be funny. Before you can scroll away, though, you realize something's just . . . not . . . real.

The graphic in the lower left corner of the screen reads "Fake News," not Fox News. The interviewer starts insulting Greene right to her face. He responds to her first comment by muttering "Who gives a s**t?," donning a pair of sparkly glasses, and calling her a few names you really wish you could call her yourself . . . and then it gets interesting.

Suddenly, the "interview" becomes a music video. That talking head is now wearing a lab coat and singing "Gurl, You're a Karen" while Lauren Boebert another of your "favorites" rambles behind him. As you keep listening, the melody starts to feel familiar. Is that . . . a show tune? (It is. It's "Dentist!" from "Little Shop of Horrors.") Wait: now he's in drag. Now there are THREE of him in drag! This thing is spectacular!

Welcome to Randy Rainbow.

His chief comedic achievement is his mastery of the song parody. Videos from his ever-growing catalog, like "Cheetoh Christ, Stupid-Czar" and "Braggadocious," are routinely streamed by millions. Scrolling through his YouTube channel is like salivating over a tray of petit fours in an exquisite patisserie. Every song he produces is yummy, delightful, and expertly artificial. Sharing a new one on social media is like bringing the dessert everyone ends up raving about to the party. It really doesn't hurt that they're easy to look at, too.

RELATED: 10 musicians who refused to let "Weird Al" Yankovic parody their songs

Rainbow himself, however, is more than just a pretty face framed by his signature pink glasses. For more than a decade, bit by bit, he has constructed a magnetic persona that serves as an avatar for contemporary rage and bewilderment, giving voice to our collective anxieties throughout the Trump-and-COVID era.

Rainbow ...has constructed a magnetic persona that serves as an avatar for contemporary rage and bewilderment.

Lest anyone mistake that persona for the real man, Rainbow has written a fetching memoir, "Playing with Myself" (St. Martin's Press) that reveals more of who he really is and where he comes from, both comedically and personally.

"I really wanted to write this book to kind of introduce myself because people came to know me just through this sort of two-dimensional version of me," he explained in an interview with Salon. "And I really wanted to take down the curtain. I was craving, like, being real a little bit."

Still, it's Rainbow's comedic character which he describes as "a slightly arrogant, somewhat ignorant, hopefully loveable, part gossip girl, part man-about-town, part vapid social media star"that has met the present moment so perfectly.

Playing With Myself by Randy Rainbow (Dirty Sugar Photography)Although he started releasing videos in 2010, Rainbow became a cultural touchstone during the 2016 presidential election campaign. While Donald Trump shattered political norms left and right, conventional media struggled to keep up with his torrent of falsehoods. Guided by Steve Bannon's insidious strategy, Trump "flooded the zone" with what Kellyanne Conway later called "alternative facts." All the major newspapers and networks wrestled with whether to call them lies while new lies replaced the originals.

America's best-known political satirists Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver gamely rose to the occasion, calling out Trump's falsehoods and dissecting his unreal universe night after night. They engaged in what humor theorist James Caron (author of "Satire as the Comic Public Sphere") has called "satiractivism," counteracting the effects of Trump calling real stories "fake news" by presenting real news on fake news programs. No matter how funny they were, though, their satire never fully succeeded, largely because you can't shame a man who, by all accounts, has no shame.

Rainbow's campy caricature proved to be far more effective at skewering the absurdity of the modern GOP than their faux news shows, largely because as he developed his oeuvre, he put comedy and entertainment before rhetoric.

"I really just wanted to be, you know, Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand and maybe some Jerry Lewis," he said.

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Rainbow inherited his devotion to entertainment from his family. "That's in my blood," he said. "You know, that old Borscht Belt kind of Jewish humor and performance." Indeed, his great-grandmother Estelle was even a Borscht Belt singer. His grandmother Nanny, a major influence, was a live wire. He describes her in his memoir as "savagely quick-witted, a Michelango of sarcasm, the greatest story-teller around."

Over time, though, Rainbow realized that comedy could do more than generate laughter. "I began to appreciate what an effective tool it actually was for delivering political and social commentary on such widely polarizing issues," he noted in "Playing with Myself." His humor became more personal and took on more of an agenda.

"I think there's always a pearl of my truth in there," he said. "In any comedy, there's always a pearl of truth."

RELATED: Jackie Mason's thorny career: Once a beacon for Jewish pride, the comedian later turned to bigotry

Throughout the Trump administration, while Rainbow continued to release videos, Americans found themselves trapped in social media bubbles. Sociologist Jean Boudrillard called the social world a "simulacrum," a hyper-reality full of noise, images, and symbols designed to mesmerize the mind and replace the boring real world.

To satirize the falsity of conservative politics, he would have to co-opt their methods.

With the advent of that simulacrum, the line between reporting and editorializing was erased. News on social media was delivered via cutesy memes and bot-written tweets. The result was a lack of distinction between news and entertainment, fact and fiction.

"There's no categories any more," Rainbow said. "People are scrolling through their feeds. They see a tweet from Kamala Harris, and then Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then they see something from MSNBC, and then they see Randy Rainbow, and it's all in the same font, so I think people don't take the time to put it into its proper category."

While mainstream comedy largely tried to mock the simulacrum from outside, Rainbow knew the real fight had to take place inside the matrix instead. To satirize the falsity of conservative politics, he would have to co-opt their methods. Caron calls Rainbow's approach "truthiness satire," exposing the simulacrum by creating a competing, obviously false reality, exposing both worlds as fakes.

When Trump's e-troops marched in misleading rhetorical lock-step from tweet to tweet, Rainbow countered by creating digital clones of himself to sing in perfect harmony. Trump coiffed his impossible hair, turned his face orange, and donned ill-fitting suits, and Rainbow responded with wigs, makeup, costumes, and clever video editing. Trump raged, and Rainbow sang back at him, delivering bravura performances that matched the former President's outsized ego with his own larger-than-life character.

In "Playing with Myself," Rainbow offers glimpses of where that character originated. As a boy, he wore yellow pajama pants on his head to imitate the blonde pigtails of the girls he knew at school, foreshadowing his future array of wigs. By middle school, he'd amassed an impressive collection of Broadway cast recordings. (Most of the songs he parodies are from musicals.) As an overweight adolescent, he carried note cards with snappy comebacks in his pocket to defuse the taunts of schoolyard bullies, getting an early start at using words to punch up, just as he does now with his deft lyrics.

The Randy Rainbow persona doesn't seem very far from the man himself.

"I might be saying, as the persona, exactly what I feel," he told Salon, "but it might be perfectly scripted and well-timed, or through song, or it might be in a sassy, witty response that I might not necessarily come up with on the fly if I were just having a conversation with somebody."

Randy Rainbow (Dirty Sugar Photography)

"I don't think that I can really trust other people to know what to do with me."

It took Rainbow years to become who he is now. After graduating high school, he made the classic leap of faith for an actor moving to New York to find work but struggled like so many others before him.

"I was just too afraid to audition," he said. "I didn't have the confidence. I had been on stage my entire life leading up to that point, but to come to New York, that was big-time."

After being fired from a production of "South Pacific" he was just "not butch enough," they told him he realized that in order to make it, he would have to follow a less conventional path. That path began with a revelation.

"I don't think that I can really trust other people to know what to do with me."

Weary of waiting for someone else to say yes to his ample talent, Rainbow decided to say yes to himself. With little more than a wardrobe full of costumes and a homemade green screen, he transformed his dextrous wit and encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater into a profoundly successful career.

"I was able to make the decision to produce myself," he said, "and that was ultimately my success."

RELATED: "Head of the Class" and the man behind the '80s comedy's progressive, even radical agenda

In the 21st century, anyone with a cell phone and a Twitter account can shoot videos and try to win the attention of an increasingly distracted modern audience. Billions make the attempt, in fact, their voices becoming the internet's background hum, but very few succeed. Rainbow is the rare stand-out exception. His self-produced comedy has earned him both industry recognition including three Emmy nominations and the viral enthusiasm of countless fans.

Surprisingly, some of those fans seem to come from across the deep partisan divide.

"I receive lots of email from people telling me things like, 'I'm a strict, conservative, Republican, QAnon anti-vaxxer, but I just love your videos!'" he wrote in "Playing with Myself."

While not naive, Rainbow remains hopeful that he might have some small effect on people.

"I have to assume that while they're laughing and singing along," he wrote. "They might also be ingesting at least a few secondhand ideas that are, shall we say, alternative to their own."

Conservatives aren't the only ones who might have had their minds opened by Rainbow's work. The performer himself seems to have learned a thing or two as well.

"The comedy I've been doing really has also helped me find my voice in other ways," he told Salon. "As a human citizen and also as a comedian."

That voice continues to be necessary in a world that remains stubbornly resistant to reality. With the threat of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg ownership of both Facebook and Instagram, we may need Rainbow more than ever. His continued viral presence could be essential to resisting the privileged and powerful from the inside as they try to control their social media narratives. Anything they can do, after all to borrow, of course, from "Annie, Get Your Gun" he can certainly do better.

More stories from the world of Jewish comedy:

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Randy Rainbow, singing truth to power - Salon

Conspiracy theories and false information have dogged this years French presidential election. We recap some of the claims that have been debunked.

Cartes lectorales electors cards were sent out, as usual, before the election containing useful information such as the nearest polling station. People were invited to present them along with their ID when they go to vote although this is not obligatory. In smaller communes it is possible to present them alone without other ID.

However, some social media posts claimed the QR codes that appeared on the front of the cards this year were going to be used to make sure that votes against Emmanuel Macron were not counted, or to discount votes of people who are not vaccinated.

In fact the code simply directs people that scan it to official information on the election at elections.interieur.gouv.fr where they could check their registration status or carry out procedures such as asking for a proxy vote.

According to what appeared to be a tweet from the BBC, that was widely shared especially via Telegram, Emmanuel Macron had warned that Europe would have to take up to 60 million refugees from Africa and the Middle East in the next 20 years, linked to effects of sanctions against Russia. Some posters even said it was one of his campaign promises.

However Mr Macrons electoral team denied he had ever said this. The BBC also denied it made the tweet. In fact the post was faked from one with the less controversial headline:

As in the 2020 American elections when similar claims were made by Trump supporters, claims have circulated, notably on Facebook accounts supporting the far-right candidates, that voting machines are to be used, and manipulated, to falsify the count in Mr Macrons favour.

This was said to be in a partnership with American firm Dominion which was alleged to have made an agreement with the government to supply machines and use them to discount votes against Mr Macrons opponents. The same firm was at the centre of accusations by supporters of Mr Trump after several American states made use of it.

There is no contract between Dominion and the French government.

A small number of French communes 63 do have authorisation to use electronic voting machines to collect votes but the only model used is made by a Dutch firm. The communes concerned were all equipped with them before 2008 and new authorisations are no longer being given.

Former presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan was cited as the source of information that the whole election could be invalid if the turnout was low.

In fact, his actual quote to BFMTV was that the election would be invalid in peoples hearts in this case.

The president is elected by majority vote no matter how low the turnout.

Salah Abdeslam, being tried for involvement with the 2015 Paris terror attacks, was said in a post originating from an anti-vax and pro-Russia account to have spoken out in tears at his trial, to tell voters not to commit an irreparable harm by voting for Le Pen.

The claim was widely refuted, including by Abdeslams own lawyers.

A gilet jaune activist, Gregory Pasqueille, was shown in a video saying that some 22,552 gilets jaunes supporters had been banned by law from voting.

In fact official figures record some 3,200 convictions in relation togilets jaunes protests in the period when they were most active, from November 2018 to November 2019, and the addition of a voting ban as an additional punishment is rare, lawyers say.

One lawyer who has represented many of those involved in the movement told French media none of those he had defended had received this penalty.

French election live first results: Macron 58.2%, Le Pen 41.8%

Presidential election: What happens after Sundays vote?

Original post:

How fake news posts tried to skew French election result - The Connexion

Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut on Saturday peddled fake news against UP CM Yogi Adityanath, alleging that he called Lord Hanuman a Dalit who cannot be worshipped. The Shiv Sena leader made the statement on 30th April 2022 when he was asked for a reaction to Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubeys remarks that Even Balasaheb Thackeray would be shedding tears to see his partys government arresting people for reciting Hanuman Chalisa.

Responding to Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ashwini Kumar Choubeys remarks, Sanjay Raut said, That Choubey or whosoever be the person, he should not worry about Balasaheb Thackeray. These people are conspiring to divide this country by inciting riots over the Hanuman Chalisa issue. Shiv Sena is fighting against them. Balasaheb Thackeray would be showering flowers on us for this.

Sanjay Raut further said, What did honourable Yogi Adityanath say about Lord Hanuman? Yogi Adityanath is the Chief Minister of the state Ashwini Kumar Choubey belongs to. He said Hanuman is a Dalit person. He said there is no need to worship him. He said Hanuman is not God. He said Hanuman is a wild monkey or something like that. Since when did he become a devotee of Bajrang Bali? Leave it. If I start telling things, it will create a mess.

Sanjay Raut concluded by saying, If someone making such statements is trying to teach us, then Ashwini Kumar Chaube should once again recite Yogi Chalisa. He should write one first. We know what Lord Hanuman is. Maharashtra is a state that worships Lord Ram and Lord Hanuman. So dont worry about Balasaheb Thackeray. If at all he would be having a tear or two in his eyes today, it is because you people betrayed his Shiv Sena.

The statement by Yogi Adityanath which Sanjay Raut is referring to is from 28th November 2018 when Yogi Adityanath was campaigning in Rajasthan for the BJP candidates in the assembly elections of 2018. He was campaigning for Ram Kishan who was then a BJP candidate for the Alwar assembly seat. Yogi Adityanath said, Bajrang Bali is such a God of masses, who himself lives in mountains and forests. Be it a Dalit or a deprived person, everyone including all the Indians right from East to West and from North to South, Bajrang Bali unites them all. This is seen from 00:17 onwards in the following video.

While Yogi did call Lord Hanuman a god who lives in the forest, he did not call Him a Dalit. He, in fact, said that how Lord Hanuman does not discriminate amongst his devotees and takes all strata of people along.

As can be heard above, Yogi Adityanath said, In Indian tradition, Bajrangbali is loved by all, lives in a forest and has no place to call it home. The Dalits, the deprived, He (Lord Hanuman) takes them all, everyone in the Indian community, from the north to the south, from the east to the west, together. Bajrangbali has carried out the task of uniting everyone. Hence, (voting for BJP) should be a Bajrangisankalp(vow). Unlike Times Now, which has misquoted Yogi Adityanath.

While Yogi did call Lord Hanuman a god who lives in the forest, he did not call Him a Dalit. He, in fact, said that how Lord Hanuman does not discriminate against his devotees and takes all strata of people along.

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Yogi Adityanath and Lord Hanuman: How Sanjay Raut raked up an old lie to malign UP CM - OpIndia