After a week in which President Trump touted strong economic growth, half of Americans say he is doing a good job on the economy. His trade policies in particular do not find overall positive reviews beyond Republicans. CONT. CBS News Read more »
Without the Russians, Trump wouldn’t have won
President Trump is willing, under duress, to briefly and begrudgingly admit that Russian “meddling” took place in 2016 before reverting to calling it a “big hoax.” But he always maintains that the plot against America had no impact; he describes it as a “Democrat excuse for losing the ’16 Election.” […] Read more »
American attitudes toward Russia worsen under Trump
A majority of Americans, 68 percent, consider Russia either unfriendly or an enemy of the United States, according to a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll. That’s a 9 percent increase from one year ago, when 59 percent of Americans said they considered Russia either unfriendly or an enemy, signaling that attitudes […] Read more »
Russian Influence Campaign Sought To Exploit Americans’ Trust In Local News
Russia’s information attack against the United States during the 2016 election cycle sought to take advantage of the greater trust that Americans tend to place in local news. The information operatives who worked out of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg did not stop at posing as American social […] Read more »
Book Review: ‘News, Numbers and Public Opinion in a Data-Driven World’
In 1954, Darrell Huff published How to Lie with Statistics, a tongue-in-cheek guide for those wanting to use numbers to deceive. The book, now widely distributed to first-year university statistics students, outlines how statistics can confuse and muddle both writers and readers. The upshot? Huff suggests that: ‘without writers who […] Read more »
Why data privacy could unite Red and Blue America
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress this week, voters had good reason to pay attention. Americans are online a lot: Seventy-three percent of us use social media, 45 of us went online more than 25 times last week, 43 percent of us did some form of online banking […] Read more »