Real News: Manitoba Tories to stop subsidizing air travel for medical escorts, but some on Facebook wonder if that’s ‘fake news’

Way back aeons ago, say around August 2014, when I last wrote in print, the phrase “fake news” hadn’t yet entered the popular lexicon. It’s not that fake news, especially in the form of state-sponsored propaganda, didn’t exist. It did and it had a long history. Octavian famously used a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory over Marc Antony in the final war of the Roman Republic,” noted James Carson, head of search engine optimization and social media at the Telegraph Media Group in London, in a March 16 piece headlined “What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016,” which appears in the Telegraph online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-origins-grew-2016/

Carson also notes that in the aftermath of Octavian’s final war of the Roman Republic, from 31 BC to 29 BC, also known as Antony’s civil war, Octavian “changed his name to Augustus, and dispatched a flattering and youthful image of himself throughout the Empire, maintaining its use in his old age.”

The British, in particular among the Allies, made good use of propaganda against the Germans during the First World War from 1914 to 1918, demonizing the “Hun” with unsubstantiated false reports of atrocities. Twenty years later in the lead-up to the Second World War, the Nazi party in Germany “used the growing mass media to build a power base and then consolidate power in Germany during the 1930s, using racial stereotyping to encourage discrimination against Jews.” That’s why the name Joseph Goebbels, who served as Reich minister of propaganda, still sends chills down our spine.

It wasn’t until Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect on Jan. 11, when he pointed at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, while refusing to listen to his question, saying, “You are fake news!” that the phrase entered the popular lexicon.  Two days after Trump became president, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, added to the lexicon, telling Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that White House press secretary Sean Spicer had used ‘alternative facts’ in his first statement to the press corps Jan. 21,  when making false claims about the inaugural crowd size. Spicer had baldly told the pants-on-fire lie that Trump drew the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

Lo-and-behold, on Friday, I posted on Facebook links to two media stories, one from May 2, written by Jonathon Naylor, a hometown Flin Flon boy, whom I have known for 10 years, and who has edited the local newspaper, The Reminder even longer, headlined “Patient escort subsidy for airfare to be eliminated” (http://www.thereminder.ca/news/local-news/patient-escort-subsidy-for-airfare-to-be-eliminated-1.17447605), and a similar May 4 story from CBC News Manitoba, headlined “‘Who’s going to help them now?’: Manitoba cutting airfare subsidy for escorts of northern patients” http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/northern-patient-escort-subsidy-1.4100111

Naylor wrote: “The provincial government plans to cancel a subsidy that offers affordable airfare to the escorts of northern Manitoba patients who fly to Winnipeg for medical appointments.

“The Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) currently allows patients and their escorts to purchase commercial flight tickets for $75 each, far below the standard price.

“While eligible patients will continue to have this option, the province plans to remove the subsidy for escorts at a date yet to be announced.

“Manitoba Health spokeswoman Amy McGuinness said the move is important for financial reasons.

“‘This ensures that costs are being managed for medically necessary trips,’ she said, adding the change is estimated to save about $1 million a year.

“Escorts, she said, ‘will need to travel by land, or to purchase a regular ticket with the air carrier.’ A one-way plane ticket from Flin Flon to Winnipeg costs up to $859 without the subsidy.

“McGuinness could not confirm when the change will be implemented, saying the health department will work with the Northern Health Region to confirm timelines.”

Amy McGuinness is press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister Progressive Conservative government.

While I may not much like some of the news delivered by her and her Tory bosses, including this news of the cancellation of a subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back  to Winnipeg for medical appointments, I would never have dreamed McGuinness was offering up “fake news” or “alternative facts” here.

Just because I find something in the news I definitely don’t like and find most unpalatable, such as the cancellation of the medical escort subsidy, doesn’t make it “fake news,” whether I post it on Facebook or elsewhere on social media, or not.

Back in the day, when I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here for seven or so years, I was never accused, even by another name, of faking the news or linking to fake news stories online.

What I was accused of sometimes was running too many real but inconvenient “bad news” stories, especially actual crime and crime-related statistical stories on how Thompson finds itself for crime, along with some OmniTRAX rail stories on freight train delays, derailments and plans (now scrapped) to ship oil-by-rail across Northern Manitoba from The Pas in the southwest to Churchill and Hudson Bay in the northeast.

The timing was bad, to say the least. The oil-by-rail to Churchill plan, unveiled in Thompson on Aug, 15, 2013, met a firestorm of public opposition, ranging from local citizens, members of First Nations aboriginal communities along the Bayline between Gillam and Churchill, with whistle stops in places like Bird, Sundance Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill, opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where a runaway Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale gas formation in North Dakota in 72 CTC-111A tanker cars derailed in downtown Lac-Mégantic on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

While many of the comments were spot-on in reacting to the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP), several others wondered on my timeline if this had been confirmed by the government or was it just media speculation?

Either some of my well-meaning Facebook friends perhaps needs to read links a little more thoroughly before commenting, or Amy McGuinness, press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister government, needs to raise her profile a little more when quoted in news stories. Perhaps something like AMY MCGUINNESS, PRESS SECRETARY TO CABINET FOR THE PALLISTER GOVERNMENT, said today. I suspect, although I could be wrong, part of it is that some of my Facebook friends, especially ones with Tory leanings (yes, I do have friends like that) were a bit blindsided by the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back for medical appointments, and couldn’t quite believe what they were reading at first. They didn’t want to believe it was true.

The topper, however, was the one Facebook friend from here in Thompson, who managed to post the comment “Fake news” with zero elaboration twice on a single thread (well done, Ron). But he also “liked” the story (I think), although it’s always hard to know exactly what that means on Facebook. Now Ron, speaking earlier of Huns, I consider to be somewhere just to the right of Attila the Hun. But here’s the thing about small Northern towns. You know people personally. And I like Ron in person. While we don’t run into each other in real life so much, we do on occasion and we have great chats about the State of Thompson, as it were.

But I must confess after readings Ron’s somewhat cryptic “fake news” allegation, I went for a little troll on his Facebook page, to see what he was reading, listening to and watching these days. A few days ago, on April 28, Ron shared on his Facebook timeline the Metaspoon story, “Ship Went Missing In The Bermuda Triangle. But Then It Shows Back Up 90 Years Later” http://www.metaspoon.com/ship-bermuda-triangle?so=pgshM&cat=shock&fb=17036M1mwr3565a0&utm_source=17036M1mwr3565a0

It’s a great story. And one that appeals to me having written soundingsjohnbarker posts such as “Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge” on Nov. 25, 2015 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/invisible-ships-romulan-star-empire-birds-of-prey-and-the-philadelphia-naval-shipyards-uss-eldridge/) and last Oct. 23, “Can meteorology use science to unmask the long-cloaked air and sea secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/can-meteorology-use-science-to-unmask-the-long-cloaked-air-and-sea-secrets-of-the-bermuda-triangle/

Ron’s Metaspoon story goes like this. The SS Cotopaxi, a tramp steamer that disappeared in December 1925, was discovered by the Cuban Coast Guard 90 years after it vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. The story originated in the World News Daily Report, which on May 18, 2015 published an article reporting that the Cuban Coast Guard had intercepted the SS Cotopaxi that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while en route to Havana in 1925. The story originated with the Weekly News Daily Report and has been widely picked up by “news” aggregators such as Metaspoon.

“The Cuban authorities spotted the ship for the first time on May 16, near a restricted military zone, west of Havana. They made many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the crew, and finally mobilized three patrol boats to intercept it,” the Weekly News Daily Report says.

Problem is, Ron, while there was indeed a real SS Cotopaxi, which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in December 1925, it unfortunately did not reappear to the Cubans on May 16, 2015. Or at any other time. World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. It routinely publishes clickbait hoax articles. All “news” articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fictitious. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.

Fake news, Ron. Didn’t happen.

Another Facebook friend posted on my timeline: “Media is a tricky business to navigate . I’ve learned that the hard way when it comes to being misquoted or have had things taken out of context (not by you personally ). I’m grateful for journalists that look into all sides and facts before stating an opinion.”

Perhaps so. In the old days we used to talk about things like a story having a “ring of truth” or whether it passed the “smell test.”

Today, I might point to something like, Deception Detection for News: Three Types of Fakes by Victoria L. Rubin, Yimin Chen and Niall J. Conroy, which appeared last year in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The abstract can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010083/pdf

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The twilight freedom of John W. Hinckley Jr.

John W. Hinckley Jr. is soon going home on “convalescent leave” to Williamsburg, Virginia to live with his 90-year-old mother.

The process for his release is set to begin as early as next Friday.

Hinckley is now 61-years-old and “suffering from arthritis, high blood pressure, and various other physical ailments like many men his age,” noted U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, who sits on the bench of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington D.C., in his 103-page opinion memorialized as an accompanying federal court order July 27.

While Hinckley suffers from some routine age-related physical ailments, Friedman found he has long been in “full and sustained remission” and no longer suffers in a dangerously demonstrable way from the mental illness that led to him shooting then President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, and the following year saw him found not guilty by reason of insanity, making him the most famous patient in the United States, innocent of criminality but still so dangerous in the eyes of the judicial system he had to be detained for the last 35 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. His release process, with reporting and myriad other conditions attached, could begin as early as Aug. 5, the judge determined.

In his ruling last Wednesday, Friedman found that Hinckley has received the maximum in-patient benefit possible at the federal psychiatric hospital and that he is ready to be returned to the community in his 60s to live out his remaining years.

The hospital opened in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane and was the first federally-operated psychiatric hospital in the United States. During the Civil War, wounded soldiers treated there were reluctant to admit that they were in an insane asylum, and said they were at St. Elizabeths, the colonial name of the land where the hospital is located. Congress officially changed the hospital’s name to St. Elizabeths in 1916. Other famous – or infamous patients depending on one’s perspective perhaps – confined to St. Elizabeths include Ezra Pound, the expatriate American poet who made radio broadcasts from Rapallo, Italy between 1941 and 1945 on behalf of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italian regime during the Second World War. Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths in 1946 and remained there until 1958, when a treason charge against him was dismissed.

John W. Hinckley Jr. is a name that will likely always be a name that conjures up historical flashbulb photographic memories for the vast majority of Americans outside of St. Elizabeths Hospital who have not seen him in press photos since his trial ended in June 1982 and he was 27 years old, although he has been rarely photographed in public since then, including in Virginia on an unsupervised visit with family in April 2014.

But to most Americans, he is still the 25-year-old John Warnock Hinckley Jr.  photographed in the famous UPI picture riding in the backseat of a police car after his arraignment in U.S. District Court on March 31, 1981 – the day after he shot President Reagan.

Hinckley was armed with a .22-caliber pistol loaded with six exploding “Devastator” bullets when he opened fire on March 30, 1981.  All survived the attack, but several were seriously wounded, including the president.

Hinckley shot Reagan in the driveway outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C. at 2:27 p.m. from just 10 feet away after the president had addressed the Building and Construction Workers Union of the AFL-CIO. U.S. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy turned into the line of fire and took a bullet for the president, while another Secret Service Agent, Jerry Parr, roughly shoved Reagan into the presidential limousine, and then, as the Lincoln roared back toward the White House – per protocol – with driver Drew Unrue not knowing the president had been wounded, Parr, however, noticed Reagan was having difficulty breathing and bright frothy blood was coming from his mouth, ordered Unrue to turn the limousine around and race to George Washington Hospital, with its trauma centre, instead. Doctors said later Parr’s snap judgment call to detour to George Washington Hospital instead of continuing on to the White House, as planned, saved the president’s life.

Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer Thomas Delahanty was wounded in the neck by the second of Hinckley’s bullets and suffered permanent nerve damage to his left arm.

But the most gravely injured was White House press secretary James Brady, who suffered a catastrophic brain injury, shot at point-blank range to the left-center of his forehead, the bullet passing through both hemispheres of his brain. ABC began airing footage at 2:42 p.m.  ABC, CBS and NBC all erroneously reported that Brady had died. Partially paralyzed, Brady did die many years later at the age of 73 on Aug. 4, 2014. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia ruled Brady’s death to be caused by homicide as a result of the 1981 shooting, but authorities opted not to prosecute Hinckley further as the result of the finding.

In his July 27 opinion, in response to the federal government’s move to continue Hinckley’s detention at St. Elizabeths, Friedman wrote, “In 1981, John W. Hinckley, Jr. was a profoundly troubled 25-year-old young man suffering from active and acute and major depression. His mental condition had gradually worsened over the preceding years – beginning as early as 1976 – ultimately resulting in a deep obsession with the actress Jodie Foster and the film Taxi Driver.

“Mr. Hinckley began to identify with the main character in the film, Travis Bickle, who unsuccessfully plots to assassinate a presidential candidate in order to win the affections of a young woman.”

Friedman goes onto say that Hinckley “has been under the care of St. Elizabeths Hospital for over three decades. Since 1983, when he last attempted suicide, he has displayed no signs of active mental illness, exhibited no violent behavior, shown no interest in weapons, and demonstrated no suicidal ideation. The government and the hospital both agree that Mr. Hinckley’s primary diagnoses of psychotic disorder not otherwise specified and major depression have been in full and sustained remission for well over 20 years, perhaps more than 27 years. In addition, since 2006, Mr. Hinckley has successfully completed over 80 unsupervised visits with his family in Williamsburg, Virginia.”

During those visits to Williamsburg, Hinckley stops in at Retro Daddio, a local music store, about once a month, where owner Jen Thurman told the Associated Press she is on a first name basis with him and a photo on the wall of a young Jodie Foster seems to go unnoticed. “I’m alone in the store frequently with him, and he’s never creeped me out,” Thurman told the AP.

Hinckley also joins his mother for Sunday services at the Williamsburg United Methodist Church when he’s visiting, and volunteers at the local Unitarian Church.

In arguing for Hinckley’s continued detention at St. Elizabeths, the United States government found itself grasping at some thin reeds, pointing out that when he was released on a work furlough in 2011 he twice told his supervisors he intended to go to the movies, when in fact he went instead to a Barnes & Noble bookstore. OK. Those were stupid lies, especially given Hinckley will be closely and rightly watched by the United States Secret Service whenever he is free for the rest of his life. Criminally responsible or not, that’s part of the price you can expect to pay for shooting a president. Last year, during a release, he deviated from his approved itinerary and visited a musician friend, instead of a photographer. He admitted to the lie. So, yes, 35 years have not cured Hinckley to the point he’s perfect and honest in every way. That would be a state of character few of the always sane could claim. But is he a danger? Is his continued detention in the public interest?

Case like Hinckley’s are extremely difficult. In 1981, he may not have committed a crime because he was insane at the time, but it is beyond doubt he committed a terrible deed by any objective standard, legally responsible for his actions or not. But what now? Is his continued detention justified simply because of his notoriety if nothing else? Of course not. John Hinckley Jr. was a mentally ill man. If indeed that mental illness is now in long, full and sustained remission, as Judge Friedman found, it is time to send the 35-year patient home, as unpopular with the public as that may prove to be.

That and only that is how the ends of justice are served.

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