By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Dec. 15, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

The WaPo’s ‘Bottomless Pinocchio’: A new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again: Love this. You have to give the WaPo credit for their aggressive coverage of Trump. For instance, not so long ago, a politician caught lying would be embarrassed enough to stop repeating the lie. Not Trump. So the WaPo has upped its game w this interesting new system for ranking repeat liars. Kudos to Glenn Kessler.

What happened to the good Google?: Google’s Dragonfly will intensify surveillance of journalists in China: Many Google watchers and company employees were shocked when they found out the search company was working hand-in-hand with the Chinese gov’t to create a censorship-compliant search engine. When word leaked out, it caused protests within the company. Well, apparently they weren’t enough to derail the project. Money talks, and the Chinese market is too big to give up over the principles of democracy, apparently. Mia Shuang Li for CJR.

The missed point of Google’s Congressional hearing: Congress had a chance to dig deep into Google’s business practices and how they can hurt consumers across the country, notes Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed. So did pols look at how people are tracked? Or how their personal data is sold? No. Instead pols focused on perceived political bias, asking shallow questions. And not surprisingly, the Google CEO gave evasive answers. All in all, a chance to shine a little light on the internal workings of one of the most influential corporations in the world was flubbed.

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