Author Topic: Media, Ministry of Truth Issues; foreign manipulation of US media/social media  (Read 1150800 times)

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Media, Ministry of Truth Issues; foreign manipulation of US media/social media
« Reply #4300 on: November 02, 2024, 07:53:48 AM »
The world retains its ability to surprise.

ccp

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Jeff Lord gives Bezos too much credit here
« Reply #4301 on: November 02, 2024, 11:15:18 AM »
https://spectator.org/three-cheers-for-jeff-bezos/


I mean the WP has always been Left wing and its DNC coordination clearly for all to see for yrs.

Why did it take him so long to finally make a kind of, sort of, mea culpa?

DougMacG

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DougMacG

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Death of the "Mainstream Media", FAR out of step with the People
« Reply #4303 on: November 06, 2024, 05:26:00 AM »


The majority of the people are not getting the majority of their news from what used to be called the "mainstream media".
-----------------------------------

Biggest loser is the corporate media complex.
https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/06/2024s-biggest-loser-is-the-corporate-media-industrial-complex/
« Last Edit: November 06, 2024, 05:48:56 AM by DougMacG »


ccp

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Fareed Zakaria
« Reply #4305 on: November 11, 2024, 07:41:40 AM »
he is correct with omissions

The first big one is he and the rest of corporate media do not take any responsibility or blame for their lies, omissions, slanted propaganda.  Non.   Nodda.   They never point any blame on themselves:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/cnn-host-scathingly-rebukes-democrats-citing-ignorance-that-put-them-out-of-touch-with-voters-they-blew-it/ar-AA1tQIq1?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=d305f099a38341fc8cbdc4bc258893ba&ei=24

infuriating.
retribution is:
they lost all credibility
they lost many subscribers and viewers
they are hated by at least half the country.



ccp

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LA Times owner fires Editorial board
« Reply #4306 on: November 12, 2024, 09:46:47 AM »
all of them:

https://deadline.com/2024/11/trump-la-times-editorial-board-1236173370/

Very interesting if other heads will roll at other networks papers etc.

O'Reilly is of the opinion all the networks will see dismissals ....

God Bless America!

DougMacG

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« Last Edit: November 12, 2024, 11:20:04 AM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Media, Ministry of Truth Issues; foreign manipulation of US media/social media
« Reply #4308 on: November 12, 2024, 03:55:48 PM »
Heh heh.

Body-by-Guinness

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Dowd Awakens About Woke Destruction
« Reply #4309 on: November 14, 2024, 01:48:40 PM »
An NYT hack gets outed:

Maureen Dowd Owes Brett Kavanaugh and Me An Apology
Mark Judge

She’s one of The New York Times’ stable of hypocrites.

Maureen Dowd went viral this week for a column blasting the woke cult. According to Dowd, the “identitarian” policies of the Left, or liberalism’s propensity to reduce everyone and everything to race and Marxist archetypes, cost Kamala Harris the election. Americans, Dowd wrote, are sick and tired of wokeness, which “alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.” Americans of all races got tired of being told they are racist, sexist, and colonialist.

Dowd then offered this from Rahm Emanuel: “When the woke police come at you, you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

Like the rest of the mainstream media, Dowd’s a hypocrite. Six years ago she was happy to pronounce people guilty with no trial and no Miranda rights and no due process. Specifically, I’m wondering if Dowd has the courage to take back her hits on Brett Kavanaugh and me. Dowd declared Kavanaugh guilty in 2018. When Kavanaugh was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault at a 1982 party when they were teenagers, Dowd tossed aside due process. She was the worst of the woke.

Dowd’s strategy was to compare Blasey Ford to Anita Hill, and claim that the conservative media was unfairly smearing Ford. “We are still watching a bookish university professor from the West,” Dowd wrote, “who tried to anonymously report an alleged blight on the character of a man about to ascend to a lifetime of power, get smeared as a demanding, mixed-up, uptight, loony fantasist.” You’ve gotta love that “bookish university professor from the West” bit.

“Dr. Blasey is dealing with some demonic forces not in play with Professor Hill,” Dowd wrote. “A vicious partisan internet that drove her out of her house and being discredited not merely by the White House but personally by a president who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault, who has consistently defended predators such as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Roy Moore, and who is advised by the same man who enabled Ailes’s loathsome behavior at Fox News.”

Like the rest of her media colleagues, Dowd has shown no interest in the other side of the story. In 2018 I was dragged into the Kavanaugh battle when Christine Blasey Ford claimed I was in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted her. I have no memory of the alleged attack. Moreover, I have a lot of evidence that suggests that the Blasey claim was, as Kavanaugh said, a well-funded and orchestrated political hit.

I’ve written about this for six years and in 2022 published a book about it: The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. Earlier this year Blasey Ford published her own book, One Way Back. The New York Times reviewed Blasey Ford’s book—they wouldn’t review mine. In her review of the Ford book, Alexandra Jacobs says that reading Ford’s book, “one longs for more about Mark Judge.” So the Times is longing for me but won’t review my book.

On the night of September 14, 2018, I got a call from Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker. Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court on July 9. Farrow was calling to tell me that Brett and I had been named in a letter claiming “sexual misconduct in the 1980s.” Farrow couldn’t tell me who the accuser was, or where it allegedly happened—only that it was “sometime in the 1980s.” A September 16 piece in the Washington Post followed. In it Ford claimed that Brett sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in 1982. Post reporter Emma Brown interviewed Leland Keyser, a childhood friend of Ford’s whom Ford claimed was at the party. Keyser denied it and denied even knowing Kavanaugh. Brown left that out of her article. Maureen Dowd lamented “the merciless pummeling of a woman who dares to obstruct the glide path of a conservative Supreme Court nominee.” Merciless pummeling? Reporters were hunting me wherever I went, breaking into my car, and using as sources people who never laid eyes on me or Kavanaugh.

Six years ago I wrote my first article about what happened and challenged the narrative Dowd and her colleagues pushed. In it I noted that for the entire summer of 2018 Ford was working with an opposition researcher named Keith Koegler. According to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, written by New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin, Koegler had “spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties… and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.”

In six years no reporter or columnist has picked up the phone to ask Koegler if this is true. (They don’t even care to ask who was paying Michael Avenatti.)

Maureen Dowd is trash. She’s happy to ruin lives but couldn’t care less about the truth. Koegler and others had set things up, and the next step was preordained: hit me with an unexpected allegation (Farrow) and get me to start talking. Then entangle my life, which has included a struggle with alcoholism when I was younger, with the life of Brett Kavanaugh, who had a much different journey than me. It was an oppo research hit whose lynchpin was me crumbling, babbling, and using my life to take my friend down, even if he had nothing to do with my struggles. Reading accounts of Ford’s behavior it becomes clear why she never went to the police or released her therapist’s notes (which never mention Kavanaugh) and why she kept asking for delays. She was waiting for me to crack.

On September 24, 2018, I received a sinister phone message from a California number. A reptilian voice on the other end told me I was about to be messed with (the caller used more colorful language), and then abruptly shifted to a slightly softer tone: “Hey, give me a call. We’ll work something out.” This was flat-out extortion, witness-tampering, Mafia-style strong-arming.

It was around this time that Dowd wrote a lengthy essay, “Of Monuments, Arguments, Vampires and Thanksgiving.” Dowd’s brother Kevin had been a basketball coach at Georgetown Prep. He’d coached Brett, praising his work ethic and amiability. “They stayed friends for the next 35 years,” Dowd wrote, “and he sometimes referred to Kavanaugh as ‘half a rung below my own sons.’ Kevin gave interviews to The Wall Street Journal and The Times, describing how the teenage Kavanaugh willed himself to be a better shooting guard and showed leadership on the basketball court.”

However, Blasey Ford caused a rupture in the Dowd clan, with all of them except for Maureen believing Kavanaugh. Dowd: “My sister told me that if I sided with Blasey, Kevin would cancel our trip west. I disagreed with Democrats who said that women should automatically be believed. Think about Rolling Stone and the ‘Jackie’ story it entirely retracted because it was based on a made-up account of gang rape and some of the later Kavanaugh accusers whose stories fell apart. But women have an absolute right not to be disbelieved without further examination.”

That further examination came with a series of articles I wrote, then my book, and then a documentary on Fox News and then a piece by Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post, which criticized the media for ignoring my story and research.

So now, in 2024, with the election results in and the Democrats and the media in tatters, Maureen Dowd has arrived to condemn the woke. Will she apologize for leading the same mob in 2018?

https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/maureen-dowd-owes-brett-kavanaugh-and-me-an-apology

Body-by-Guinness

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Trying to Save Democracy in Reporting Undermines in Instead
« Reply #4310 on: November 14, 2024, 05:23:59 PM »
2nd post. A left wing journalist does a pretty good job of IDing what’s wrong w/ allowing ones political beliefs—in the case of the media tilting well to the left—to enter into one’s reporting. Even the comments here are for the most part on point, something that rarely occurs on most sites:

Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy
Journalists who turn themselves into political activists inadvertently undermine democratic institutions.

YASCHA MOUNK
NOV 14, 2024


Reporters at announcement of sale of Washington Post, June 1, 1933. (Photo by Arthur Ellis/The Washington Post via Getty Images.)
Thank you to everyone for the insightful comments on the question I asked on Sunday. I learned a lot.

Since this experiment is going well so far, we’re keeping the comments open for today’s column. Just remember: Be nice to each other and engage in good faith.

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Back in 2006, I was doing an internship at the International Herald Tribune, in Paris. The work was mostly menial. I would photocopy mock-ups of pages for the next day’s edition and sometimes enter short descriptions of articles into an internal management system. My biggest accomplishment was unscrewing a flickering neon light bulb that was making it hard for editors to concentrate—a simple act which earned me the undying hostility of the French janitor, who had refused to help since his shift was ending in fifteen minutes, and did not believe that anyone else should have the right to ameliorate the situation in his stead.

The other memorable moment was the time I was sent home to change. Without thinking about it, I had put on a T-shirt a friend had given me during the presidential campaign a few years earlier: a depiction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream bearing the inscription “Bush Again?” I doubt the T-shirt offended anyone at the office. In fact, I imagine that the great majority of staffers at the IHT shared the sentiment. But the leaders of the newsroom took very seriously their duty both to be neutral and to be seen to be neutral. In those days before modern social media, the risk of anyone learning about my questionable sartorial choice may have been low; even so, it was one they were not prepared to take.


This nicely sums up the bygone attitude of journalists. As a group, they have always skewed left, and perhaps always will. But they also had a strong conception of their role and the professional standards it entails: Their job was to be fair arbiters, reporting without fear or favor. This involved posing tough questions to everyone and about everything. And to accomplish that, they needed to cultivate a strong bullshit detector, starting from the premise that anyone they talk to has their own story to spin. To be sure, journalism, even in its halcyon days, never fully lived up to these aspirations; but the existence of these aspirations did do a lot to curtail the profession’s partisan lean and preserve some modicum of trust in mainstream news outlets.

All of that went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist. Faced with what they regarded as a genuine emergency, many younger and more progressive journalists came to believe that they needed to revolutionize their profession’s traditional conception of its mission. Rather than eschewing the spirit of party, they now openly advocated for taking the side of the angels. And far from striving for objectivity, they resolved to offer their readers “moral clarity.” The Washington Post was merely formalizing the emerging consensus when, in February 2017, it adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”


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The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy.

I have some sympathy for this new self-conception. Democracy really is embattled around the world. And as citizens, we really do have a civic obligation to do what we can to shore up principles like free speech and the rule of law. Democracies need citizens to be engaged—and if some citizens need to adopt an inflated sense of their likely efficacy to keep them going, then let them enjoy their delusion.

But while all of us, including journalists, may have a civic obligation to fight for the preservation of our political system in our role as citizens, it is a category mistake to assume that journalists should place that aspiration at the center of their professional identity. Democracies depend on having a few widely trusted news outlets that can objectively inform the public about current affairs. The trust which citizens have traditionally placed in these outlets was premised on a belief that their journalists are at least striving to present events in an even-handed manner. The moment they recognize that this is no longer the case, that trust is shattered—and any hope of building political life on a basis of shared facts vanishes.

In light of the last four years, I’d go one step further. The aspiration of many journalists to save democracy has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets. It has also deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions—which, ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain.

The Cognitive Cost of Partisanship

Over the last months, I have heard from multiple European diplomats that the extent of Joe Biden’s struggles has long been well-known. In meetings with a number of senior statesmen, Biden repeated the same anecdotes, or seemed unsure about his own whereabouts, as early as 2021. Is it really plausible that American journalists were unable to learn something that has been known in capitals across Europe for so long—something that, as it happens, tens of millions of American voters have long cited as a serious concern in opinion polls?

No. The obvious truth of it is that, for the most part, journalists simply did not want to go there. Part of that reluctance may have been rooted in an understandable (if misplaced) sense of propriety. But another part of it was rooted in the unspoken suspicion that open consideration of this topic would somehow wind up helping Donald Trump.

As it happens, the reluctance to level with readers ultimately accomplished the opposite of what was intended. It allowed Biden to stay in the race long enough to make the entire Democratic establishment complicit in covering up the true state of his mental health. And it made it virtually impossible to stage an open primary to choose his successor.

This brings us to yet another way in which the consensus in the mainstream press ultimately harmed Democrats. It should long have been obvious that Harris was a weak candidate. Though she entered the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination with a lot of enthusiasm and a large financial war chest, she ran a disastrous campaign, and quickly fell to the single digits in polls. In the end, she was forced to drop out before a single vote had been cast in her favor.

Biden revived Harris’ fortunes by restricting his search for a running mate on demographic grounds, all but guaranteeing her elevation to the vice presidency. But given a golden opportunity to reintroduce herself to the American people, Harris flailed. Despite a relentless and unprecedented rhetorical emphasis on the “Biden-Harris Administration,” she developed little initiative of her own and alienated most of her staff. Charged with helping to reduce the number of illegal migrants coming into the country, she refused to travel to the southern border, likely for fear of upsetting parts of the progressive base. For most of the period until Biden bowed out, Harris was significantly less popular than him.

As long as Harris was merely a potential presidential contender, all of that was sayable in the mainstream media. The moment she was elevated to the Democratic nomination, it suddenly became taboo to point out these facts. And when Harris benefited from an unsurprising (but short-lived) surge in enthusiasm upon becoming the official nominee, the critical faculties of mainstream journalists went out of the window altogether. She was now said to be running a flawless campaign, harnessing a groundswell of enthusiasm unknown since the days of Barack Obama—all of which (despite the polls being so tight) seemed to put her on a sure path towards victory.

By the final stretch of the campaign, this confidence had become widely adopted, especially in progressive circles. Democratic strategists were feeling bullish. On Twitter and MSNBC, on NPR and in The New York Times, they were proclaiming that internal polling showed Kamala Harris well ahead; that early vote tallies favored the party; that all the signs pointed towards massive turnout; and that late-deciding voters were breaking blue.

I suspected that some of these strategists may have been acting, well, strategically. Voters want to pick a winner. It makes sense for campaigns to project confidence on the final stretch. So I texted some trusted friends who are deeply ensconced in the Democratic world. All of them assured me that their public pronouncements were rooted in private conviction. Yes, they conceded, they had proven overly confident in 2016. But no way were they making that same mistake again. Kamala was on a sure path to victory. She might even win Iowa!

In retrospect, the cost of these lies layered upon delusions is painfully clear. If the Harris campaign had reckoned with the fact that she was not on the way to winning the election, they could have taken some rhetorical risks and encouraged her to appear on a much wider range of shows and podcasts. Instead, lulled into a false sense of complacency, they played it “safe.”

The irony is palpable. At each step, the mainstream media was careful not to emphasize facts which might make it harder for Democrats to beat Trump. But at each step, this created a bubble of “elite misinformation” that made it impossible for Democrats to make the hard strategic choices they needed to win the election. The cognitive costs of partisanship in the media are high—in this case, arguably sufficiently high to have gotten Trump reelected.

Why Attempts to Save Democracy Are Likely to Backfire

Even if self-driving cars get to a level of safety which far outpaces that of human drivers, they will at times produce accidents that most human drivers would have been able to avert. And yet, as defenders of the technology will be quick to point out, adopting self-driving cars makes sense if it reduces the overall death toll.

Similarly, the defenders of “moral clarity” in journalism may say that attempts to influence their readers can sometimes go awry, either because mainstream outlets happen to be wrong about something, or because readers are particularly reluctant to accept some specific dose of truth. But that, they may say, is no reason to eschew the self-conscious goal of saving democracy if such an aspiration is likely to do good under most circumstances.

I am deeply skeptical that we should write off the sequence of events that led to Trump’s reelection as such an unfortunate and uncharacteristic mishap, and that’s for two reasons.

The first is that journalists vastly overestimate their ability to influence their readers. Ordinary people are able to sense when journalists frame every news story in the hopes of leading them to some predetermined conclusion. And rather than falling for that conclusion, many of them take that as a reason to stop trusting—or reading and watching—mainstream journalism.

This has likely always been the case. Even in the halcyon days when The New York Times was (somewhat) trusted across the aisle and Americans got most of their news from CBS and NBC, the views of ordinary citizens differed widely from the consensus among the professional class. Notably, researchers trying to show that conspiracy theories have been on the rise of late have come to the conclusion that Americans have long believed in them at surprisingly steady rates.

But it is especially true now, in the age of YouTube, podcasts, and social media. Journalists who obsess over whether to say that Trump is lying or whether to call him a fascist—as well as the many commentators on social media who spend their days backseat quarterbacking such decisions—assume that their choices will have a big impact on the views of citizens. Sadly, that assumption is unwarranted.

The second reason why I believe that the self-conscious goal of trying to save democracy is likely to backfire is that it is extremely hard to predict the long-term consequences of telling supposedly noble lies. At the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials stressed that ordinary people could not effectively protect themselves against Covid by wearing simple medical masks, a talking point that was duly and uncritically amplified by mainstream journalists. There is good reason to suspect that both public health officials and journalists took this line in part because many hospitals were running out of personal protective equipment at the time, putting doctors and nurses at risk, and impeding their ability to care for patients.

Like defending democracy, the goal of making sure that medical workers don’t run out of masks in the midst of a pandemic is perfectly sensible in and of itself. But as in the case of defending democracy, it turns out that prioritizing that goal over speaking the plain truth can easily backfire.

In the case of Covid-era masking, the noble lie had three unintended consequences. First, public health officials were too focused on making sure that existing masks got into the right hands and insufficiently focused on producing more masks. Rather than telling people that masks didn’t work, they should have called upon businesses to find ingenious ways to produce more masks—something that started happening once public health guidelines were reversed, and it became clear that the demand for masks would remain high for the foreseeable future. Second, the initial guidance according to which masks did not work made it much harder for public health officials to convince people to mask up once access to the equipment was no longer a problem. And finally, this highly salient case of flip-flopping in the early stages of the pandemic lastingly undermined public trust in the health authorities, likely impeding the uptake of vaccines once those became available.

With a little empathy, it’s easy to see how public health officials could have gotten this call so disastrously wrong. In the early stages of a pandemic, information is limited and the stakes are high. The perceived need to lead the public to the right course of action, even if it means being less than forthright, must be immense. But politics is no less complicated and unpredictable than a pandemic. And as in public health, so too in a functioning democracy one of the most important preconditions for long-run success is giving the public good grounds to trust the information they are given. The reason why it’s so important to prioritize the plain truth over activist goals isn’t that I don’t share those goals or believe them to be nefarious; it’s that, unless we are on guard against our own self-aggrandizing tendencies, the very fact that these goals are so appealing will keep seducing us into screwing up.

The Wider Epistemological Crisis of the American Mainstream

Over the past years, mainstream newspapers have written endless articles about the threat posed by “misinformation.” There can be no doubt that lots of false or frivolous claims now gain enormous traction on social media. Countering these falsehoods is an important and legitimate goal of responsible journalists.

But the truth of it is that the American mainstream itself now suffers from a serious epistemological crisis. If you were a faithful reader of The New York Times or a frequent listener of NPR, you were less likely than the average American citizen to believe that Biden was suffering from serious mental decline or that Harris was an unpopular politician with a steeply uphill path towards winning the presidential election. You were also less likely to recognize that school closures would exact a big toll on students’ educational outcomes and mental health or to realize that a lot of Latinos were embracing the Republican Party. And you would, even now, be less likely than most voters to recognize how utterly simplistic it is to believe that America can meaningfully be divided into two opposing blocks of “whites” and “people of color.”

Americans have lost trust in many of their institutions in good part because, despite their assurances to be the arbiters of truth and science, legacy news outlets and establishment institutions fundamentally misconstrue and misunderstand basic aspects of American life. The reasons for this sorry state of affairs go well beyond the decision by many journalists to flatter themselves into thinking that their task was to save democracy. But the first step towards fixing the problem is for journalists to re-embrace the humdrum conception of their own work that served them comparatively well in the past: to cultivate a healthy distrust of everyone, including those you may secretly believe to be on the right side of history, and report the news without fear or favor.

https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/dear-journalists-stop-trying-to-save?publication_id=2709399&post_id=151650095&isFreemail=true&r=295un&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

ccp

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DougMacG

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Shameless media continued, Politico
« Reply #4312 on: November 17, 2024, 10:37:03 AM »
"The selection of Kennedy would be a shrewd early move for the new presidential team."

   - Does that remind you of the coverage you hear today?

DougMacG

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Re: R's should not go on LEFT wing media
« Reply #4313 on: November 17, 2024, 10:50:02 AM »
Right but I'm not sure that was an "anti trans rant" except in the title of the video.

His main point was the double standard of the scrutiny. The gender pronoun confusion isn't of his making, IMHO.

Did that official get this kind of scrutiny?
« Last Edit: November 17, 2024, 10:52:02 AM by DougMacG »



DougMacG

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Media, Ministry of Truth, Matt Taibbi: How the accurate polls were covered up
« Reply #4316 on: November 19, 2024, 07:28:53 AM »
Matt Taibbi: How the accurate polls were covered up

https://www.racket.news/p/how-americas-accurate-election-polls

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: Media, Ministry of Truth, Matt Taibbi: How the accurate polls were covered up
« Reply #4317 on: November 19, 2024, 01:20:19 PM »
Matt Taibbi: How the accurate polls were covered up

https://www.racket.news/p/how-americas-accurate-election-polls

Another great find! I dunno, given how all this polling hijinks is employed to impact election outcomes I think these pieces are worth aggragating in a "Polling" thread....

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Media, Ministry of Truth Issues; foreign manipulation of US media/social media
« Reply #4318 on: November 19, 2024, 01:26:04 PM »
Green light to go for it.

Body-by-Guinness

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Dear Fair & Balanced Media: To Whom Should We Make Out the Check?
« Reply #4319 on: November 19, 2024, 08:29:18 PM »
Ye freaking gods, these bleeping grifters have been grifting so fornicating long they utterly fail to note the grifting waters in which they run their well saturated grifts. How could Kamala spend a $1 billion+ and lose? Well if a quarter or more of that spending is “donations” or other payments in kind ala the Clinton Foundation model, well that shit adds up.

Besides, how else are you going to get people that wet panties at the mere mention of the Bad Orange Man to pitch you softballs, conceal your teleprompter, work what magic they can on your shrill mutterings in the edit bay, etc? I mean, without those payments you might get hard questions like “what’s your favorite color,” or “do you remember the name of your kindergarten teacher,” or have cameras swing to show staff members wildly gesticulating from the sidelines demanding that the interview be cut short, or even share a raw transcript of the interview, shit oh dear!

But hey, ultimately it’s all the government's money one way or the other as it writes the favorable media regs, witness Soros buying 200 or whatever it was radio stations (Rush is rotating in his resting receptacle), or it’s the ads sold by the TV network that thinly guises its shilling for you as “news,” or it’s the gig you land in government due to your media connections, or the gig some federal official lands on a network after getting voted out or after taking one for the team….

Anyhoo, got your daily dose of semi-conscious shamelessness right here:

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2024/11/19/harris-campaign-and-msnbc-involved-in-major-ethics-violation-over-500k-donation-to-al-sharpton-n4934450
« Last Edit: November 20, 2024, 12:28:48 PM by Body-by-Guinness »

ccp

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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Media, Ministry of Truth Issues; foreign manipulation of US media/social media
« Reply #4321 on: November 20, 2024, 01:45:17 PM »
 :-D :-D :-D

ccp

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MSLSDers new jobs or no jobs
« Reply #4322 on: November 20, 2024, 03:10:56 PM »
It never pleases me to see people lose their jobs

but.......

MSNBC ====--->  'SpinCo"

I am thinking more like BSinc. might be better  :wink:

Madcow will get scooped up some where or she may do the Lib version of O'Reilly or Kelly broadcast/podcasts

ccp

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Woodward
« Reply #4323 on: November 21, 2024, 06:14:55 AM »
He is like a little old lady who loves to gossip

she said this he said that blah blah blah......

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bob-woodward-recalls-donald-trump-094902943.html

ccp

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"dear"
« Reply #4324 on: November 21, 2024, 02:45:55 PM »

Body-by-Guinness

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”Tectonic” Media Shift?
« Reply #4325 on: November 22, 2024, 02:06:56 PM »
Couldn’t happens to nicer partisans:

John Podhoretz
@jpodhoretz

Fascinating stuff going on. Politics editor at WSJ laid off today. Wash post national editor “removed” today. Wash bureau chief at NYT replaced a few days ago.  MSNBC selloff. Tectonic plates are shifting.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Media, Ministry of Truth Issues; foreign manipulation of US media/social media
« Reply #4326 on: November 22, 2024, 02:28:56 PM »


"Politics editor at WSJ laid off today"

I definitely have noticed some Dem/Prog shadings of late in what should be straight reporting articles. 

Body-by-Guinness

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The MSM, its Lies, and its Waning Impunity
« Reply #4327 on: November 22, 2024, 04:06:22 PM »
2nd post. One of the victims of the Kavanaugh witch hunt unloads on the WaPo editor that was and is one of its prime movers, and in doing so gives us a peek behind the MSM curtain:

The Cowardice of Modern Journalism

NOVEMBER 22, 2024BY MARK JUDGE

It shouldn’t still surprise me. But it does.

Marty Baron, the “legendary” editor who ran the Washington Post from 2012 to 2021, writes about me in his 2023 memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.
 
For almost a year, I have been calling Baron out on social media and formally requesting that he give me space in his paper to defend myself against what he wrote. Because Marty Baron is a coward, he will not answer me.

This surprises me because I grew up the son of a journalist and in the days when my father was in the game, a person was given an opportunity—usually long before publication time—to defend himself when a journalist mentioned him in a negative light. I realize, now, that I’m probably naïve and that these people are scum.

Baron recently came to mind because he just did an interview on NPR—where else? —in which he conjured the bogeyman of President Trump cracking down on the press. “I think [Trump’s] salivating for the opportunity to prosecute and imprison journalists for leaks of national security information—or what they would call national security information,” Baron told Terry Gross.

“I would expect that he would deny funding to public radio … and TV. And that he will seek to exercise control over the Voice of America and its parent company, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as he did in his previous administration, trying to turn it into a propaganda outlet.”

Oh Marty, get bent. No one is buying the self-aggrandizing bit where you play the victim, the courageous, fourth-estate warrior who defies big government. You’re Stephen Glass with a beard.

In 2018, I was at the center of a political storm when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that I had been in the room when she was allegedly sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh in 1982, when Brett and I were 17 and in high school. The accusation inflamed the nation and upended my life. I have written about it a lot in the last six years, but as long as orcs like Marty Baron are going to mention by name in their books and articles, I’m going to respond. You can turn the page or click away, and God knows I’m tired of reliving it. But as long as I have a platform, when a fool like Marty Baron speaks my name I am going to be there to defend it.

Baron spends a good part of Collision of Power writing about the Kavanaugh nomination. He mentions me when he cites a letter that Blasey Ford had written saying that Kavanaugh “with the assistance of a friend, Mark G. Judge,” had been involved in her assault.

Had Baron read my book or any of the many columns I’ve written about the ordeal, he would know that even something as small as Ford referring to me as “Mark G. Judge” is a tell. Mark G. Judge was a byline I used when I was a younger journalist. Ford’s casual use of it in that letter suggests that someone was doing opposition research about me and Brett, not referring to someone she actually knew. It’s a small detail, maybe lost in the fact that Ford could not remember the “when” or the “where” of the alleged attack, but it is something Woodward and Bernstein would have noticed.

In my book The Devil’s Triangle, I reveal the opposition researchers Ford was working with, how the idea that she was a “reluctant witness” is a lie, and take The Washington Post apart piece by piece. Baron does not have the integrity to mention a single article I have written on the subject. He does not mention my book. He does heap praise on Emma Brown, the Post reporter who broke the Blasey Ford story. Baron writes: “The Post’s reporter, Emma Brown, had focused single-mindedly on getting the facts right and checking out Ford’s account as best she could under the circumstances at the time.”

Wrong. In The Washington Post piece published by Brown on Sept. 16, 2018, there was also no mention of Leland Keyser. Keyser was a close friend of Ford’s, who Ford claimed was present at the party where the alleged assault took place. Brown omitted Keyser from her story. Kimberly Strassel at The Wall Street Journal noticed this and asked: “Why is there no mention of Leland Keyser in the official Post piece? Why didn’t Post reporter Emma Brown mention Keyser, who according to Ford was at the party in question?”

On Sept. 22, almost a week later, The Washington Post answered. From Fox News :

“Ford, the Post acknowledged in an article by reporter Emma Brown on Saturday, had told the paper more than a week ago about Keyser and said ‘she did not think Keyser would remember the party because nothing remarkable had happened there, as far as Keyser was aware.’ But the Post did not mention Keyser specifically or Ford’s preemptive dismissal of her memory in its original recounting of Ford’s allegations, a bombshell story that has threatened to upend Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. The story mentioned only that ‘Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party’ and that [t]hose individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning.”

In 2018 Marty Baron’s Washington Post also did a profile of a guy named Mike Sacks. Sacks, a comedy writer, talked to the paper about what it was like growing up outside of Washington, D.C., with Brett and I. There was only one problem. Mike Sacks, by his own admission, has never laid eyes on me, Brett Kavanaugh, or any of our friends.

Yes, The Washington Post ran a story detailing the misadventures of Brett Kavanaugh and me in the 1980s, sourced by a man who had never met either one of us. There was also the ridiculous hit piece about our underground high school newspaper featuring deep dives into pressing matters like which movies we watched  during those years. All of this chatter, of course, was intended to portray Kavanaugh and me as something we were not. We were smeared and set up, and Marty Baron’s paper is largely to blame.

There was a brief media maelstrom before the election when The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, refused to endorse a candidate. Baron got so upset he went on MSNBC to take it to Ali Velshi. After talking nonsense about “the wall between news and editorial” at the Post, Baron criticized the paper for not endorsing Harris. He claims that the decision to not endorse “was made by Jeff Bezos and the circumstances are highly suspect.” Nothing about Russiagate was considered suspect. Nothing about Post columnist Jennifer Rubin’s obvious mental health decline is suspect. And nothing about the reporting on me and Brett Kavanaugh allegedly drugging and gang raping girls was suspect. Marty feels that “the practices and principles” of the great paper have suffered as a result of the non-endorsement, not from its inability to do journalism.

“When [Trump] talks about his triumphs during his first term,” Baron told NPR,

“he’s cited the undermining confidence in the mainstream press—he’s called it one of his greatest successes. … It’s not the only reason the confidence in the press has declined. There are a variety of reasons. … But the big factors have been market fragmentation and the fact that people can find any site that affirms their preexisting point of view and any conspiracy theory, no matter how crazy it is, they can find somebody who says that’s true.”

Well, I know this much is true: You’re a coward, Marty. Subscriptions are down, Trump has been elected, Joe Rogan gets 10 times your audience. As Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis bluntly put it, “people aren’t reading your stuff.” It’s over. Even so, my offer stands: have the balls to let me defend myself in your dying newspaper. It’s an honor thing.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-cowardice-of-modern-journalism/