NYT Journalist Erases ENTIRE Twitter After National Pulse Unearths Posts Admitting ‘Working’ For The Chinese Communist Party. - "New York Times Director of Cinematography and visual journalist erased his entire Twitter history following a National Pulse exposé that unearthed posts where he admitted to “working” for the Chinese Communist Party. Kessel, a former creative director at the state-run outlet China Daily and freelancer with clients including China’s Ministry of Information, also insisted working for the communist “regime” had its benefits.
At NYT, "talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called 'the narrative.'" - "By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line. Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?” The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”"
Meme - "Project Veritas: I will pretend to be gay, start a Grindr account, and honeypot big pharma in pursuit of the truth."
Legacy Media: "Omg when is Pfizer going to email me my story for today, I have a Grindr date tonight."
Meme - Frank McCormick: "This is how the media creates racial narratives that contribute to social strife. Notice how NBC selectively uses racial descriptors depending on the race of the perpetrator and victim(s)? They decide which stories have a racial context, regardless of investigational outcomes."
"WAUKESHA
Wisconsin Christmas Parade: 5 Dead, Over 40 Injured After SUV Plows Into Crowd"
"A white man shot his Black neighbor in Missouri, claiming self-defense. Neighbors tell a different story."
If you're ever feeling down, just remember that Ice T probably stands with you - "We soon learned that, yes, Body Count’s own Ice-T stands with the punks, metalheads, Juggalos, goths, and surfers... Interested to find whether Ice won’t stand with anybody, the questions did eventually uncover the fact that, sadly, he isn’t necessarily on board with journalists."
Journalists believe news and opinion are separate, but readers can't tell the difference - "It is a tenet of American journalism that reporters working for the news sections of newspapers remain entirely independent of the opinion sections. But the divide between news and opinion is not as clear to many readers as journalists believe that it is. And because American news consumers have become accustomed to the ideal of objectivity in news, the idea that opinions bleed into the news report potentially leads readers to suspect that reporters have a political agenda, which damages their credibility, and that of their news organizations... The news sections of the paper also increasingly run stories that contain a level of news analysis that casual readers might not be able to distinguish from what The New York Times designates as opinion"
Of course, this pretends that news coverage has no bias. Also, even if opinion is separated from news, this doesn't mean there is no bias if all the opinions are the same. Ironically liberals are very eager to talk about unconscious bias. But not when it comes to themselves
When did we give up on persuasion? - "When was the last time you read an article, an opinion piece, that you felt was trying to persuade you of something? To argue a position that you don’t hold, and make you believe it? I suspect such experiences are rare. It is easier to write things for people who already agree with you: to make them cheer or feel clever, or to remind them how dreadful the other lot are. It’s also more fun... a long-awaited New York Times article was published, about the blog Slate Star Codex (SSC)... Metz and the NYT said they would reveal Alexander’s real name in the piece. Alexander thought this would endanger his relationships with his patients, and took down his blog. He has since quit as a psychiatrist, re-ordered his life, and set up a new website. Now, half a year later, the NYT piece is out. I don’t want to get into whether or not it is a hit-job; others have done that. I will say that it comes perilously close to outright misrepresentation... What interests me, though, is that SSC, and the rationalists, are seen as gateways to hard-right thinking... the idea that the rationalists are secret fascists is strange. A 2019 survey of SSC’s readers found that self-described “conservatives” were outnumbered 8:1 by self-described “liberals” and “social democrats”; there were rather more “libertarians”, but still far fewer, and weirder subcultures like “alt-right” and “neoreactionary” existed only in slightly larger numbers than “Marxists”. They are far more anti-Trump than the American population. But the NYT piece is far from the first article to suggest that, nonetheless, the rationalist community is an “an on-ramp to radical views” that allows “extremist views to trickle into the tech world”. Partly, that’s because the rationalist community is explicitly a place for reasoned, polite debate, and almost any views are welcome as long as they are expressed respectfully and can be backed up with evidence or reasoning... straightforward discrimination can’t be the only factor behind the male dominance of some fields: he points out, for instance, that sexist attitudes kept almost all women out of almost all professions until relatively recently. Law, medicine, academia, journalism, you name it. Now, though, he says, lots of professions are female-dominated: “men make up … only 25% of new psychologists, about 25% of new paediatricians, about 26% of forensic scientists, about 28% of medical managers, and 42% of new biologists.” Women make up half of new medical students, half of new law students, the large majority of new journalism students and psychology students. Most of these jobs are comparable in pay and status to computer programming. “Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.” ... women make up the large majority of gynaecologists, paediatricians, psychiatrists and family doctors (American GPs), while men make up the large majority of radiologists, anaesthetists and surgeons. Either we have to posit that radiologists are much more sexist than psychiatrists, or we have to say there’s some other, major, factor going on. Alexander suggests that it’s about interests... If you are on Team A in the big internet fight, and you want to beat Team B, then someone who comes along and talks, in Team A language, to Team A people, to make them believe things that are associated with Team B — then that person is worse than the most fire-breathing Team B zealot. He’s not a foreigner, he’s a traitor. He’s not a combatant, he’s a spy. He’s a fifth columnist... Rationalism is indeed a gateway to dangerous beliefs, says Scott Aaronson: “insofar as once you teach people that they can think for themselves about issues of consequence, some of them might think bad things. It’s just that many of us judge the benefit worth the risk!”"
If you believe in critical thinking, rather than following leftist groupthink, you are part of the "far right"
America Needs Truth and Reconciliation on Russiagate - "Russian bots and trolls were blamed by virtually every major news organization in the country for amplifying the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. The files contain a mass of emails from executives blowing up this ridiculous story, once and for all. The #ReleaseTheMemo scandal was one of the more shameful episodes in the recent history of our media, but taken seriously by all but one or two mainstream editors at the time. All citing the same dubious source — the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” trumpeted by former FBI counterintelligence official and current MSNBC contributor Clint Watts — they insisted Russians deployed Twitter bot-armies to whip up cyber-support for Republican congressmann Devin Nunes. Nunes had just released a classified memo alleging Democrats and the FBI used the infamous paid oppositional research dossier of ex-spy Christopher Steele to obtain secret FISA surveillance authority on Trump-connected figures like Carter Page, amid other improprieties. We now know Twitter internally found no evidence, as in zero, that Russians were anywhere near this story... This is a constant theme in the files. In addition to revelations about FBI censorship, shadow-banning, Pentagon use of fake accounts, and suppression of true information about issues like Covid-19, the Twitter emails regularly expose the wide delta between what we were told about foreign threats, and what a major platform seeing the raw data knew. (In this case, for instance, the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag reportedly originated with @TracyBeanz, the clearly American editor of UncoverDC). Even within the heavily partisan culture at Twitter, the regular “Russia, Russia, Russia” claims by politicians and media in self-serving pursuit of headlines caused eyes to roll. “Members,” said one Twitter executive, “look foolish if they cry ‘Russia’ every time something happens on social media.” We have a lot of problems in this country, and there are serious arguments to be had between blue and red about all sorts of issues, from immigration to the wealth gap to abortion and race. But the country is currently paralyzed by distrust of media that runs so deep that it prevents real dialogue, and that situation can’t be resolved until the corporate press swallows its pride and admits the clock has finally run out on its seven years of loony Russia conspiracies. It’s over, you nitwits. It’s time to stow the Mueller votive candles, cop to the coverage pileup created by years of errors, and start the reconciliation process. You’ll be tempted to shout, “But Trump, Stop the Steal, QAnon — Derp!” Don’t do it. Don’t be the Japanese soldier still clutching a bayonet to defend the forgotten atoll in 1960. Forget Trump: you need to clean your own house first. Expunging the years of absurd deceptions has to happen, if media companies ever want wide audiences to trust them again, and that starts with admitting the obvious screwups — like this case"
Good luck convincing the liberals, especially when they're in power. I still many spout the lie about a police officer being killed in the Capitol Riot, even when the media have grudgingly retracted it, so they rather cling to their delusions
They aren’t even trying to hide it anymore - "How do conservatives get pulled into conspiracy theories and things like QAnon? Why don't they just trust the "experts"? Did they not hear what was just reported?... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was pressed to explain her inability to rally both lawmakers and the general public to support the gargantuan $3.5 trillion spending bill that she, President Biden, and Democrat party leadership are pushing. To Pelosi, the issue is a lack of propaganda. That is, she's frustrated over the lack of any effective public relations campaign that focuses on what the bill will give to people rather than what it will cost them. Whose fault is that? A fair-minded person would say the responsibility for such an effort falls squarely on the shoulders of the leaders wanting to enact the legislation. But Pelosi's not a fair-minded person. "Well I think you all could do a better job of selling it, to be very frank with you," the Speaker said to the press gathered in the briefing room. If you've ever wondered how leftists in positions of power view the mainstream media, this is all you need to hear. They see them not only as allies, but as propaganda agents, who bear the responsibility to "sell" Democrat party policy to the American people. It's an astounding implicit admission from the Speaker... Katie Couric intentionally edited a sit-down interview she conducted with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg... Couric admits that she felt obligated to "protect" the late liberal justice from public backlash after she made comments that would be perceived as disrespectful to the race radicals the media was promoting at the time. Rational minds will be asking an obvious question: why does she feel such an obligation? Couric wasn't employed by Ginsburg. She wasn't a biographer getting paid by the family's estate. She was not the hired reporter for the DNC or a left-wing judicial organization. She was writing for YahooNews at the time, supposedly churning out hard news stories, interviews, and features. But she claims to have faced a "conundrum" when the 83-year-old (at the time) Ginsburg carried on about the racially motivated national anthem kneeling. Athletes participating in the protest like Colin Kaepernic, "probably could not have lived in the places they came from," had it not been for the government they were protesting, Ginsburg told Couric... Would she have done so for Donald Trump, the late conservative justice Antonin Scalia, or any other elected Republican? I can't even ask the question with a straight face."
Only "conspiracy theorists" don't trust the media
Thread by @BrentBozell on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "We're in the midst of the Great American News Blackout. The networks, CNN, and MSNBC get 4 pinocchios for calling themselves news organizations. They are too busy pushing a Marxist agenda to cover the most important issues of the day. The same goes for Big Tech. They will censor anything and everything that might hurt their leftists pals and their anti-american agenda. This year alone, the media and social media have blacked out or given minimal coverage to:
- Mass exodus from the workforce
- Surging inflation
- Biden's border crisis
- Hunter Biden's corruption
- Loudoun County School Board cover-up of alleged rape allegeations
- Biden's crashing poll numbers
- Diminishing trust in the media"
From 2021
WATCH: Brian Stelter claims that CNN doesn't want to censor Fox News, then calls for Fox News to be censored - ""Reducing a liar's reach is not the same as censoring his freedom of speech," Stelter falsely claimed. "Freedom of speech is different from freedom of reach, and algorithmic reach is part of the problem." Left-wing journalist and former human rights lawyer Glenn Greenwald took to Twitter to comment on Stelter's false claims, pointing out that restricting "freedom of reach" has for decades been considered a violation of the first amendment by the courts."
Journalists & Free Speech: When Journalists Become Speech Police | National Review - "Call it Cooke’s First Law: Whatever the story, however complex its details, members of the American press will react by announcing who must be forbidden to speak going forward. That is what too many journalists are now — not firefighters, not mediators, not conveyors of vital information, but zealous obscurantists staffing would-be censorship agencies. In comes the news, and, within minutes, out comes the latest justification for shutting everyone up. A mentally ill homeless man attacks Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer? That’s the Republican Party’s fault for running political ads against Pelosi — and it must stop. A disturbed man shoots up a gay club in Colorado Springs, Colo.? That’s the fault of Americans who object to drag shows for kindergartners — and they must be quiet. Elon Musk plans to moderate Twitter with a lighter hand? That will cause “havoc” and put lives at risk — and it must be prevented at all costs. C. S. Lewis once observed that “it would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” So it is here... Because they are vaguely aware that there is something untoward about members of the press playing whack-a-mole with the national conversation, their rules come couched in the language of necessity. Once upon a time, everything was speech. Now, there is “speech” as classified and approved by media sentinels, and then there is “disinformation,” “hatred,” and even “stochastic terrorism.” One might sum the caprice with which free expression is now treated with one of those “irregular verbs” from Yes, Minister: “I report, you harass, he should go to jail for incitement.” Worse still is the grotesque tendency for members of the press to cast their transparently self-serving determinations as raw scientific truths. It’s not the opinion of NBC, Axios, or the Washington Post that Twitter would be better left as is; it’s a fact — as determined by the “experts.” That these “experts” have been repeatedly proven to be full of it — remember when the entirely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian disinformation campaign,” and therefore needed to be suppressed just before the election? — seems not to matter. Nor, indeed, does it seem to matter that a great many of our arbiters of truth are rank hypocrites and contemptible lunatics. The temptation to cast one’s preferences as fact is a remarkably strong one, and, for now at least, many modern journalists seem entirely incapable of resisting it... the Times’ editorial board complained that “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”... Which . . . well, would that, by any chance, be the “condemnation and recrimination” of which the Times is routinely guilty itself? Last week, the Times’ Michelle Goldberg conceded at the outset of her piece on the shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs that “the police are still investigating the motive.” And then, having duly covered her ass with that caveat, she proceeded merrily along as if there were no need to wait for the facts of the case to be determined. Throwing caution to the wind, Goldberg proposed that because “we know that the suspect is facing hate crime charges, and that the attack took place in a climate of escalating anti-gay and anti-trans violence and threats of violence,” she could write the column she’d wanted to write all along. Among the causes of the “entirely predictable” massacre, Goldberg insisted, were “the right,” Chris Rufo, Florida legislators, “Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary,” “QAnon,” “Republicans and Republican-aligned groups,” the “Proud Boys and other demonstrators,” “Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert,” “The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh,” and “Ben Shapiro.” These people, groups, and phenomena, Goldberg concluded, “don’t get to duck responsibility if a sick man with a gun took them seriously.”... writers at outlets such as the Times feel entirely comfortable constructing lists of people who are presumptively to blame for crimes that do not, at the point at which those lists are constructed, even have a clearly established motive... In 2011, the Times repeatedly blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting of Gabby Giffords, only to discover later on that there was no connection between the two at all. In 2016, the Times pulled the same trick with the shooting at Pulse — among the attack’s contributing “factors,” the editorial board contended, was “a vicious and virulent homophobia” — only to learn that the killer had chosen the venue at random. The most recent editorial that the board has published — literally, the last thing it has said at the time I’m writing this — is that the 2022 “campaign season was marked by numerous incidents in which many Republicans used speech that has been linked to violence.” Linked, one must ask, by whom?... The most clear-cut connection between heated rhetoric and violent action in recent years was between the Democratic Party’s anti-Republican rhetoric and the attempted massacre of Republican lawmakers at a baseball field in Virginia."
Fact check: Biden honored service members during dignified transfer - "Corrections & Clarifications: This story was updated Sept. 2 to note that Biden checked his watch multiple times at the dignified transfer event, including during the ceremony itself. The rating on this claim has been changed from partly false to missing context."
Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Jamil Jivani: Alleged political bias at the New York Times undermines trust in media - "The New York Times is accused of wanting to check with then-Democrat U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer before publishing an article written by a political opponent. According to Weiss, the junior editor “refused” to follow the direction given by the senior editor, indicating the possibility of ethical tensions around such a practice... original reporting from the National Review’s Nate Hochman affirms Weiss’s account and disputes the Times’s denial... In 2020, the same year that Sen. Scott’s essay was rejected, the Times did publish writing from another Republican senator, Tom Cotton. Publishing the Cotton article led to the resignation of the paper’s editorial page editor James Bennet. In 2021, journalist Ashley Rindsberg’s book The Gray Lady Winked documented a series of news stories that the Times has gotten wrong over the span of decades. Rindsberg accused the Times of manufacturing false narratives that serve the paper’s political interests. The resignation letter submitted by Weiss to the Times in July 2020 also makes mention of the organization’s biases in explaining why she felt the need to leave her position. Sen. Scott has indicated that he believes the story is evidence of not only bias against him as a Republican, but also bias against him as a Black conservative. After the podcast interview with Weiss was released, Sen. Scott stated on social media, “The NYT silenced me because Black men who think for themselves are an existential threat to the Leftwing coalition built on lies. They said they didn’t do it … but we have the receipts.”"
Glenn Greenwald: Tucker Carlson, Left-Wing Authoritarians, Identity Politics, and Free Speech - "No living American journalist has a fiercer reputation for independence—and invective—than Glenn Greenwald... what are we to make of the fact that Greenwald, once a contributing writer at Salon who appeared regularly on the left-wing news show Democracy Now!, is now a fixture on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight? How do we explain the fact that Greenwald, known for his progressive critique of American foreign policy, is now welcomed in conservative circles but considered a pariah by many of his former colleagues on the left? Has Glenn Greenwald changed, or has the world?... 'The kind of values I've always embraced are heard more on Fox than on CNN and MSNBC'"
Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It - "Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America’s intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept “protected” even from its allies. The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks... Once again, Internet platforms, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, and payment processors like PayPal are working to help track down and/or block the activities of “extremists.” This time, they’re on the same side as the onetime press allies of Wikileaks and Snowden, who began a course reversal after the election of Donald Trump... After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and “domestic extremists” stepped into the role enemy combatants played before... Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical “hidey holes.” We’ve seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts, ProPublica arguing that Apple’s lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Verge and Vice and The New York Times listening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech about imploring the “authorities” to use the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” argument to shut down Fox News. Multiple outlets announced plans to track “extremists” in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica, and Berkley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program used “high-precision digital forensics” to uncover “evidence” about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the “sedition hunters” at the Twitter activist group “Deep State Dogs” to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to “sleuthing communities”... Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones “violent white supremacists” — they’re a lot of things, but “violent white supremacists”? In the first piece about “extremists” on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man’s attorney later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction. When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he “certainly wouldn’t want to accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists.” When asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he’d be naming public figures only, the sarcastic answer this time was, “Of course I won’t be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended at all costs.”... “The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state agencies is a short one”... It hasn’t escaped the notice of some current and former Intercept staffers that combing through the hacked private communications of ordinary people in an FBI-like hunt for “extremists” is more or less the exact opposite of the company’s original mission, which focused on the institutional abuses of the very counterintelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies they now seem anxious to aid... “That a media outlet founded in order to battle mass surveillance of ordinary citizens and to safeguard privacy rights is now trolling through stolen digital data of private citizens in order to expose and punish them for thought crimes and ideological dissent is as grotesque as it is ironic,” says Greenwald. The giveaway that these deviance hunts have little to do with holding the powerful to account is that they’re taking place as news outlets have given up even the pretense of interest in spy agency abuses... All of this is taking place as a slew of War on Terror programs are being retooled for domestic use... Vigilante press efforts at outing “domestic extremists” will function as an auxiliary watch list. Do we need help remembering how the last version worked out? Over 1.1 million names were entered on a list that was shared with 1,400 private groups, from hospitals to universities to prospective employers, resulting in people losing jobs, being denied banking services, having travel restricted, and experiencing all sorts of other difficulties... It turned out that was needed to get most of the press off the case was a little partisan catnip. Issues like mass surveillance and drone bombing were already more or less non-starters in media once the intel agencies started feeding reporters sensational (and often bogus) stories about the Russian-Republican conspiracy to conquer our precious bodily fluids, but in the later Trump years, and especially since January 6th, the FBI-CIA-media partnership has been cozier than a Swedish porn shoot. Buzzwords cooked up by security agencies have for years now become media talking points instantaneously. Whether it’s “an attack on our democracy” or the “sowing of discord,” media outlets are happy to re-transmit propaganda constructions verbatim. Two more recent security-agency talking points are now gospel. First, the greatest threat to America is no longer al-Qaeda but homegrown extremists, whom the FBI defined as being almost, but not quite, foreign, i.e. “inspired by, but not receiving individualized direction from, foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).” Second, the security agencies are held back in their ability to combat such folks by “weak laws” and encryption... On MSNBC, one recent guest said of al-Qaeda, “They got nothing on what this Republican Party is doing.”"
Mainstream Media Slain in Canada - "I had the privilege of taking part in the prestigious Munk debates in Toronto, Ontario. Along with The War on the West author and reporter Douglas Murray, we took on New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, arguing: “Be it resolved: Don’t trust mainstream media.” A pre-event vote of attendees and listeners showed 48% support for our “side,” versus 52% for theirs. 82% of thousands of audience members claimed to be willing to change their minds. They were telling the truth, as it turned out. In a bitter slugfest that featured tense confrontations, impassioned oratory (especially from Douglas), and several almost unbelievably petty exchanges, Douglas and I swung the vote 39% in our favor, ending with a 67%-33% win, the most decisive rout in the history of the event... [Once], the commercial strategy of news was to aim for the whole audience. A TV news broadcast aired at dinnertime and was designed to be watched by the whole family, from your crazy right-wing uncle to the sulking lefty teenager. This system had its flaws. However, making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits, too. For one, it inspired more trust. Gallup polls twice showed Walter Cronkite of CBS to be the most trusted person in America. That would never happen today… Gladwell seized on the line and repeatedly asserted it meant I was pining for the all-white, all-male paradise of the fifties and sixties. He went there five different times! By the last time, I threw my hands up in the air, and even sweet old ladies in the audience were rolling their eyes... The “most trusted” polls I mentioned Cronkite winning were actually in the seventies and eighties, but he was on a roll. Moreover, as he hammered the theme, Gladwell kept pulling the schoolyard tactic of mispronouncing my name, repeatedly calling me “Tee-AHH-bee,” even after I corrected him onstage. The great fast-food philosopher and factory-producer of bestsellers wanted to make clear, I guess, that I hadn’t reached a professional level of sufficient height to penetrate his lofty consciousness... The first turn in the debate came when Gladwell turned his disdain on Douglas, suddenly deciding to call him “Doug.” In my mind’s eye I remember Murray turning to me and mouthing, What the fuck? It’s possible I imagined this (I’ll need to look at the video). Anyway, a flutter shot through the crowd, which then burst out laughing when Douglas replied: “Well, Malc…”... A highlight was a monologue by Murray aimed at the Canadian media, which he said acted as an “amen chorus of the Canadian government” during the trucker protests, blasting its representatives as “utterly rancid and corrupt.” This, he said, addressing the Toronto crowd, was especially shameful because “in this country, your mainstream media is funded by the government.”... I really believe, though, that the event turned when Gladwell wouldn’t let Cronkite go. It was a small thing, but it happened to coincide with a subtext of the discussion, i.e. the unearned waft of superiority emanating from the mainstream press. Journalists were once more down-to-earth, being mostly fuckups and castoffs from other professions who tended to feel more comfortable in the company of bartenders or hot dog vendors than politicians. The latter were universally thought of as scum, or at least suspect. Now a corporate press pass is a status symbol, reporters tend socially to run in the same circles as the people they cover, and when presented with the growing mountain of evidence that they’ve lost the trust of the public (see this recent Gallup survey), the reflex is to declare the public defective. Toward the end of the debate, Gladwell made this exact argument. After one last time invoking my longing for the fifties, when the press was so exclusive that “people like Michelle and I wouldn’t have been on the stage,” he shifted without any hint of contradiction to question the current wisdom of having mainstream media institutions “perfectly match” the makeup of the rabble... I watched this performance with awe. If douchebaggery were an ice cream cone, the guy would be melting all over the stage. I almost felt bad. When the results were announced, he scurried off stage, doubtless already carrying the germ of a new bestseller (thought the fifties-obsessed white male, acidly)."
Matt Taibbi, Douglas Murray Dominate Trust-in-Media Munk Debate against Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg : samharrisorg - "The excuse, “At least we’re not Breitbart,” doesn’t even hold. Think about another of these bombshells, the one in which Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen supposedly went to Prague to meet with Russian hackers. This story came from the now-disgraced dossier of former British spy Christopher Steele. It’s been refuted multiple times, including by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who flatly declared Cohen “never traveled to Prague.” Yet the tale will not die... This story is every bit as nuts as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. I would venture to say it’s crazier. It’s at least more creative. No serious journalist would go near a story like this without a lot of evidence. Yet our leading media people believed it with none. Because they’re not doing journalism. They’re selling narrative, and this was good narrative... How can you “hold Trump accountable” without credibility? Getting things right is hard enough. The minute we try to do anything else in this job, the wheels come off. Until we get back to the basics, we don’t deserve to be trusted. And we won’t be." Matt Taibbi, Douglas Murray Dominate Trust-in-Media Debate - "Taibbi’s opening remarks echoed those raised in his most recent book Hate Inc., in which he explores how the mainstream American media abandoned its commitment to neutrality in favor of fan service. Taibbi argues the change was driven by an effort to retain a niche audience of like-minded readers and viewers who remained after the industry was gutted by tech-driven changes in the advertising market. The Canadian trucker protests featured prominently in the debate. During Murray’s opening remarks, the British commentator and fellow National Review contributor, laid into Prime Minister Trudeau and Canadian media outlets for failing to challenge the government-approved narrative that the protests were organized by bigots of various stripes... Goldberg also discussed the truck protest... “I showed up at the Ottawa protests kind of expecting the sort of things that I’ve seen at Donald Trump rallies, at various even further right events, and didn’t find it. I was really quite astonished . . . and I told my editors that this is what I found and they said: ‘Great, that’s more interesting than what we thought you were gonna find.’ And it was more interesting”... According to a Gallup poll from October 2022, barely a third of Americans trust the “mass media” to “fully, accurately, and fairly” report the news. The survey was the first time Gallup ever recorded the percentage of Americans having no trust in the media greater than those that have a “great deal/fair amount” of trust in the media."