Taylor Lorenz Complains The New York Times is Too Right-Wing - "Washington Post tech “reporter” Taylor Lorenz is bothered by the political bias within the New York Times. You might wonder why a liberal columnist would criticize the political leanings of a paper that has endorsed a Democrat presidential candidate for every election since 1960, starting with John F. Kennedy. The answer is she’s not. According to Lorenz — and this is not a headline from the Babylon Bee — the New York Times has long been a right-wing news operation. Lorenz claims the outlet only allows its journalists to express political opinions if they uphold the conservative orthodoxy. She posted her claim on Threads, in protest of X: “Anyone who’s worked as a journalist at the NYT knows that journalists there are absolutely allowed to loudly espouse political opinions, you just have to espouse the *right* political opinions. Right wing opinions are fine, left wing opinions are not,” Lorenz wrote... Lorenz didn’t provide any evidence to support her claim, other than re-posting an article that discussed the Times condemning antisemitism and Hamas. (Those damn right-wing nut jobs.) Then again, it’s probably best to leave out examples at the risk of bringing light to the Times’ coverage of Trump-Russia, Covid, BLM, and the Hunter Biden laptop story — all of which echoed the same talking points as MSNBC, CNN and the DNC. Last year, the website All Sides, which scientifically determines the bias of an outlet, ruled that the New York Times operates with a “strong Left bias.”... we reckon she does actually believe the Times is a conservative brand. See, Taylor Lorenz is nuts. Seriously. She’s off her rocker. Lorenz is best known for doxxing the then-anonymous creator of the Libs of TikTok X account, whose family members she then harassed. She even showed up at their front door. With a mask, of course. Lorenz still wears a mask to this day. She also recently complained that the government did not lock the country down as much as she would have preferred... Lorenz was the subject of a column of mine in 2021, where we documented her journey into becoming one of the most delusional writers on the internet."
Thread by @ggreenwald on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Just amazing, and shows who changed, and...who didn't. In 2005, the NYT won a Pulitzer for exposing this illegal Bush/Cheney domestic spying. I wrote my first book on it. Now, the NYT claims only the "hard-right" wants reforms, and heralds the program as vital to Our Safety™. Yet again: the liberal media and political establishment are now drooling, devoted loyalists of the US Security State. They cheer spying domestic programs they once indignantly denounced, and suggest only traitors and fascists want to limit FBI/NSA spying authorities.🤷♂️ That said, there are also some Dems - including Sens. @ossoff and @DickDurbin -- who are demanding reforms and limits to these spying powers before the law is renewed. But long-standing left-liberal causes - free speech, civil liberties, etc. - now coded as "hard-right" views. @ossoff @DickDurbin These labels have become empty parodies. They meaning increasingly little: just weapons. RFK Jr. has a panoply of long-time left-liberal views. Here he is denouncing censorship by the US Security State. Yet the Atlantic christens him a "MAGA Democrat." Is this a left-wing or a right-wing view? What's more -- to use the words of the NYT -- "hard right" here: demanding that the FBI/NSA's domestic spying powers be renewed yet again with no reforms or limits (as the Biden WH is doing), or saying this?"
NBC News changes headline after omitting man killed at pro-Palestinian protest was Jewish - "The original headline from NBC News appeared to emphasize only that Kessler died after hitting his head: "Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say." The updated headline gave the context that Kessler died after an "altercation" with protesters: "Jewish man dies after hitting head in altercation at dueling pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies in California." The outlet failed to include a note for readers that the headline had been altered... Political commentator Joe Walsh wrote that misleading headlines have caused the American public to lose trust the media"
8 Horrific Atrocities And How NBC News Reported Them | Babylon Bee - "Passengers aboard the Titanic accidentally drink a little too much water
Citizens of Pompeii experience sudden heat wave
Abraham Lincoln dies after hitting head on a bullet
Millions of Soviet Union residents receive free housing, work opportunities in Siberia
Roman leader killed after knife accident
Malaysian flight delayed indefinitely
Joan of Arc dies after rapid onset of heat exhaustion
Jeffrey Epstein kills himself"
WIRED’s Gushing Pete Buttigieg Profile Is an Embarrassment to Journalism - "Is journalism’s job to afflict the comfortable? Or is it to kiss the ass of the powerful with hosannas to how smart, talented, and charming they are? In the case of WIRED’s recent profile of Pete Buttigieg, it’s clearly the latter... To call it hagiographic would be something of an undersell. The piece — incidentally penned by someone who in 2016 described Hillary Clinton as “an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself” — opens with two stanzas that similarly make the former mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city sound like a fusion of Jesus Christ and Aristotle"
NBC News on X - "A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks."
Oilfield Rando on X - "They buried the Hunter Biden story by calling it “Russian disinformation”. They were exposed as liars afterwards. And after all that, they still published this. Realize where we are."
Furious at the Concept of Paying Taxes, Elon Musk Lashes Out at Elizabeth Warren
The US media lying as usual
Rolling Stone on X - "Speaker of the House Mike Johnson admitted that he and his son monitored each other’s porn intake in a resurfaced clip from 2022"
Thread by @DanFriedman81 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "What he actually said is that he installed accountability software on his son's devices to keep his son from using porn, and he put the same software on his own devices to show his son he wasn't using porn either. But Rolling Stone is a dishonest publication. I think, if something like Rolling Stone's UVA rape story scandal happened today, they would stand by the story, because their standards of journalism have eroded completely, and they no longer care about factual accuracy, just the ideological valence of the content they publish. The concern over “misinformation” is usually framed as people getting bogus news from randos on social media, but what doesn’t get acknowledged enough is how media outlets that used to be trusted, like Rolling Stone, the LA Times and NBC News, are now trafficking in propaganda."
Clear proof the Daily Mail and Fox News can't be trusted
Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "The sad or crazy journalist stereotype confirmed again. Out of 263 occupations, journalists are the 7th highest in neuroticism. Personality Profiles of 263 Occupations"
Glenn Greenwald: 'Journalists Are Authoritarians' - "I started writing about politics because I thought the media was so dormant and complacent about these radical assaults on civil liberties under Bush and Cheney taking place during the war on terror. And then under Obama, they went to sleep even further. They got hypnotized into thinking that he was a noble and benevolent leader. I'll give you just one example, which is press freedom. Under Obama, as I'm sure you know, the Espionage Act of 1917—one of the most pernicious laws we have on our books; it was enacted under Woodrow Wilson, and it was designed to criminalize dissent from U.S. participation in World War I—was invoked against whistleblowers and sources, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and a dozen others, more under Obama than every other prior president combined. It ended up being three times more prosecutions under the Espionage Act for our sources as journalists than all previous presidents, including Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever you want to pick. And the press said almost nothing. Trump gets in, and The Washington Post changes its motto to "Democracy Dies in Darkness," essentially saying press freedom is under assault. [White House reporter] Jim Acosta writes a bestseller with some pompous, self-glorifying title, like Danger: Reporting in the Era of Trump. What the fuck ever happened to Jim Acosta that constitutes an assault on press freedom? The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was to say mean things about them in tweets. Those aren't assaults on press freedom. I was threatened by the Obama administration with prison when I was doing the Snowden reporting. I was criminally indicted by the [Jair] Bolsonaro government at the beginning of [2020] for the reporting I did in Brazil. Those are attacks on press freedom. Saying Jim Acosta is an idiot, and tweeting something insulting about Wolf Blitzer, isn't... whatever independent entity arises that gives journalists freedom and begins to compete with corporate media outlets, they turn their guns on it. People don't realize this. The main reason Facebook and Google and Twitter so actively censor now isn't because they wanted to. They don't want to. They never wanted to. They wanted to tell that story that Substack is telling—that AT&T tells, right?—which is, "Look, we're just a neutral platform. We don't pick and choose who gets to speak." Nobody expects if Milo Yiannopoulos calls Alex Jones on AT&T and does a conference call that AT&T intervenes and cuts off their service, because people accept that AT&T is a content-neutral service. That's what Facebook and Twitter wanted to be. They had to stop doing that. They had to start censoring…because journalists at CNN and NBC and The New York Times demanded they do so. Turning on their huge megaphones and saying, "Look at the extremists and the hatefulness these platforms are giving voice to." And they're going to do the same thing to Substack and Patreon. It's just a question of time... what's happening at the ACLU is the same thing happening on every college campus, practically; in corporate workplaces; and also in newsrooms. It largely breaks down on generational lines. Not completely, of course, but largely... These Jewish lawyers in the 1970s represented the actual Nazis who were wearing swastika armbands and their right to march down the streets of Skokie, Illinois, where a large population of Holocaust survivors were. That's how radical they were. And not just free speech but also due process. The idea that you cannot, no matter how odious a person's crime is that they're accused of, assume their guilt without giving them full due process... I have to say, when some pundits, like [New York magazine's] Jonathan Chait, were obsessed with these college campus controversies, I really didn't pay much attention. Because I just thought: I had a lot of views in college, and I grew out of them. I wasn't interested in chiding 21-year-old sophomores at Oberlin. I didn't think that was a very important power center to go and denounce and confront the way Jonathan and others were doing obsessively. They turned out to be right in the sense that [the students] didn't grow out of it. They brought it with them to their workplaces. And as I said, these millennials aren't 20 anymore. They're 35 and 40, and they still haven't grown out of it... journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others. That's just unfortunately the modern-day mentality of the journalist. It used to be an anti-authoritarian mentality. Now they work for big corporations and become authoritarians. But also, they don't believe in the right of citizens to confront power centers... Journalists view the dissemination of information about what powerful people are doing in the dark not as their principal function and purpose—which is what it ought to be if we had a healthy media—but as something to be denounced and condemned... I'm very worried about what a Biden-Harris administration is going to do when it comes to leakers and whistleblowers and sources, except for the ones who are leaking to their approved journalists for reasons that are designed to advance their interests."
What comes after we get rid of objectivity in journalism?
When the media openly proclaim that they are biased and that is good and there's no point being objective
Journalism is being eaten alive by opinion - "if we don’t grapple with what the Covington debacle revealed about where journalism is right now, we won’t have much worth saving, anyway... rightside norms have begun infecting mainstream journalism and spreading within it like a plague. That’s my diagnosis, at least. But if you disagree, just go on Twitter, which is where just about every left-of-center journalist 40 and under spends a big chunk of each and every working day. Over and over and over, you will see people whose job is to report the truth responding with strong half-baked opinions, or retweeting their friends’ and colleagues’ strong half-baked opinions, in response to breaking-news events about which very little is known so far... if you call yourself a journalist, there needs to be some distance, somewhere, between your tribal allegiances and the way you do your job. To be clear, a return to a slightly more “traditional” understanding of journalism’s mission won’t save us. We’re probably doomed either way, but our doom is only going to come sooner, and be far uglier, if we can’t demonstrate our ability to add value, if we advertise, loudly and sanctimoniously, that we have nothing to offer an increasingly hyperkinetic and confusing informational ecosystem other than just another set of screaming outraged Twitter avatars."
From 2020
White House sends letter to news execs urging outlets to 'ramp up' scrutiny of GOP's Biden impeachment inquiry 'based on lies'
Weird. I thought the media are supposed to be independent
The TikTok boat jumping challenge is fake, despite news reports - The Washington Post - "the Today Show broadcast a television segment about an alleged TikTok challenge that was killing people. “A stunt, intended to rack up views … It’s known as the boat jumping challenge,” the host declared. The news segment and subsequent article on Today.com claimed: “Multiple people have died after attempting boat jumping challenge on TikTok.”... But it was all untrue. There is no boat jumping challenge on TikTok. Before the media frenzy, no boat jumping videos had gone viral on TikTok, and no hashtag related to jumping off boats had ever been popular on TikTok, according to the company. Not a single trending audio on TikTok has ever been linked to jumping off boats. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency issued a statement denouncing the story... When pressed for evidence of the challenge, a spokesperson for Today declined to comment. A representative from People pointed to three videos on TikTok, two of which had less than 100 views and have since been removed from the platform. The third was posted from an account with just 28 followers and received only 63 likes. Before the media cycle decrying the alleged challenge, there were fewer than 5 searches per day for “boat jumping” on all of TikTok globally, according to data provided by the company. Since the media storm broke out, searches have skyrocketed by 35,900 percent. Several articles about the alleged “boat jumping challenge” also falsely claimed that a 13-year-old boy had died as a result of a TikTok “Benadryl challenge.” In fact, such a challenge has never existed on TikTok, and there is no evidence that TikTok played a role in the child’s death. “TikTok has been, for the past few years, a very lucrative boogeyman,” said Emily Dreyfuss, who runs a program aimed at educating news executives on disinformation and media manipulation at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy. “Our team and countless researchers and journalists across the country have spent time trying to educate producers, reporters, and editors that just because a source says something started on TikTok doesn’t make it true. I’m extremely disappointed to see that the Today Show has still not learned that lesson.” Since TikTok broke into the mainstream consciousness in 2020, dozens of viral challenges have been falsely attributed to the app. In March, representatives in Congress bombarded TikTok’s CEO with questions about nonexistent TikTok challenges, repeating false information gleaned from news accounts. Last year, The Post revealed that Facebook had hired a conservative lobbying firm to plant news about fake TikTok challenges in local media across the country. The origin of the “boat jumping challenge” can be traced to a single comment that a local Alabama resident made during a news broadcast... “It’s just like with TikTok issuing the Tide Pod challenge,” Dennis said during the interview, which was later uploaded to YouTube. In fact, TikTok never issued a Tide Pod challenge. The Tide Pod challenge was another fake viral hoax, attributed to YouTube at the time, that became a meme in late 2017, nearly a year before TikTok launched in the United States... Until TikTok launched in the United States, these fake trends were primarily attributed to YouTube and Facebook. Throughout 2017 and 2018, news outlets falsely claimed that YouTube videos were encouraging children to snort condoms, set themselves on fire, and eat toxic Tide pods. In 2019, national media outlets, most notably the Today Show, claimed that Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube were spreading the “Momo challenge,” in which an image of a terrifying sculpture would appear on a child’s cellphone screen and pressure them to kill themselves... The whole thing was a hoax. There was no evidence the challenge ever existed on YouTube, Facebook, or WhatsApp, and zero deaths were reported. The image cited as “Momo” is actually a sculpture titled “Mother Bird” created by the artist Keisuke Aisawa for the Japanese special-effects company Link Factory. Media reports recently have seized on TikTok as the latest threat to child safety... “Journalists are falling down on the job,” she said, “which leads to ridiculous policies and blanket bans and complete misunderstanding of what roles these platforms hold in our children’s lives. Journalists do a humongous disservice against our country’s ability to keep people safe and craft regulations that would actually protect children when they muddy the water so much with bad reporting. It’s frankly lazy.”"
Of course, news sources are only wholesale condemned as unreliable when the liberal establishment disapprove of them
How the New York Times publishes lies to serve a biased narrative - "the Biden administration acknowledged there was no evidence that Russia ever offered bounties on American troops in Afghanistan, walking back a report that wounded former President Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election. Four days later, the Washington, DC, medical examiner revealed that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick had not been murdered by rampaging Trump supporters during the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, as reports had claimed, but had died of natural causes. Both stories were based on anonymous, unidentifiable sources, but had become deeply enmeshed in the public consciousness. Both confirmed the assumptions of the nation’s left-leaning media and academic elite, while damaging their political enemies. And both were driven by The New York Times, where malicious misreporting has been the practice for a century, argues journalist and media commentator Ashley Rindsberg. “My research churned up not mere errors or inaccuracies but whole-cloth falsehoods,” Rindsberg writes in “The Gray Lady Winked” (Midnight Oil), out now, which examines how the nation’s premier media outlet manipulates what we think is the news. The “fabrications and distortions” he found in the Times’ coverage of major stories from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to Vietnam and the Iraq War “were never the product of simple error,” Rindsberg contends. “Rather, they were the byproduct of a particular kind of system, a truth-producing machine” constructed to twist facts into a pattern of the Times’ own choosing, he says... Times reporters have followed the same playbook since the 1920s. Star reporters cite fuzzily identified sources and make sweeping assertions to support a narrative aligned with the corporate whims, economic needs and political preferences of the patriarchal Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has helmed the operation since 1896, he writes. The chosen narrative, reinforced from multiple angles, is entrenched through a network of stories over time... The paper’s coverage of Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the decade before World War II is an early example of its narrative manipulation... So glowing was its picture of the regime that the Nazis regularly included New York Times reports in their own radio programs... The infamous behavior of the Times’ star Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty — who pooh-poohed reports of the Holodomor, the 1932-33 mass starvation that Josef Stalin either allowed or imposed in the Ukraine — is well known. But Rindsberg’s book reveals that Duranty had not accidentally overlooked the disaster that killed millions. “Duranty was instructed by his higher-ups to cover the Ukraine famine in that way,” Rindsberg said. “At the time, The New York Times was actively pushing for American recognition of the Soviet Union,” he explained. The US business establishment, led by the Chamber of Commerce, was on board, and Soviet rhetoric meshed with the Ochs-Sulzberger family’s leftist politics... Rindsberg sees the Sicknick and Russian-bounty stories as the latest examples of narrative construction at the Times. Sicknick died the evening of Jan. 7, the day after Trump supporters overran the US Capitol. “By Jan. 8th the Times had already published two big stories on his death,” Rindsberg said. “Right off the bat the narrative was that he’d been murdered.” In those initial stories, “two law enforcement officials” claimed that Sicknick suffered a “bloody gash” when “pro-Trump rioters . . . struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”... Over the next month, at least 20 Times articles pounded the theme that Sicknick had been “killed” by the demonstrators or died as a result of rioters’ violence. None of the reports named a source for the claim, or even identified the law enforcement body from which it originated. “Ten or 12 different reporters contributed to this,” Rindsberg said. “Several had won Pulitzer Prizes” for coverage of the Trump-Russia narrative after the 2016 presidential election. “Yet early on, the story was already changing”... In February, the Times shifted gears to claim that Sicknick had been overcome by mace or bear spray — as references to his bloody head wound faded from view. Ten more stories followed, continuing to press the idea that Capitol violence had killed him. Not until April 19 did readers learn that Sicknick sustained no injuries at all in the melee, but had died of an unrelated stroke... Similar hallmarks can be seen in the Russian bounties story... “What they were reporting on was an intelligence assessment,” Rindsberg said, a government account that by its very nature is ambiguous and incomplete... Nonetheless, “the Times coverage quickly became conclusive,” Rindsberg said. Its initial story was framed in the most absolute of terms, claiming that “American intelligence officials have concluded” that bounties were offered — and that Trump had refused to take action on the information. “It was circular logic: We know that Trump is colluding with the Russians, therefore he doesn’t do anything about the bounties,” Rindsberg said. “And why doesn’t Trump do anything about the bounties? Because we know he’s colluding with the Russians.” Some of the paper’s top prize-winning reporters participated in follow-up stories that hammered on the theme for months, despite National Security Agency objections... Ten months — and a presidential election — would pass before another media outlet, NBC, revealed that the initial intelligence had been “inconclusive” all along... “We already believe Sicknick was battered to death, because we were told that for a month every single day,” Rindsberg said. “And when the story turns out to be false, The New York Times does not do accountability,” he said. “It’s quiet little adjustments — updates to the Web pages, maybe run a small correction or an editor’s letter somewhere.”"
From 2021. So much for liberals dismissing Fox News and the Daily Mail because they publish lies
Washington Post, New York Times, NBC retract reports that said Giuliani was warned by FBI he was target of Russian disinformation operation - "The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NBC News on Saturday issued significant corrections, retracting earlier reporting that said Rudy Giuliani had been directly warned by the FBI that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign."
Damn unreliable Daily Mail and Fox News! They lie all the time so they can't be trusted!
This Daily Mail hater claimed that the liberal media "actually print their retractions" and claimed I "had to go back years to find examples", but was silent when I asked which Daily Mail retractions were not printed and how many years he needed to back for for them
The Washington Post corrects, removes parts of two stories regarding the Steele dossier - The Washington Post - "The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusian American businessman as a key source of the “Steele dossier,” a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump."
'N.Y. Times' Retracts Core Of Hit Podcast 'Caliphate' On ISIS - "The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags indicating that the man it relied upon for its narrative about the allure of terrorism could not be trusted to tell the truth"
To Hell with You People - "Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out... The Giffords shooting sent the media elite in this country into a bout of St. Vitus’s dance that would have warranted an army of exorcists in previous ages. Sarah Palin’s Facebook map was an evil totem that forced some guy to go on a shooting spree. The New York Times, the Washington Post, all three broadcast networks — particularly NBC whose senior foreign-affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, devotes, by my rough reckoning, ten times as much air time to whining about Sarah Palin as she does about anything having to do with foreign affairs — flooded the zone with “Have you no shame” finger wagging. A memo went forth demanding that everyone at MSNBC get their dresses over their heads about the evil “tone” from the right. Media Matters went into overdrive working the interns 24/7 to “prove” that Republicans deliberately foment violence with their evil targets on their evil congressional maps. Everyone “knew” the shooter was a tea partier. Except he wasn’t. He wasn’t even a conservative. He was a sick, demented, nutball. And it still didn’t matter! More bleating and caterwauling about the “tone” followed. More chin stroking and tut-tutting from Meet the Press roundtables and “very special segments” on the Today Show. More pizzas were ordered for the Media Matters galley slaves... Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the Founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair. Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said. Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists. No one cares. I hate the “if this were Bush” game so we’re in luck. Instead imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called) a “bunch of terrorists” on the day Giffords returned to the Congress. Would the mainstream media notice or care? Would Meet the Press debate whether this raises “troubling questions” about the White House’s sensitivity? Would Andrea Mitchell find some way to blame Sarah Palin for Dick Cheney’s viciousness? Would Keith Olbermann explode like a mouse subjected to the Ramone’s music in Rock and Roll High School? Something inside me hidden away shouts, “Hell yes they would!” The Today Show even had Debbie Wasserman Schultz on this morning for five minutes talking about Giffords. No one thought to ask her what she thought of Biden’s comments? It’s not like she’s the Democratic party’s national spokesperson or anything. Oh, wait. She is!... And yet you know the next time there’s the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing’s rhetoric. Well, go to Hell. All of you."
From 2011. Violent leftist rhetoric is never dangerous, because it's the truth, of course
