Monday, June 10, 2024

Links - 10th June 2024 (1 - US Media)

Meme - "How many recent mainstream media hoaxes did you fall for?
Russian collusion
The Inflation Reduction Act reduces inflation
Trump called neo-nazis "fine people"
Jussie Smollett
Bubba Wallace garage pull
Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation
Covington kids
Governor Witmer kidnapping plot
Kavanaugh rape
Trump said drinking bleach would fight COVID
Russia bombed their own pipeline
Trump pee tape
COVID lab leak was a conspiracy theory
Border agents whipped migrants
Trump saved nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago
Steele Dossier
Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan
Muslim travel ban
Andrew Cuomo showed the best COVID leadership
Ghost of Kyiv
Trump built cages for migrant kids
Austere religious scholar
Trump overfed Koi fish in Japan
Build Back Better will pay for itself
Trump tax cuts benefited only the rich
Cloth masks prevent COVID
If you get vaccinated you won't catch COVID
SUV killed parade marchers
Trump used teargas to clear a crowd for a bible photo
Don't Say Gay was in a bill
Putin price hike
Ivermectin is a horse dewormer and not for humans
Mostly peaceful protests
Trump overpowered secret service for wheel of "The Beast"
Officer Sicknick was murdered by protesters
January 6th was an insurrection
Trump mocked a reporter's disability
BYU students hurled racist insults at Duke volleyball player
Rocket that hit Poland was launched by Russia"
I still see left wingers spouting these. Time to ban Fox News and the Daily News for being unreliable and misinformation!

Meme - The New York Times: "As India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, struggles to quell months of protests by farmers, critics and analysts see a pattern of curtailing free speech that they fear is sending India down a dangerous path of intolerance."
The New York Times: "As protests stretch on in Canada and truckers block supply chains with the U.S., some Canadians are asking: Why hasn't Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered the authorities to quash the demonstrations?"
Freedom is only for those who push the left wing agenda

Lucas Lynch | Facebook - "Glenn Greenwald has resigned from the Intercept, the publication he co-founded, for - wait for it - being censored by his own editorial board for writing articles critical of Joe Biden.  I'm glad he's come around to the illiberalism of leftist cancel culture, but I don't feel sorry for him here. He has been consumed by a monster of his own creation. It's a fitting act of penance for someone who spent years smearing anyone left of center willing to speak out on these issues.  But I have no doubt now that he's tasted some justice of the mob, he will now be a dedicated fighter for liberalism and free speech again."
From 2020

From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans - "Americans overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of most majority groups"
The media pushing diversity and representation and minority voices cannot be responsible for this. The hoi polloi are just stupid

Thread by @Andercot on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "

Our one-party journalism system suffers no dissent from within. Here are some who do it anyway. ("Left Heretics and the New Media Collective") - "“When I as a Black person look at the Black Lives Matter movement, I have questions,” Max said through a gray face mask. “Like I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it.”  The full interview was 2 minutes and 6 seconds long. On June 6, with his job reportedly at risk for posting the video, Fang was forced to issue a public apology... What had Lee Fang done wrong? His colleague at the Intercept, Akela Lacy, accused him of “being racist,” of pushing “narratives about Black on Black crime after repeatedly being asked not to,” and of “using free speech to couch anti-Blackness.” Since June, more than 30,000 people have liked Lacy’s accusation against Fang on Twitter and over 5,000 have retweeted it, including a number of prominent left-wing journalists who endorsed the smear.  Fang arrived at the Intercept with impressive credentials... in the aftermath of Trump’s election, he expressed a number of opinions that made him a controversial figure within the Twitter left cohort: questioning the effectiveness of violence as a tactic to achieve social change, defending the principle that free speech extends to unpopular ideas, and criticizing identity politics and performative ideological militancy. On May 31, a few days before posting the video that got him in trouble, Fang had tweeted: “Seeing so many manipulate the MLK quote that riots are the ‘language of the unheard.’ Read the actual speech. It’s a passionate argument against riots and in support of nonviolence at a time when much of the radical left despised MLK and embraced violence.” This, too, got him in trouble with fellow left-wing journalists whose objection rested on the strange claim that by defending Kingian nonviolence, Fang was somehow in league with the white supremacist forces responsible for murdering the civil rights leader. The pluralist and democratic tradition on the left that Fang was identifying himself with put him at odds with the anti-majoritarian party line that progressive journalists have policed with growing intensity since Trump’s election, leading them to denounce Fang and others who hold similar views as “racists” and “crypto-fascists.” For these journalists, who now dominate the American media class, the “democratic majority” is a vehicle for the dangerous majoritarian mob lurking in the middle of the country plotting to oppress vulnerable minorities. The proper aim of politics, therefore, isn’t to try and convince the undecided—let alone the “deplorables” who disagree with them—but to wield the power of elite institutions to enforce right-think. Yet the idea that a reporter could be tarred as a racist by his colleagues simply for quoting MLK and publishing an interview with a Black protester expressing an opinion that’s not at all uncommon in the Black community did not sit well with everyone. While dozens of high-profile journalists joined in publicly denouncing Fang, his fellow left heretics and hate-magnets Zaid Jilani, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Tracey were among the most prominent in coming to his defense... “The reality,” said Jilani, “is that if you go to any high crime place in America, you’ll meet people who say exactly what that young man said to Lee. You’ll meet people who have the exact same concern, but they don’t view their role as just being part of a political narrative—as if they only exist to serve someone else’s political agenda.” The secret motive driving people in the news business is the fear of standing alone. Most journalists look around to see what the journalists they imagine are important are doing, and they copy that. In today’s online journalism, the natural impulse to be part of the pack gets supercharged by social media algorithms that reward split-second conformity and, voila, you have big outlets independently pushing the same stories at the same time, with the same framing, all without any need for a larger conspiracy... The [1619] project’s ostensible challenge to the establishment hasn’t prevented it from being endorsed by large corporations and entering the official curriculum of public schools and government bureaucracies. What’s left is an image of the American media as a one-party system controlled by an unstable alliance of security state liberals and “woke” progressive identitarians... Some of the bitterest attacks launched by the one-party media system are reserved for the few internal critics that dissent from the party line while remaining on “the left.” The small grouping of left-wing heretics exists more as a social affiliation or moral stance than a coherent political ideology. It includes people like Fang, Taibbi, Jilani, Tracey, Glenn Greenwald, Angela Nagle, Chris Arnade, and the hosts of the What’s Left and Red Scare podcasts. Despite their considerable differences, the outline of a broad, common sensibility is evident in the overlapping cluster of insults directed at these people. They are called racist, obviously, but they are also accused of being vulgar class reductionists, mere contrarians and provocateurs, transphobes, Strasserites, social conservatives, and closet reactionaries. Tracey, Taibbi, Jilani, Fang, and others in their orbit all have political views that put them well to the left of the Biden-Harris ticket. Where they dissent is on core issues of the progressive media consensus like Russian collusion, the value of identity politics, and the legitimacy of rioting and political violence... “I think a lot of this has to do with people within the press believing that Trump was such an extreme threat that they had to change the way they go about their business”... Life outside the one-party media state can be lonely, but it also has rewards—like being able to actually do reporting on stories that the collective has decided to censor. Tracey has spent several years supporting himself as an independent journalist by fundraising online. For the past three months he’s been covering the fallout and damage from the looting and riots that have taken place in hundreds of cities across the country, an assignment that puts him at odds with the chorus of media figures who have minimized the severity of the destruction or justified it on ideological grounds... “I saw a poll recently showing that 85% of Americans think that people rioting and committing arson should be arrested,” Jilani told me toward the end of our conversation. “Yet it would be very hard to go through progressive media and find arguments against just illegal nihilistic violence taking place, like in Portland and Seattle. It’s telling that The New York Times didn’t correct the record on what happened in the anarchist zone in Seattle until two months after it started, and that it was a tech reporter who did it.”... Spectacles like the ritual denunciation of left heretics can help enforce cohesion among journalists and within the larger educated professional class. They provide an effective deterrent for anyone tempted to notice the yawning gap that separates elite moral crusades from the priorities of ordinary Americans."
Black and minority voices only matter when they push the left wing agenda

I Was a Heretic at The New York Times - The Atlantic - "I also sought out expressly conservative views. Ochs was not, of course, calling for publishing just any opinion. An op-ed had to be smart and written in good faith, and not used to settle scores, derive personal benefit, or engineer some desired outcome. It had to be authentic. In other words, our goal was supposed to be journalistic, rather than activist.  This, I learned in my two years at the Times, was not a goal that everyone shared. Being a conservative—or at least being considered one—at the Times was a strange experience. I often found myself asking questions like “Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?” only to realize how unwelcome such questions were. By asking, I’d revealed that I wasn’t on the same team as my colleagues, that I didn’t accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news. Or take the Hunter Biden laptop story: Was it truly “unsubstantiated,” as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism. Nor is a vague unease with difficult subjects. “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable,” a colleague once told me. This was something I was used to hearing from young progressives on college campuses, but not at work. There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist. But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with the liberal line. It was also clear that right-of-center submissions were treated differently... many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication. After senior leaders in the Opinion section realized that these articles were not getting a fair shake, the process evolved. Articles that were potentially “controversial” (read: conservative) were sent directly to the most senior editors on the page, to be scrutinized by the leadership rather than the whole department. The tension between journalistic and activist impulses existed in newsrooms before the spring of 2020. But it deepened after the murder of George Floyd... Edward Wong, wrote in an email to colleagues that he typically chose not to quote Cotton in his own stories because his comments “often represent neither a widely held majority opinion nor a well-thought-out minority opinion.” This message was revealing. A Times reporter saying that he avoids quoting a U.S. senator? What if the senator is saying something important? What sorts of minority opinions met this correspondent’s standards for being well thought-out? In any event, the opinion Cotton was expressing in his op-ed, whatever one thinks of it, had, according to polling cited in the essay, the support of more than half of American voters. It was not a minority opinion... A narrative had emerged on Slack: that I had gone rogue and published the article without any involvement of higher-ups. Of course this was false, but that untruth nevertheless became central to the story. I had followed all the rules, but I had the sinking feeling that not all of my colleagues felt similarly constrained... an editors’ note was appended to the op-ed. The note contains many errors, among them that the editorial process had been “rushed,” that “senior editors were not sufficiently involved,” and that facts in the article weren’t quite right. Never mind, of course, that it wasn’t rushed, that senior editors were deeply involved, and that there were no correctable errors. The note criticized Cotton’s claim that “radicals like antifa are infiltrating protest marches,” alleging that it had “not been substantiated.” But the attorney general was on the record saying that antifa had done just that—a fact the Times eventually confirmed for itself. “A more pathetic collection of 317 words would be difficult to assemble,” Erik Wemple, the media critic of The Washington Post, wrote a few years later about the editor’s note... Sulzberger asked Bennet to resign. “Wow,” Meghan Louttit, who is now a deputy editor in the newsroom, wrote on Slack. “James’s resignation makes me somewhat … Hopeful?” and added that the firing, in her view, represented “a first step.”  But a first step toward what? During an Opinion all-hands meeting, a liberal columnist asked Sulzberger about the precedent that firing Bennet set: Will you stand by me if people around here and on Twitter don’t like one of my columns?  Every now and then, the group that handles security for the Times would check in on me to make sure I was safe. Ever since the paper had named me as the person responsible for publishing Cotton’s op-ed, I had been receiving alarming threats... Maybe I should have seen this all coming. A few months earlier, my former colleague Bari Weiss had predicted that Bennet wouldn’t last long: “He is doing what they claim to want but they don’t want it,” she told me. Once Bennet resigned, a new regime came into Opinion... In the years preceding the Cotton op-ed, the Times had published op-eds by authoritarians including Muammar Qaddafi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Vladimir Putin. The year of the Cotton op-ed, it also published the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Regina Ip’s defense of China’s murderous crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, Moustafa Bayoumi’s seeming apologia of cultural and ethnic resentments of Jews, and an article by a leader of the Taliban, Sirajuddin Haqqani. None of those caused an uproar. Last year, the page published an essay by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City, and few seemed to mind. But whether the paper is willing to publish conservative views on divisive political issues, such as abortion rights and the Second Amendment, remains an open question... On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated... One friend contacted my girlfriend of seven years, asking whether she would take a stand against “Adam’s role in promoting fascism.”... As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode, it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it... It was clear to me then and it’s clear to me now that the fight over Cotton’s op-ed was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it. In the end, all that mattered was that an example had been made."

Richard Hanania on X - "If you mention that you like Chick-fil-A at the NYT orientation for new employees, the HR representative scolds you and then everyone starts snapping their fingers."
Gabriel on X - "my first day at breitbart news the HR team ran an induction for new starters. it began with an icebreaker game — we grabbed a piece of ammunition out of a cowboy hat and had to answer a question. mine was a hollow point so i had to say my favourite sandwich. i considered katz’s pastrami on rye but it seemed a little (((lib))), so i said a hotdog from a cart. the HR woman said “a HALAL cart???” and everyone booed. one of the gay guys called me a “gay retard” and everyone laughed and started chanting “gay retard, gay retard”"
Proof that mainstream media is unbiased

New York Times Bosses Seek to Quash Rebellion in the Newsroom - WSJ - "The New York Times is investigating itself. Over the past several weeks, Charlotte Behrendt, a top Times editor in charge of probing workplace issues in the newsroom, has summoned close to 20 employees for interviews to determine whether staffers leaked confidential information related to Gaza war coverage to another media outlet. It is the latest internal crisis at the Times, where management has been at odds with factions of the newsroom over union negotiations and coverage of sensitive topics like the transgender community and social justice. Reporting about the Gaza war has been a particular flashpoint, especially over an in-depth article that found Hamas weaponized sexual violence in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Some staffers questioned the reporting behind it and alleged that the suffering of Gazans isn’t getting the same attention. Times leaders in March said they stand by the reporting. The internal probe was meant to find out who leaked information related to a planned podcast episode about that article. But its intensity and scope suggests the Times’s leadership, after years of fights with its workforce over a variety of issues involving journalistic integrity, is sending a signal: Enough. “The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn said in an interview. “I haven’t seen that happen before.”   The Times is the envy of much of the news-publishing world, with more than 10 million paying subscribers and a growing portfolio of products like cooking and games apps. But while its business hums along, the Times’s culture has been under strain... Newsroom leaders, concerned that some Times journalists are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests to coverage decisions, are seeking to draw a line... Kahn said he welcomes the normal push and pull of any newsroom—journalists challenging each other’s assumptions and debating whether coverage is fair. But he said opposition to the Hamas sexual-violence article, penned in late December by veteran correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two freelancers, crossed a line when confidential Times work-product was allegedly shared outside the newsroom... Stacy Cowley, a business reporter and Times union officer who sat in on a few interviews to represent staffers, said the Times is targeting employees who have been struggling to get the company to listen to their concerns about war-related coverage.  “Instead of taking them seriously, the company is turning around and bullying that group into silence,” she said. The union has filed a grievance alleging that the company was targeting a group of staffers of Arab and Middle Eastern descent. Times leaders said the allegations are false... NewsGuard, an organization that rates credibility of news sites, in February reduced the Times’s score from the maximum of 100 to 87.5, saying it doesn’t have a clear enough delineation between news and opinion... The current dynamics at the Times stretch back to 2020, when a seed of employee activism took root in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing... Emboldened by their show of strength on Bennet, employees would flex their muscles again on multiple occasions, pushing to oust colleagues they felt had engaged in journalistic or workplace misconduct... some editors and reporters were growing concerned that some Times journalists were letting their personal views dictate which stories to pursue—or not pursue... One thing Powell noticed, he said, was that coverage that challenged popular political and cultural beliefs was being neglected... Management concerns about independence deepened in February of last year when some Times contributors and staff signed an open letter to the Times’s standards editor laying out complaints about transgender coverage... Kahn, who succeeded Baquet as executive editor in June 2022, and Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury said in a letter to staff that they wouldn’t tolerate participation by Times journalists in protests or attacks on colleagues."
When terrorism supporters are upset their attempts to control the narrative aren't as successful as they want

Meme - Marc Bennetts @marcbennetts1: "Tucker Carlson has been in Moscow for the past three days, according to Russia's Mash outlet. He was spotted at the Bolshoi Theatre today."
Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) @AdamKinzinger: "He a traitor."
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald: "That a journalist -- or any American -- becomes a "traitor" by visiting a foreign country we're not at war with, and interviewing its leader, is, in equal parts, demented, stupid and authoritarian. But this McCarthyite jingoism is also fully normalized in liberal discourse."
A.J. Delgado @AJDelgado13: "And... Strangely, it was fine when Barbara Walters interviewed Fidel"
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald: "US politicians have always spoken with, and US journalists have interviewed, foreign leaders of all kinds, including the US's adversaries and Russian leaders. But liberal discourse is now a replica of the worst McCarthyite abuses and think it's treason"
Bill Kristol @BillKristol: "I didn't like Jane Fonda going to Hanoi in 1972, and I don't like Tucker Carlson going to Moscow in 2024. But I'm just an unsophisticated old-fashioned Scoop Jackson Democrat/John McCain Republican."
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald: "The US was at war with North Vietnam. The US is not at war with Russia, even though the neocons who now dominate and are beloved by the Dem Party wish it were. At least this warmongering maniac honestly describes himself as what he is: a Democrat."

Tucker Carlson claims he's interviewing Vladimir Putin because 'Americans are not informed' about the war in Ukraine - despite 'paying for it in ways they don't understand'
Trying to provide a different perspective and doing the job of a journalist makes you a traitor. Oddly, the left didn't get this excited over Osama bin Laden's letter being published by mainstream media outlets, or when CNN aired an interview with him after 911. Probably all this butthurt shows that in the modern US, the job of journalism is now to push regime propaganda

Strongarm Zed on X - "Remember when the news would try hard to get interviews with Soviet leaders? Or 15 years ago when journalists were having interviews with Iran's Ahmadinejad? Journalism used to be about all sides, and actual reporting, not just our own government talking points."

Scott Adams on X - "Are they worried he'll negotiate a peace deal?"
𝕏 π•Šπ•₯𝕖𝕧𝕖 𝕏 on X - "The idea that a journalist shouldn't interview people is certainly a unique idea. There appears to be a significant risk of people understanding what is going on. I'm just sayin..."

Drew Holden on X - "And the media haven’t slowed down on pushing conspiracy theories. It was only a couple months ago that the media leapt, in unison, to claim Israel was responsible for an explosion at a hospital caused by an ally of Hamas."

Megan McArdle on X - "Becoming clear that an entire generation of younger progressives whose political character was formed during the Obama admin take the extra-gentle media treatment he got as the baseline to which any Dem president is entitled. Hence their indignation when we do our jobs."
JoeA64 on X - "It's not media criticism of Biden that's the problem. It's the obsession with "both-sides'ing" and continually downplaying Trump's outrages that's the problem."
Megan McArdle on X - "If you think that the mainstream media have failed to mention that Trump is a barbaric vulgarian with a penchant for fraud and a chronic case of verbal incontinence, I don’t know what to tell you except you should read more of our coverage."

How the cult of Vice came crashing down - "In recent years, Vice has become an object of much ridicule. This was a magazine that cut deals worth millions with the Saudi Arabian government, while simultaneously publishing woke guides on ‘How to shop for jeans as a nonbinary person’ and ‘How to deal with the “ally” in your friend group who’s actually a huge jerk’. Yet once upon a time, Vice was seen as the coolest media organisation on Earth. In London, in the mid 2010s, it was a cult that my entire social circle was desperate to join... To the uninitiated, the cult of Vice might seem as inexplicable as the ‘dancing plague’ of 1518 or the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, but it actually made a lot of sense. Because at the time, Vice was really the only major ‘alternative’ media platform out there for budding journalists and filmmakers to cut their teeth on... Vice was covering cannibal warlords in Liberia and sending reporters to see what it was like to do stand-up comedy on acid. It even had a dedicated drugs correspondent called Hamilton Morris! Vice’s genius strategy was to offer salaries way below industry standard to hungry young journalists and filmmakers. This meant that its offices were packed to the rafters with privileged kids who were happy to pass up a decent pay cheque in exchange for the infinitely more valuable social currency of working there... At its height, Vice was the most contrarian and unconventional publication out there. Much of this is owed to co-founder Gavin McInnes... Such was their cultural cachet that, for a period, Vice sales staff convinced the entire consumer-goods market that they had discovered a Rosetta Stone to translate corporate messaging into youthspeak. Naturally, they charged through the nose for this. Eventually – inevitably – the money took over. Investment flooded in from the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, the Walt Disney Company and private-equity firm TPG Capital. Like many other online media platforms, Vice struggled to turn this into profit. The multiple #MeToo settlements it faced didn’t help either. Amid its financial struggles, it signed a deal with Mohamed Bin Salman’s regime to make films promoting Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, editors repeatedly blocked stories that might offend the Saudi government. From that moment on, any pretence at edginess just felt like LARPing. No one is going to take the journalistic rigour of your ‘Guide to radical polyamory for Latinx long-Covid sufferers’ all that seriously when one of your biggest funders likes to chop up journalists and put them in suitcases. Perhaps it was this hypocrisy that ultimately turned Gavin McInnes into a right-wing extremist... In 2016, McInnes founded the Proud Boys, a group that describes themselves as ‘Western chauvinists’. When contrarianism runs so deep in your veins that you are ‘just shocking in nature’, the temptation to troll the media establishment must have been irresistible. After all, that is what Vice ultimately became – the very establishment that it once railed against. When the multi-billion dollar corporate machine has become so performatively ‘progressive’, where else is there for the ultimate antagonist to go, other than to become radically regressive?"

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