The Washington Post: Can billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos save journalism? - The Hub
Nolte: Serial-Lying Washington Post Staff Demand New Sugar Daddy After Jeff Bezos Hands Out Pink Slips - "The disgraced, far-left Washington Post as we knew it was obliterated on Wednesday, and now the very same staffers who have spent decades annihilating the former newspaper’s credibility want a new sugar daddy to bail them out... I wonder how Bezos feels about being demoted from “sole owner who poured hundreds of millions into this failing institution for years” to “steward.” The arrogance. The actual definition of “steward” tells you precisely what these insufferable Post staffers think of Bezos... the staff sees Bezos as an employee who is there to serve them. Well, right about now, he’s serving them pink slips... “In the last three years, The Post’s workforce has shrunk by roughly 400 people,” whines the Washington Post Guild. That’s right. The writing has been all over the wall for three years, and not once did anyone have the moral courage to do a self-inventory and say, Maybe if we stopped lying, we would earn the trust of subscribers, advertisers, and the casual readers whose clicks increase our revenue? Not. Once. All they’ve done over those three years is arrogantly carry on in the hopes that some idiot with too much money would come along and buy into their unearned self-importance. Learn to Substack, serial liars. Good riddance."
Thread by @haugejostein on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The bloodbath at The Washington Post today — roughly one-third of its staff has been laid off — illustrates the ruthlessly plutocratic and neoliberal nature of the US economy. In the span of a single day, one of the world’s most prominent English-language newspapers is being both crushed and politically restructured at the whim of a billionaire. It’s honestly jaw-dropping. Everything about it sends shivers down my spine — the complete absence of labour rights, and how the billionaire class can just casually destroy media they dislike. This is certainly not what democracy looks like."
Max on X - ""... how the billionaire class can just casually destroy media they dislike." π€£ππ The generosity of the "billionaire class" was the only thing keeping this relic alive on life support. Thanks for the laughably disconnected from reality opinion, London."
Paul on X - "Nick Shirley broke one of the biggest news stories in the last 20 years by simply talking to people and showing up with a camera and releasing that footage on X. The Washington post employs a 1000 people and hasn't done real journalism in close to 15 years. Being a relay for leftist power isn't journalism. That's what the Washington post is, a political relay. Nick Shirley is actually a journalist.
And the Somali fraud story wasn't a secret. I've been crowing about it for a decade as have others. The Washington post could have broke that story, they knew about it but it made Democrats look bad so it sat untouched for 15 years."
John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte on X - "Yeah, I believe the Washington Post this time.
•The ICE Detains Five-Year-Old Hoax
•The Hegseth ‘Kill Everybody’ Hoax
•Trump “Destroying” White House Hoax
•Photo of Starving Gaza Baby Hoax
•Israeli Troops Murdered Food-Seeking Palestinians Hoax
•Trump Tariffs Will Explode Prices Hoax
•Maryland Man Hoax
•Black Newborns Much More Likely to Die If Doc’s White Hoax
•Elon Musk Nazi Salute Hoax
•Mass Hysterectomies Performed on Immigrants Hoax
•The All-White Trump Party Hoax
•Springfield Bomb Threat Hoax
•Trump Called for Liz Cheney to Be Executed Hoax
•Violent Crime Down Under Biden/Harris Hoax
•Arlington Cemetery Hoax
•Kamala Was Never America’s Border Czar Hoax
•Russia Collusion Hoax
•Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax
•Jussie Smollett Hoax
•Covington KKKids Hoax
•Very Fine People Hoax
•Seven-Hour Gap Hoax
•Russian Bounties Hoax
•Trump Trashes Troops Hoax
•Policemen Killed at Mostly Peaceful January 6 Protest Hoax
•Rittenhouse Hoax
•Eating While Black Hoax
•Border Agents Whipping Illegals Hoax
•NASCAR Noose Hoax
•Georgia Jim Crow 2.0 Hoax
•Trump Assaulted Secret Service Agents and Grabbed Steering Wheel of Beast Hoax
•MAGA Assaulted Paul Pelosi Hoax
•COVID Lab Leak Theory Is Racist Hoax
•Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Russian Disinformation Hoax
•Joe Biden Will Never Ban Gas Stoves Hoax
•COVID Deaths are Overcounted Is a Conspiracy Theory Hoax
•Mass Graves of Native Children in Canada Hoax
•Trump Killed Japanese Koi Fish Hoax
•Trump Told People to Drink Bleach Hoax
•Hamas Hospital Hoax
•If Reelected, Trump Will Execute People Hoax
•The 900,000 Kids Hospitalized with Coronavirus Hoax
•Dozens of Environmental Hoaxes
•The Alfa Bank Hoax
•Libs of TikTok Murdered Non-Binary Teen Hoax
•Aaron Rodgers Sandy Hook-Truther Hoax
•‘Bloodbath’ Hoax
•Biden ‘Sharp-as-a-Tack’ Hoax
•Iowa Poll Hoa"
Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus: "The Washington post last month wrote this article. The headline is completely false. The study did not explore the effects of racism at all. The study was showing there was a disparity, the “because of racism” part was added by the Washington Post journalist, because as another race correspondent at WaPo said, race drives subscriptions. I am happy to say that the author of this piece has been fired today."
The Washington Post: "Nearly half of the mortality gap between Black and White adults can be traced to the cumulative toll of stress and inflammation, a new study shows. These two biomarkers bolster the "weathering hypothesis" that links systemic racism to health disparities."
Akilah Johnson @akjohnson1922: "In 2021, I was hired by @washingtonpost to cover health disparities & explore the way racism & social inequality affects health. 4 months ago, I became the generations' reporter exploring how health is experienced by different pple across the life course. Today, I was laid off."
Meme - Arthur in California @ArthurReturnss: "The mass layoffs at The Washington Post are unfortunate, but then I remember articles like this and think it's for the best."
"The racist legacy many birds carry. Birders grapple with complicated past linked to slavery, white supremacy"
Elon Musk on X - "Wired, The Atlantic, Guardian and many other propaganda legacy publications would die immediately if they had to support themselves. Donations from far left organizations disguised as charities are what keep them alive. They serve simply as a means of influencing Wikipedia, Google, etc as fake “authoritative” sources."
Daractenus on X - "The United States currently ranks below Ghana, Namibia and nearly every single European country when it comes to freedom of press. You don't get to lecture anyone on this."
Christian Heiens π on X - "This is just proof that Reporters Without Borders is, like countless other organizations and institutions, little more than a tool of the Progressive managerial elite. The United Kingdom, which regularly imprisons its own people for memes they post online, is ranked #23 on this list. Germany, where it's a crime to "insult someone in public" or post "hate speech online", is ranked #5. Meanwhile, the US is ranked #55. There isn't a single person who isn't a total idiot who thinks the European continent has more press freedom than the United States."
David Bernstein on X - "A self-discrediting study, but not surprising, given that much of it is based on the views of so-called "Human rights experts" who hate the US and Israel. I can predict without even looking that Israel will be even lower than the US, despite having a very robust press corps."
Andrew Hammel on X - "I live in Germany and have published journalism in the US, UK, and Germany, and I can tell you this study is utterly laughable. Most European countries have laws allowing journalists to be severely fined for "insulting" or "disrespecting" politicians."
Larkin Magnus on X - "Like "Democracy", "Freedom" on the left just means "my preferred policy outcomes"."
Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Journalist thinks that making a prediction that can be judged to assess one's credibility is childish."
Nate Silver @NateSilver538: "Allan you wanna bet? Let's say 250k at even odds?"
John Harwood @JohnJHarwood: "grow up"
Nate Silver @NateSilver538: "Happy to bet you too bro."
Trust the 'Experts'! Even when they're always wrong. "Qualifications" are all that matter.
Lomez on X - "NPR Update: aside from screeching about Maduro, NPR spent the morning advertising their new January 6th retrospective, a massive, exhaustively researched, minute-by-minute breakdown of the day, the key actors, and its political implications and fallout. This was a huge and probably quite expensive effort. The "Jan. 6 Archive" is of course uncompromisingly slanted in a way to make Trump and the events look maximally incriminating and to justify the years of lawfare against Trump and his allies that followed, and also to ignore all of the surrounding context of the summer of riots that preceded the election (let alone an honest appraisal of the election itself). And say what you want about it, but I am struck again by the asymmetry in how the left understands "writing history" and preserving cultural memory to their own ends, while the right refuses to engage in comparable efforts, or leaves it to amateurs (as with its journalism) who, while meaning well, lack the polish and know-how to compete with their institutional adversaries. We have just lived through a decade of the most brazen effort to remake American life in the image of the dumbest, most perverse, mentally-ill (literally) leftist ideology that has possibly ever existed––all with the consent and full buy-in from every corner of our ruling institutions. Is it possible the right can muster the resources and man-power (it wouldn't even be that expensive), to catalog all of this? To preserve its memory? To demonstrate its depravities and shame and permanently desecrate the reputations of every one who played along? Here is the NPR page link. Take a look. The saying that "history is written by the victors" is not quite true. History is written by the people who make the effort to write history. It's really that simple."
REVEALED: New York Times contributor busted as Iranian spy - "A frequent contributor for The New York Times was revealed to be an Iranian spy and was charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Federal prosecutors reported that this Iranian-born political science author arrested Monday was paid in secret to write columns favorable to Tehran and lobby at least one American lawmaker on the global power's behalf. A criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn charged 63-year-old Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi with acting and conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). If convicted of both offenses, Afrasiabi faces the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison."
From 2021
Report: NPR’s Maher Refused Internal Demands to Resign “For the Good of Public Media” Before Loss of Funding - "the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) called on National Public Radio (NPR) CEO Katherine Maher to resign before all federal funding for both the CPB and NPR was cut off. As in the past, Maher and the NPR board chose their own agendas over the interests of their institution and public radio. I have long been a critic of Maher since her inexplicable selection by the NPR board to lead the media organization. Despite years of objections to NPR’s overt bias, many critics genuinely wanted NPR to reverse course and adopt more balanced coverage. That is why, when NPR was searching for a new CEO, I encouraged the board to hire a moderate figure without a history of political advocacy or controversy. Instead, the board selected Katherine Maher, a former Wikipedia CEO widely criticized for her highly partisan and controversial public statements. She was the personification of advocacy journalism, even declaring that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” that makes it “tricky” to censor or “modify” content as she would like. Maher has supported “deplatforming” anyone she deems to be “fascists” and even suggested that she might support “punching Nazis.” She also declared that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction [in] getting things done.” As expected, the bias at NPR only got worse. The leadership even changed a longstanding rule barring journalists from joining political protests. One editor had had enough. Uri Berliner had watched NPR become an echo chamber for the far left with a virtual purging of all conservatives and Republicans from the newsroom. Berliner noted that NPR’s Washington headquarters has 87 registered Democrats among its editors and zero Republicans. Maher and NPR remained dismissive of such complaints. Maher attacked the award-winning Berliner for causing an “affront to the individual journalists who work incredibly hard.” She called his criticism “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” Berliner resigned, after noting how Maher’s “divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR” that he had been pointing out. In her disastrous appearance before Congress, Maher sat next to PBS CEO Paula A. Kerger and dismissed criticism. What was not disclosed is that PBS agreed with some of us that, if Maher truly wanted to save federal funding and protect NPR, she would resign. According to the Times, our calls for her resignation were being repeated internally. Instead, the board that made the foolish choice of hiring Maher chose their ideological and personal agendas over the interests of their institution . . . again. In the meantime, Maher and others were going public, bewailing the threat to journalism and calling on citizens to do everything that they could to protect NPR. The only thing that they were not willing to do was admit their own failure. We have seen the same pattern in academia. The fact is that this academic echo chamber may be killing educational institutions, but the intolerance still works to the advantage of faculty who can control publications, speaking opportunities, and advancement with like-minded ideologues. We have watched the same perverse incentive in the media where outlets are seeing plummeting readers and revenue. Journalism schools and editors now maintain that reporters should reject objectivity and neutrality as touchstones of journalism. It does not matter that this advocacy journalism is killing the profession. Reporters and editors continue to saw at the limb upon which they sit due to the same advantage for academics. For reporters, converting newsrooms into echo chambers gives them more security, advancement, and opportunities. Recently, the new Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis was brought into the paper to right the ship. He told the staff “let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.” The response from reporters was to call for owner Jeff Bezos to fire Lewis and others seeking to change the culture. The Post has been eliminating positions and just implemented another round of layoffs to address the budget shortfalls. In the meantime, trust in the media is at record lows — paralleling the polling on higher education. The result is the rise of new media as people turn to blogs and other sources for their news. At NPR, the board and Maher have led the organization into a complete and utter meltdown, resulting in the loss of millions in funding and a shrinking audience. However, it does not matter. CPB called on Maher to resign “for the good of public media.” It was not, however, good for her or her board. Socially and personally, these individuals are praised and promoted as ideological champions on the left. They were even willing to see the death of CPB to remain faithful to the agenda. So, CPB died, NPR lost all funding, but Maher kept her job… and her agenda."
Pete Buttigieg rep tells 'aggressive' reporter to turn off camera at Ohio derail site
From 2023. Hostility to the press is only fascist if right wing politicians do it to the left wing press
Why Americans Hate the Media - The Atlantic - "Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”... He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached. As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, several soldiers in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror. Retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, who would soon become George Bush’s National Security Advisor, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. “What’s it worth?” he asked Wallace bitterly. “It’s worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon.” After a brief discussion between Wallace and Scowcroft, Ogletree reminded Wallace of Scowcroft’s basic question. What was it worth for the reporter to stand by, looking? Shouldn’t the reporter have said something ? Wallace gave a disarming grin, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I don’t know.”... Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces—and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. When that happens, he said, they are “just journalists.” Yet they would expect American soldiers to run out under enemy fire and drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. “I’ll do it!” Connell said. “And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get … a couple of journalists.” The last words dripped disgust... [Newt] Gingrich said. “The military has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have.”... He did not try to explain the reasons a reporter might feel obliged to remain silent as the attack began—for instance, that in combat reporters must be beyond country, or that they have a duty to bear impartial witness to deaths on either side, or that Jennings had implicitly made a promise not to betray the North Kosanese when he agreed to accompany them. The soldiers might or might not have found such arguments convincing; Wallace didn’t even make them... When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile. The limited curiosity that elite reporters display in their questions is also evident in the stories they write once they have received answers. They are interested mainly in pure politics and can be coerced into examining the substance of an issue only as a last resort. The subtle but sure result is a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems... Two days before the election many of the country’s most admired analysts had no idea what was about to happen. Yet within a matter of weeks these same people, unfazed, would be writing articles and giving speeches and being quoted about who was “ahead” and “behind” in the emerging race for the White House in 1996. As with medieval doctors who applied leeches and trepanned skulls, the practitioners cannot be blamed for the limits of their profession. But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part. It builds the impression that journalism is about what’s entertaining—guessing what might or might not happen next month—rather than what’s useful, such as extracting lessons of success and failure from events that have already occurred. Competing predictions add almost nothing to our ability to solve public problems or to make sensible choices among complex alternatives. Yet such useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong... If a reporter is sued for libel by a prominent but unelected personality, such as David Letterman or Donald Trump, he or she says that the offended party is a “public figure”—about whom nearly anything can be written in the press... Most journalists would eloquently argue the logic of this broad definition of public figures—until the same standard was applied to them... The analysts who are so clear-eyed about the conflict of interest in Newt Gingrich’s book deal claim that they see no reason, none at all, why their own finances might be of public interest... In 1992 political professionals had laughed at Ross Perot’s “boring” and “complex” charts about the federal budget deficit—until it became obvious that viewers loved them... There is an astonishing gulf between the way journalists—especially the most prominent ones—think about their impact and the way the public does. In movies of the 1930s reporters were gritty characters who instinctively sided with the common man... Since the early 1980s the journalists who have shown up in movies have often been portrayed as more loathsome than the lawyers, politicians, and business moguls who are the traditional bad guys in films about the white-collar world... The joke in these movies is how rapidly the pundits leap to conclusions, how predictable their reactions are, how automatically they polarize the debate without any clear idea of what has really occurred... the most depressing aspect of the new talking-pundit industry may be the argument made by many practitioners: the whole thing is just a game, which no one should take too seriously.
From 1996 too. Time to mock Fox News for being entertainment
Meme - Aesthetica: "One thing you realize if you travel abroad and catch a few minutes of their national news coverage is that anyone who watches the news in these countries is being conditioned to be the most retarded person on the planet. Picture a foreign smug leftist news dork giving their retarded opinion on an American smug leftist news dork's fake depiction of an event. That's the only news these people get about America. There's a boomer sitting in Canada as we speak who thinks Trump will be sent to prison for Russiagate any day now and he can't travel to Florida anymore because Trump will send him to El Salvador."
Li Jingjing: "It keeps getting crazier."
"Me reading news everyday as a Chinese *America using rifle to blow head off with lots of blood*"
