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MEDIA

George Soros Set to Control Second-Largest Chain of Radio Stations

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/02/14/george-soros-set-control-second-largest-chain-radio-stations/

Billionaire and left-wing philanthropist George Soros has been buying up debt to acquire a controlling stake in the second-largest radio broadcaster in the country, Audacy.

Court filings and sources close to the situation told the New York Post that Soros Fund Management has “bought up $400 million of debt in Audacy — the No. 2 US radio broadcaster behind iHeartMedia with stations including New York’s WFAN and 1010 WINS, as well as Los Angeles-based KROQ, according to bankruptcy filings.”

Soros could than have control of more than 220 radio stations nationwide. One Republican insider close to the situation told the outlet that Soros could be trying to have media outlets to potentially influence public opinion during the 2024 election.

“This is scary,” the source said.

Should Soros prove successful, he will likely have a 40 percent stake in the company’s senior debt, which would give him strong control of the company when it emerges from bankruptcy. He will not have a majority.

When Journalism Dies :Sebastian Junger

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/when-journalism-dies/

The truth dies with it

It’s hard to know what to make of the international press corps. Overwhelmingly white and college-educated, most have presumably ignored professional opportunities that pay orders of magnitude more money than journalism — and generally don’t get them killed. If you’re smart enough to tease the truth out of the confusion, nuance, and outright propaganda of most war zones — and most countries — you’re probably smart enough to do pretty well on Wall Street. Or in the restaurant business. Or flipping houses in Florida. And yet, every year, idealistic and ambitious young people troop off to make almost no money reporting on the world’s tragedies and failures. I hardly have a friend in the business who hasn’t been shot, kidnapped, blown up, detained, or threatened with execution. And yet they persist. I’ve lost one close friend and numerous acquaintances to war.

If you ask my fellow journalists why they do it, many will resort to the tired piety that someone must bear witness to the world’s horrors, but let’s have some honesty here. Journalism is one of the most important jobs in a democracy, and my involvement in the profession is a source of profound pride, but we don’t need to pretend selflessness to have merit. No other profession — lawyer, logger, preschool teacher — bothers to, so why should we? Journalists are some of the most ego-driven people I know, as well as some of the most principled, and they’re willing to risk their lives on both counts. Their supposed addiction to adrenaline can be thought of more accurately as an addiction to having a life of great meaning and consequence. What’s addictive is feeling different from everyone else, cut from a different cloth. Which indeed many of them are.

I’d now like to take a moment to get a semantic issue out of the way. Many people will tell you — or scream at you — that objectivity is a myth and journalists are just partisan hacks trying to advance their own agenda. Fair enough — some are. But such people aren’t actually journalists; they’re something else. News hosts who put on enormous amounts of make-up to make enormous amounts of money inflicting damage on our nation by lying about reality are (thankfully) outside the scope of this article. Now that that’s out of the way we can state that a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome.

Truth-tellers are everywhere in our society because we rely on them to survive. Trial judges, weather forecasters, safety inspectors, structural engineers, and radiologists all provide unvarnished opinions so that we can lead safer, better lives, and the press is no different.

Many Reporters Paid for Covering the Russiagate Story Matt Tiabbi

https://www.racket.news/p/many-reporters-paid-for-covering?

Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran “In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says.” Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on “Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’” detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Public and Racket Thursday. Describing a 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on the subject, Aaron wrote:

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.

I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows.

An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation, was denounced by The Guardian as part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.

Pushed’ Missouri’s GOP Elections Chief, But You Won’t Hear It From Big Media BY: Shawn Fleetwood

https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/14/leftists-shoved-and-pushed-missouris-gop-elections-chief-but-you-wont-hear-it-from-big-media/

A leftist agitator was arrested last week for physically harassing Missouri Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.

Corporate media regularly run dishonest articles hyping concerns about the safety of election officials throughout the country. So, why haven’t they reported on Missouri’s leading election official getting accosted by leftist agitators last week?

The incident in question occurred on Feb. 6, when Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was attempting to enter a venue hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Held at a local business in Jefferson City, the event took place following remarks by Israeli Consul General Maor Elbaz-Starinsky before the Missouri General Assembly.

According to KOMU, a local NBC affiliate, anti-Israel demonstrators were already in the area and blocking traffic prior to Ashcroft’s arrival. Despite being asked by the Jefferson City Police Department (JCPD) to “clear the roadway,” the agitators “began blocking access to several local businesses, including the private event.” One such demonstrator, who has been identified as 20-year-old Ainslee Harkins, was arrested for trespassing after she “allegedly entered the private event and would not leave.”

Video footage of the incident shows Ashcroft walking by the protesters — who had lined up to block entrance to the facility — upon arriving at the private venue. After reaching the entrance to the building, Ashcroft attempted to open the door but was accosted by some of the demonstrators.

“There’s a lot of yelling and screaming but as I was just walking along the sidewalk, it was fine until I turned left to actually head into the doorway,” Ashcroft told The Federalist. “That’s when they … collapsed around me and [started] shoving me and pushing me.”

Despite being jostled, Ashcroft kept attempting to enter the facility. As he was reaching for the doorhandle, Ashcroft said one agitator — who video footage appears to show grabbed the secretary — told him he was going to “throw me to the ground.”

CNN rearranges the deck chairs… again The network is attempting to put itself at the center of the anti-Trump universe Stephen L. Miller

https://thespectator.com/newsletter/cnn-rearranges-the-deck-chairs-again-bad-press-02-06-2024/

After CNN ousted Chris Licht, who attempted, at least, to moderate CNN’s biased news coverage, the floundering network has found itself in limbo, unsure of how much more it wanted to lean into a professional, “definitely not biased” news infotainment network.

Now, new boss Mark Thompson has signaled a clear direction for the network in this election year: All Donald Trump, All the Time, with changes once again to its morning and midday line-up. All CNN is really doing, though, is shuffling deck chairs around the network as ratings continue to languish behind networks like the History and Hallmark channels.

What Thompson and other CNN executives don’t seem to get is that the brand is the problem, the brand that has found itself in peril over the course of the past six years. CNN can reshuffle the same dishonest media news personalities while attempting to juice the last remaining drops of credibility it’s attempted to fashion over the last thirty years, but all that has gone out the window for a network that still insists on existing as a kind of zombie form of liberalism, that unlike MSNBC, refuses to admit its editorial leanings.

CNN will move Kasie Hunt to mornings now. Hunt (like most current new personalities) made her name as a correspondent during the 2016 presidential campaign, hounding various GOP candidates while ignoring Democrats, which is pretty much a standard résumé requirement to end up in a CNN chair these days.

CNN has also moved former White House grandstander Jim Acosta from a little-watched Sunday daytime show to a little-watched, weekly daytime slot. Acosta will presumably also offer live, breaking-news situations. Acosta famously made his reputation by making Trump administration White House press briefings about him and his questions about immigration and the Statue of Liberty — a topic he has somehow all but forgotten as the country faces a border crisis not seen in thirty-five years, and New York City threatens to deport criminal migrants.

Since Jim Acosta’s attention-seeking antics were rewarded with his own CNN show, his line-up has included a who’s who of Donald Trump’s circus cadre. His regular guest rotations have included George Conway, Adam Kinzinger, Mary Trump and others whose sole existence is to somehow remind everyone how very bad Trump is, and also how much they used to suck up to him personally and professionally.

But Thompson and CNN see an election year coming and are once again attempting to put CNN at the center of the anti-Trump universe, positioning itself as both a Donald Trump elevator network, while trying to maintain Jeff Zucker’s hires of #Resistance. Back then, it sacrificed mainstream cachet for the viewership of fierce partisans — and it’s hoping to repeat the trick eight years later.

Dementia And Double Standards

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/22/dementia-and-double-standards/

Every once in a while media bias is so flagrant, it’s worth pointing out.

At an event in North Carolina last Thursday, President Joe Biden called out for a congresswoman with whom he claimed he’d just been photographed. She was, at the time, in Washington, D.C.

At an event in New Hampshire the next day, presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to mix up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley when talking about Jan. 6.

Guess which mental lapse was ignored while the other was covered by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, ABC News, The Hill, PBS, and countless other news outlets.

About a minute into his speech about the taxpayer money he’s dumping into high-speed rail, Biden veered off his teleprompter and apparently forgot where he was, or what day it was.

“Where’s Deborah?” he asks, referring to Rep. Deborah Ross, who was in Washington. “Did she — I just had my picture taken with her. That’s probably why she left. (Laughter.) No, all kidding aside — but, anyway — you — oh, she couldn’t be here, actually. That’s not true. I got it mixed up.”

Ramaswamy Defies New York Times Narrative: Suspends Campaign, Backs Trump The New York Times doesn’t get it. That’s one more reason why it is an increasingly parochial publication that speaks only to a shrinking coterie of pampered, irrelevant dittoheads. Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/21/ramaswamy-defies-new-york-times-narrative-suspends-campaign-backs-trump/

No one was surprised that Vivek Ramaswamy decided to suspend his campaign for the presidency after his poor showing in Iowa. Although he was by far the most rhetorically nimble of the GOP candidates, it had long been clear that this was not his moment. His showing in the Iowa Caucus—he came in a distant fourth with about 7 percent—quantified that truth.

Not that Vivek is going anywhere. He will not be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024.  But by immediately suspending his campaign and enthusiastically endorsing Donald Trump after Trump’s stunning, blow-out victory in Iowa, Vivek guaranteed that he would have an important role to play in Trump’s campaign and, should Trump be reelected, in the second Trump administration.

The New York Times did not like that Vivek endorsed Trump. Veteran readers of our former paper of record can already tell from the headline and subhead of the story that reported the news. “Vivek Ramaswamy, Wealthy Political Novice Who Aligned With Trump, Quits Campaign.” “Wealthy,”  eh? “Quits,” you say? Beginning rhetoricians should be set the task of rewriting that headline for some progressive plutocrat.  Then they should try their hand at rewriting the subhead: “A self-funding entrepreneur, Mr. Ramaswamy peaked in late August but deflated under attack from his rivals. He dropped out after the Iowa caucuses and endorsed Donald J. Trump.”

I think it was a writer for Time magazine who, back in the day, illustrated the point by noting the difference in tone between “Truman slunk from the room to huddle with his cronies” and “Ike strode from the chamber to confer with his advisors.” Truman and Ike were doing the same thing, but the description of their activities cast them in very different rhetorical spaces.  The Times obviously had Vivek slated for a Truman-like role.

Consider the first sentence of the story: “Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur and political newcomer who briefly made a splash with brash policy proposals and an outsize sense of confidence, dropped out of the race for the Republican White House nomination after a disappointing fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.” “Newcomer,” “briefly,” “brash,” “outsize,” “disappointing.” You see where this is going.

Not Ink but Blood: Meet the Hamas Press Corps

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2024/01/not-ink-but-blood-meet-the-hamas-press-corps/

In yesterday’s Part 1, I wrote in general terms on the Committee for Protecting Journalists’ tally of Palestine journalists killed by Israeli forces since October 7. I now get into the specifics of many names on the CPJ list and on a Hamas list from which it originated. This illustrates listees’ tight associations and support for the Hamas terror campaign. The prevalence of self-portraits with assault rifles suggests some might even have died with guns in their hands.

Many listees had deep ties to Hamas leaders, according to London investigative journalist David Collier, who has exposed the CPJ flaws in a 150-page report, The “Journalists” of Gaza: a modern-day antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by mainstream media. He studied all names in a listing of 107 alleged journalists compiled by Hamas and affiliated Palestine Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS) at January 4, from which CPJ used 70 for its own list. Collier located social media from 100 of them.

At the funeral of the grandfather of one purported journalist Hazifa Al-Najjar (PJS) in 2017, a pallbearer was Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza’s Hamas commander now being hunted by the IDF. Similarly listed by PJS is slain Gamal Haniya, eldest grandson of Ismail Haniyeh.

Mohammad Khair al-Din (CPJ) posed armed and in full Hamas uniform while with his small kids at a park festival. He posted pics of the kids in Hamas headbands and holding assault rifles. Two of his brothers were slain terrorists. His nephew, Ahmed Khaireddine, also makes the CPJ list as a Hamas journalist. CPJ adds a tribute about Ahmed working for 82 days straight and then being persuaded by a fellow reporting brother to do another assignment in the course of which he was killed. CPJ says the brother mourned, “He wanted to rest, but apparently his rest was forever.”

The CPJ list includes half a dozen Palestinian female media workers. Such women are perhaps the most likely of listees to be authentic journalists. Here’s a check.

Today’s Journalists Seek Power, Not Truth By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/todays_journalists_seek_power_not_truth.html

NPR, The New York Times, and other leftist propaganda organs parading as reliable news publications wrapped up 2023 by jeering House Republicans for passing only twenty-seven bills that became laws.  Hyperventilating like out-of-shape Chris Christie clones perpetually catching their breath, the Fourth Estate’s most prestigious windbags could not hide their priggish condescension: Republican legislators simply cannot legislate, they huffed in unison.  

I know the “Yes, Daddy, govern me harder!” crowd gets goosebumps every time the ignoramuses and perverts in D.C. create a new rule that comes with the threat of a good spanking, but it still amazes me how desperately today’s “journalists” desire for the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.  

The United States of America has been around for two and a half centuries.  During that time, tens of thousands of federal laws, rules, regulations, and executive orders have been created to squash and squeeze Americans’ natural liberties into smaller and smaller sanctioned containers suitable for TSA inspection.  It would be interesting to know just how many more decades of legislating and how many thousands of additional recorded laws it would take before the masochists at The New York Times finally feel as if they have been sufficiently governed!

Mr. Edward Holman commented recently that the creepy JournoList community of leftist “reporters” who collaborated to push narratives and news coverage favorable to Barack Obama during his rise to power crippled the profession permanently: “A free press cannot secretly conspire to rig elections by coordinating to destroy candidates, movements (TEA Party, MAGA, etc) they dislike with false accusations by anonymous sources.”  I heartily agree.  The propaganda “journalism” legitimized by the JournoList cabal was as loud of a death knell for objective reporting (and the enduring independence of the press) as they come.  

Equally demonstrative of journalism’s demise has been the corporate domestication of reporters and their lamentable transformation from an unruly gang of rebellious muckrakers and misfits who naturally despised the status quo into a docile pack of housebroken and primped-up poodles all desperate to service the “ruling class.”  You don’t get anything as noxious as a JournoList to eat through the body politic like a parasite through its host without first initiating a widespread campaign to spay and neuter those journalists in the profession packing cojones as well as brains.  

Good Riddance to Mehdi Hasan By Becket Adams

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/good-riddance-to-mehdi-hasan/

The MSNBC host’s fact-challenged invective won’t be missed.

MSNBC has bid farewell to yet another anchor whose penchant for insipid demagoguery far outstrips any actual talent.

Mehdi Hasan, who slanders conservatives nearly as much as he slanders “Zionists” (wink, wink), announced last week his intention to quit MSNBC. The news came not long after the network axed his weekend show that nobody watched.

“With this show going away,” Hasan told those who happened to tune in that evening, “I’ve decided that it’s time for me to look for a new challenge.”

Attracting viewers seemed plenty enough of a challenge, but okay.

MSNBC last November announced a weekend reshuffling, citing as chief among its reasons the looming 2024 presidential election. And among those to get the cut was none other than the British-born Al Jazeera English and Intercept alumnus. In response to the news, a member of the House of Representatives famous for her antisemitic remarks demanded that the network reverse its decision, suggesting that Hasan’s loss of his show, which launched in 2021, was somehow an affront to “free expression.”

“Mehdi is one of the most brilliant and most prominent Muslim journalists in the U.S.,” said Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar. “It is deeply troubling that MSNBC is canceling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices. Anyone who cares about free expression should be concerned.”