RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/05/05/tucker-the-left-and-poor-old-canada-n1693033

It’s becoming abundantly clear that with Tucker Carlson being put out to digital pasture, Fox News is falling on hard times and may come to regret its decision. Its viewership and market share are plummeting while Tucker will find “fresh woods and pastures new” in which to pursue his career of incisive reporting and unabashed truth-telling. Tucker Carlson has become a first name, which indicates that he is not simply an internet commentator but something of an institution. To believe that he is no longer a force is merely wishful thinking.

Indeed, it has been said that Tucker is bigger than Fox, a plausible assumption the leftward media adamantly denies in gloating over Tucker’s presumed demotion. And why shouldn’t it? After all, with Tucker gone, Fox is no longer a threat to the left’s political and media establishment. Democracy goes to die not only in the darkness of the Washington Post and its media cohorts; its light is also extinguished in a meekly capitulating Fox News.

The political mafia in Canada is equally deluded. Bill C-11, an amendment to the Broadcasting Act, has just been passed into law, effectively providing for regulating online content (aka internet censorship), controlling what we can see and read online as well as depriving Canadian content producers of up to 90% of their international viewership. As Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien has said, “The bill would represent a step back overall for privacy protection.”

https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial

Today you’ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another by Andrew Lowenthal, who worked for 18 years defending digital rights at EngageMedia and watched activists in his space slowly be absorbed by what we’re now calling “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The two new threads collectively show the wide political range of revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered — absurdly — as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his “Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation’” describes himself as a “progressive-minded Australian,” printed a series of exchanges between journalists who attended a summer “tabletop exercise” at the Aspen Institute about a hack-and-leak operation involving Burisma and Hunter Biden, weeks before the actual event. When the actual scandal broke not long after, the existence of that tabletop exercise clearly become newsworthy, but none of the journalists present, who included David Sanger of the New York Times and current Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman — said a word. Perhaps, as was common with anti-disinfo conferences, the event was off the record. (We asked, and none of the reporters commented). It doesn’t matter. Lowenthal showed how another “anti-disinformation” conference featured the headline speaker Anthony Blinken. He’s currently suspected of having “triggered” the infamous letter signed by 50 intelligence officers saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

As Lowenthal writes: “See how it works? The people accusing others of “disinformation” run the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.”

On the flip side, Orfalea found a document showing that both the Wikileaks account and that of Dr. Jill Stein were algorithmically added by Twitter to a list given the creepy name is_russian. This was one of two buckets of “Russians” Twitter was collecting, one called “A Priori Russians” (usually, accounts identified as Russian by 3rd party researchers), the other “Inferred Russians” (accounts that had “strong,” “medium,” or “weak” “signals” of Russianness, involving language, type of email account, location of IP address, tweet time, etc). Even Twitter’s own analysts noted that any system that “captured” Jill Stein as “Russian” spoke to the “overly broad nature of is_russian.” It was just such a “signals” or “marker”-based methodology that Twitter and other researchers used to identify “Russians” on the Internet, a methodology Twitter internally called one of “educated guesses,” concealing a company secret about identifying accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency: “We have no realistic way of knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis.”

Driving the news: Shocking news broke Monday that two top cable news anchors had been fired — less than a day after NBCU CEO Jeff Shell was unexpectedly fired for an inappropriate workplace relationship.

Fox News on Monday said the network and its star primetime host Tucker Carlson “have agreed to part ways,” after more than a decade. Carlson’s last program was Friday, April 21, per the network, meaning Carlson did not get a chance to sign off to his viewers.
CNN, shortly after, announced that Don Lemon had been fired. Lemon said in a Twitter post that he was “stunned.” He said he was informed by his agent Monday morning that he had been terminated.

Drama had been encircling both Carlson and Lemon for months.

Fox’s decision to part ways with Carlson occurred just days after Fox News reached a historic 11th hour settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for over $787 million. A trove of material uncovered during pre-trial discovery implicated Carlson.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/don-lemon-became-embarrassing-distraction-cnn-lost-newsroom-endless-antics-insiders

Don Lemon said he was shocked at his firing by CNN Monday, but insiders say it was a long time coming for the embattled host whose 17-year tenure came to an abrupt end after months of controversies.

Just hours after what ended up being his final broadcast on the network, Lemon announced on Twitter that he had been terminated and found out through his agent. To put a stamp on what was no longer a tenable relationship, CNN essentially called one of the faces of its network a liar, saying Lemon’s account was “inaccurate.”

“When you are demoted, reprimanded and sent to manner class – and still don’t learn your lesson, the logical next step is termination,” one CNN insider told Fox News Digital. 

While things hadn’t looked bright ratings-wise for Lemon over the past several years, the beginning of the end was in February when he made misogynistic comments about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, saying she was past her “prime” at 51 years old. Lemon was forced to issue multiple apologies and CNN boss Chris Licht, in a rare public rebuke of an employee, ordered him to take “formal training.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-thomas-and-the-plague-of-bad-reporting-propublica-washington-post-disclosure-court-safety-def0a6a7?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

By James Taranto

ProPublica’s big scoop turned out to be a quarter-teaspoon. In an error-filled report last week, the opinionated news site got one point right: Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t disclose the 2014 sale of his one-third interest in three Savannah, Ga., properties to a company controlled by his friend Harlan Crow. He was legally required to do so. On these pages, in an article published online Sunday, I observed that he may have to amend his financial-disclosure form for that year.

On Monday, “a source close to Thomas” told CNN that the justice would do so. “The source said . . . it was an oversight not to report the real estate transaction. Thomas believed he didn’t have to disclose because he lost money on the deal, according to the source.” It is the justice’s share of the sale price ($1,000 or more), not a profit, that triggers the statutory obligation to report.

How big a deal is it to amend a form after missing a disclosure? Consider these examples, which reader Darin Bartram dug up:

• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2012 disclosure amended her 2011 report, which “inadvertently omitted” the sale of shares in an exchange-traded fund that she had bought earlier the same year. “The Value Code should of [sic] been L and the Gain Code should of [sic] been A,” the amendment says.

• Ginsburg amended her 2017 disclosure to reflect that she had “inadvertently omitted” a gift of an opera costume worth $4,500.

• Justice Stephen Breyer reported in an amended 2018 disclosure that he had “inadvertently omitted” two stock sales by his wife, one in 2006 and one in 2018.

• In February 2022, three days after President Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson amended her 2020 disclosure to note that in various years between 2011 and 2021 she had “inadvertently omitted” travel reimbursements for two speaking trips, a university teaching salary, four nonprofit board memberships, her husband’s consulting income and a 529 college savings plan. No senator mentioned these omissions at her confirmation hearings.

https://thespectator.com/topic/media-tows-national-security-state-narrative-leak-ukraine-russia/?utm_source=Spectator%20

The tacit alliance between operatives of the national security state and corporate media burst into view last week when the New York Times and the Washington Post did the FBI’s job for it by tracking down the leaker of documents that detailed, among other things, the extent of American and allied involvement in the Ukraine war. 

That Bellingcat, the shadowy, government-funded open-source intelligence group, played a role in helping to identify the twenty-one-year-old Air National Guardsmen Jack Teixeira proves (once again) that many media outlets are now de facto agents of the national security state.

The idea that these open-source sleuths at Bellingcat, the Times and the Post are simply reporters acting in good faith is belied by their long history of, in the case of the Washington Post’s Evan Hill, writing a hatchet job on an American combat veteran turned politician, and Bellingcat’s subterfuge in the service of a cold war against Russia and a hot war against Syria.

The leaked documents show beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Biden administration, from the president on down, has been rather less than truthful about the war in Ukraine. Yet instead of taking the administration to task for, as some critics have charged, recklessly prolonging the war, the media has worked overtime to shift the focus from what revelations the documents contain to the identity of the leaker. 

There was a time when journalists in this country treated official pronouncements with skepticism and saw their role as challenging entrenched interests. Today, as the Teixeira story shows, they work to protect those interests — as those interests align with their anonymous sources inside the national security apparatus. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-tale-of-two-online-giants/

There are few more elaborate examples of the contemporary leftist capture of institutions than the metamorphosis of Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and influential encyclopedia in human history and the seventh most frequently consulted website on earth, from a relatively objective source of information into a massive assemblage of progressive agitprop. When it was founded in 2001 by two self-styled libertarians, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia – which is currently based at 120 Kearny Street, San Francisco, just off Market Street – was a self-consciously noble enterprise, conceived as a benign collaboration among unpaid volunteers and solemnly committed to truth and neutrality. In a 2021 interview, Sanger recalled that during its first few years, Wikipedia’s articles, even on the most controversial politicians and issues, were models of balance.

No more. “Especially over the last five years or so,” lamented Sanger, “Wikipedia has changed” although theoretically anyone can rewrite a Wikipedia entry to eliminate bias, left-wing administrators and editors labor endlessly to prevent and undo such changes. Sanger noted that the entry for Joe Biden, for example, mentions “very little by way of the concerns that the Republicans have had about him”; although there’s a paragraph about the Ukraine scandal, it “reads like a defense counsel’s brief.”

But don’t dare to call Wikipedia biased. To do so is “incorrect.” Wikipedia itself says so, in an emphatic little essay that lays down its party line on this question. It’s not possible for Wikipedia to be biased, you see, because it draws “only on reliable sources” – a “methodology” that ensures it will contain only “knowledge that is verifiable.” And what are those “reliable sources”? Well, on Wikipedia you can find an exhaustive list of sources in which it meticulously separates the sheep from the goats. And to peruse that list is to see news outlets being judged not, as Wikipedia would have you believe, by journalistic professionalism, but rather by the degree to which they can be relied upon to put a progressive spin on the facts.