RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/08/threads-mark-zuckerbergs-safe-space/

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter last year, the people formerly known as ‘blue ticks’ have been threatening to flounce off. Twitter, they say, has become an unusable hellhole, rife with disinformation and proto-fascist hate speech. A great Twitter exodus has been promised once every few months, yet still they have carried on tweeting.

Why did so few of them ever leave Twitter? The main barrier has been the lack of a viable alternative. Twitter, for good or ill, has remained the world’s public square. But that could be about to change. This week, Threads, the new social-media app from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, was launched to huge fanfire. It has been explicitly pitched as a rival to Twitter. Within the first 24 hours of its launch, 30million users are said to have signed up.

Threads is effectively a clone of Twitter. It is a ‘text-based social app’ or ‘microblogging service’. As with Twitter, posts on Threads have strict character limits. Twitter’s retweet function has become ‘repost’ and quote tweets have become ‘quote threads’. Even the name Threads seems to be a nod to a ‘Twitter thread’ – a connected series of tweets, posted by the same Twitter user, to get around the character limit.

The similarities between the two rival apps are so stark and so noticeable that Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Meta. Meta has hardly tried to hide the similarities, either. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in over a decade. It was of the Spiderman meme – where two men in exactly the same Spiderman outfit point at each other, unable to tell the real thing from the imposter. Besides, ripoffs of other platforms are not unknown at Meta. For instance, Instagram Stories are a shameless copy of Snapchat, while Instagram’s Reels feature is an obvious imitation of TikTok.

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

ATHENS, GREECE — In the course of a single week, two tragedies unfolded, both exposing the stark, divergent responses by our media and governments based on the affected demographics and the narratives they spin. Intriguingly, both tragedies involved the ocean and rescue attempts, starkly underlining our inconsistent approaches to different crises. One tragedy revolved around the implosion and subsequent deaths of five individuals who had invested $250,000 each for an underwater journey to explore the Titanic’s ruins. The other was a catastrophe at sea off the coast of Greece, resulting in the tragic assumed loss of nearly 700 migrants in pursuit of better lives overseas. Now, take a guess, which incident garnered more media attention? If your instinct was to go for the event that claimed up to 700 lives, you would be dead wrong.

On June 13, a distress signal from a migrant vessel carrying up to 750 individuals was first brought to light by Italian activist Nawal Soufi, prompting a range of rescue efforts from different parties throughout the day. Nonetheless, differing narratives surfaced concerning the vessel’s readiness to receive aid and its overall condition. Despite obtaining supplies from the Maltese-flagged tanker Lucky Sailor and from Greek authorities, the boat’s occupants reportedly declined any further assistance, staying their course. Adding to the confusion, Soufi and Greek parliament member Kriton Arsenis alleged that the Greek coast guard attempted to tug the boat toward Italian waters, a claim vehemently denied by Greek officials. Ultimately, the boat succumbed and capsized during the early hours of June 14, with further conflicting stories on whether it was a result of overcrowding and engine malfunction, or if it was because they were being tugged by a Greek coast guard. Tragically, of the estimated 750 souls onboard, 104 have survived.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/networks-devote-291-minutes-to-trump-scandals-0-seconds-to-bidens

Just as they did in 2016 when it became clear that Donald Trump was the golden goose of viewership, the Big Three networks have turned all their cameras to the former president and practically abandoned covering President Joe Biden.

While Biden’s own classified documents scandal is important, and he is also tied up in bribery allegations linked to his scandal-plagued son Hunter Biden, TV executives apparently have decided that wall-to-wall coverage of Trump is the key to success.

According to a count conducted by our friends at the Media Research Center, which teams with Secrets for the Monday “Liberal Media Scream” feature, ABC, CBS, and NBC have devoted all of their scandal coverage to Trump and none to Biden or the first son.

And the numbers are staggering.

In a report from MRC’s Newsbusters, the three have devoted 291 minutes to Trump and zero time to Biden’s scandals. That is not just a Grand Canyon-sized gap, but figuring each full half-hour newscast devotes 20 minutes to news and the rest to advertising, that amounts to nearly 15 shows devoted to nothing but Trump.

“Over four days (June 8-June 12), the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) broadcast networks predictably crammed their evening, morning, and Sunday roundtable shows with a total of 291 minutes of coverage dedicated to the Trump indictment,” said the report from Geoffrey Dickens, the director of media analysis at the Media Research Center.

“The double standard is breathtaking,” he added, especially when considering the similarities between the classified documents scandals.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2023/06/wrongium-the-medias-favourite-element/

Everyone likes a good beat-up. On May 31, Nature magazine—the world’s most prestigious scientific journal—published a news article under the headline “India Cuts Periodic Table and Evolution from School Textbooks”. Do notice that,according to Nature, they cut evolution too.

Why would such a science-obsessed country as India do something so stupid? The standard take across Western media is that a religiously conservative government has declared war on rationality. Richard Dawkins went so far as to belittle Hinduism an “idiotic religion”.

The actual answer is all of this is fake news. Neither the periodic table nor evolution has been dropped. The periodic table was moved from Year 9 to Year 11, and evolution was moved from Year 9 to Year 12.

The main reason for the change was to ensure that university-bound students who missed out on in-class instruction during the coronavirus pandemic shouldn’t be disadvantaged in their higher education studies. In other words, India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) thought that evolution and the periodic table were so important that no university-bound student should miss them, though early school-leavers might reasonably live without them.

Nonetheless, search “India” and “periodic table” or “evolution” and you’ll find that Nature‘s (unretracted) fake news narrative is now the received truth. And with all due respect to Nature‘s Melbourne-based science writer Dyani Lewis, who authored the piece, her article is technically accurate. She wrote that “children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements or sources of energy”. Her report simply omitted that students over 16 would.

While one might see a lack of proper journalistic skepticism in the report, Ms Lewis is perhaps not to blame for creating the fake news. She may have simply been a dupe of credible-sounding sources in India: activist academics and op-ed writers who spare no opportunity to besmirch the reputation of a religiously conservative government that they personally loathe. It is quite possible that none of the eminent Indians she interviewed for the article bothered to mention that the subjects were simply being rescheduled, not removed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/you_cant_perestroika_cnn.html

Who remembers Perestroika?  It was a “Hail Mary pass” from Mikhail Gorbachev to save the USSR.  Perestroika means “restructuring” in Russian, but it did not save the communist economy.   

Well, not long ago CNN hired a fellow named Chris Licht to save the ratings-challenged network.  He fired Don Lemon and tried to change the image of the network.  This week, we learned that Mr. Licht is out.  This is the story: 

Mr. Licht’s 13-month run at CNN was marked by one controversy after another, culminating in his exit earlier this week. He got off to a bumpy start even before he had officially started when he oversaw the shuttering of the costly CNN+ streaming service at the request of its network’s new owners, who were skeptical about a stand-alone digital product. The cuts resulted in scores of layoffs.

David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, informed staff on Wednesday morning that he had met with Mr. Licht and that he was leaving, effective immediately.

As Gorbachev learned, you can’t fix communism.  It does not work.  In a short time, the next leader of CNN will learn the same thing, that you can’t fix a news channel that can’t stop talking about former President Trump. 

The network’s basic problem is that no one is watching, a rather difficult challenge for the account executives selling airtime:  “494,000 average total viewers in primetime in May — and just 113,000 viewers in the key 25-54-year-old demographic, according to Nielsen.” To be fair, cable news ratings are down but nobody does it “worse” than CNN.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/05/corporate-media-trips-over-itself-trying-to-downplay-bidens-faceplant/

Americans know the corporate media launders disinformation on behalf of the Democratic Party.

After President Joe Biden faceplanted during the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation ceremony last week, the corporate media immediately began running PR for the president, waving away legitimate concerns surrounding his mental and physical fitness.

“Biden ‘fine’ after fall onstage at Air Force Academy graduation,” reads an NBC headline, framing their story around the totally impartial word of a White House aide. Politico ran a similar story titled, “Biden falls on stage at Air Force graduation but is ‘fine,’ according to spokesperson.” Reuters’ headline read, “Biden trips and falls during graduation ceremony, recovers quickly,” and Newsweek had the creative angle of blaming the whole thing on the Secret Service.

But the most shameless piece of media manipulation after Biden’s tumble comes from The New York Times, which ran a piece titled “Inside the Complicated Reality of Being America’s Oldest President.” You have to hand it to the Times. It takes some truly dedicated propagandists to spin a story about Biden falling before the world on national television into an opportunity to praise the president for his “sharp[ness],” “fit[ness],” and “striking stamina.”

“The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world,” read the Times article. “Yet a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.”