RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/05/media-tailspin-continues-as-trust-hits-record-lows-ii-tipp-poll/

With mass layoffs at a number of companies and new revelations of intervention in recent elections, the media have had a rough two months. Now, it gets even rougher. According to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll, trust in the media has now fallen to record lows.

Each month, the I&I/TIPP Poll asks respondents two questions: “How much trust do you have in the traditional or established news media (Example: Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

Then the same question is asked about the “alternative media,” which includes less-mainstream outlets, the New York Post, Washington Times, News Max, The Daily Caller, and Real Clear Politics, among others.

For both sets of media, the news is not good.

In the case of the traditional media, just 33% of poll respondents said they either had a “lot of trust” (12%) or “quite a bit of trust” (21%) in these outlets. But the “No trust” group totaled 61%, with 32% expressing “little trust” and 29% “no trust at all.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11499137/Liberal-journalists-rush-criticize-reporter-Matt-Taibbi-releasing-Elon-Musks-Twitter-Files.html

Left-wing journalists have unsurprisingly rushed to smear reporter Matt Taibbi for releasing Elon Musk’s explosive ‘Twitter Files’.

Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, gave Taibbi access to the documents, which he began to publish excerpts of on the social media site on Friday evening. 

The documents included internal Twitter emails appearing to show staffers removing tweets showing a nude Hunter Biden at the behest of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

Taibbi, a podcaster and former Rolling Stone correspondent, came under heavy criticism from top journalists at NBC News, MSNBC, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere, who accused him of doing ‘PR work’ and committing journalistic malfeasance.

‘Matt Taibbi…what sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good work back in the day,’ tweeted Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali.

Matt Taibbi, a podcaster and former Rolling Stone correspondent, came under heavy criticism from top journalists at NBC News, MSNBC, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere over his publication of files relating to Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story

NBC News reporters Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny were among those who criticized Taibbi’s work, calling it ‘PR work’ and ‘really bad reporting’

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/the-meltdown-over-elon-musks-covid-misinformation-policy/

More free speech on Twitter ‘will literally kill people,’ cry the hysterics.

In September 2016, an Atlantic essay from Salena Zito introduced a line that would become one of the defining phrases of the Trump era: “The press,” Zito wrote of then-candidate Donald Trump’s propensity for exaggeration and embellishment, “take him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

The axiom, or some version of it, comes to mind amid the frenzied response to Elon Musk’s recent loosening of Twitter guidelines on Covid-related content. Last week, users noticed a curt message on Twitter’s “COVID-19 Misinformation” page: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” What that means, the New York Daily News reported, is that “Twitter will no longer flag tweets containing misinformation about COVID-19 nor take action against the accounts that post them; the reversal of a longstanding policy implemented at the peak of the pandemic and the . . . latest major shift under new owner Elon Musk.” Since January 2020, some 11,000 accounts — including those of members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) — and nearly 100,000 posts have been removed under the auspices of that Vijaya Gadde–era policy.

Musk’s move was quickly denounced as literally homicidal by a chorus of “misinformation” “experts,” progressive think-tank scholars, journalists, public-health censors, and various other professional hysterics. “Twitter has quietly changed their policies to allow COVID-19 misinformation,” Columbia University “science communicator” Lucky Tran emoted. “This change will literally kill people.” The “consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily,” White House Covid coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned the Associated Press. “Misinformation is a life-or-death issue,” tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss told the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz. “It’s certain to get many more people killed from covid than otherwise would,” added Johns Hopkins health sociologist Jon Shaffer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/matt-taibbi-douglas-murray-dominate-trust-in-media-debate/
The 39 point swing in favor of Murray and Taibbi’s position is the largest ever recorded in a Munk debate.

Conservative commentator Douglas Murray and veteran reporter Matt Taibbi soundly defeated their opponents in a Wednesday evening debate on the question of whether to trust the mainstream media, convincing a significant segment of the audience to abandon their faith in an institution they say is hopelessly compromised by bias.

The debate, held at Roy Thomson Hall in downtown Toronto and sponsored by the Canadian cultural non-profit Munk Debates, featured Taibbi and Murray squaring off against the tremendously popular non-fiction author Malcolm Gladwell and New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, who made the case for continued trust in major American and Canadian outlets.

Pre-debate polling showed the audience virtually split 48 to 52 percent on the question of whether to trust the mainstream media.

However, over the course of nearly two hours, Taibbi and Murray compellingly persuaded over one-third of audience members (39 percent) to abandon their prior allegiance to the position championed by Gladwell and Goldberg.

To date, Taibbi and Murray won by the largest margin ever recorded at a Munk Debate. The result stunned the sold-out crowd of 2,630 viewers normally accustomed to smaller swings.

“I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter. My stepmother was a reporter. My godparents were reporters. Every adult I knew growing up seemed to be in media,” Taibbi said during his opening remarks to start the debate. “I love the news business. It’s in my bones. But I mourn for it. It’s destroyed itself.”

Taibbi’s opening remarks echoed those raised in his most recent book Hate Inc., in which he explores how the mainstream American media abandoned its commitment to neutrality in favor of fan service. Taibbi argues the change was driven by an effort to retain a niche audience of like-minded readers and viewers who remained after the industry was gutted by tech-driven changes in the advertising market.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/when-journalists-become-speech-police/

Too many in the media now seek to neuter free expression in the name of saving it.

EXCERPTS

Call it Cooke’s First Law: Whatever the story, however complex its details, members of the American press will react by announcing who must be forbidden to speak going forward.

That is what too many journalists are now — not firefighters, not mediators, not conveyors of vital information, but zealous obscurantists staffing would-be censorship agencies. In comes the news, and, within minutes, out comes the latest justification for shutting everyone up. A mentally ill homeless man attacks Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer? That’s the Republican Party’s fault for running political ads against Pelosi — and it must stop. A disturbed man shoots up a gay club in Colorado Springs, Colo.? That’s the fault of Americans who object to drag shows for kindergartners — and they must be quiet. Elon Musk plans to moderate Twitter with a lighter hand? That will cause “havoc” and put lives at risk — and it must be prevented at all costs.

Worse still is the grotesque tendency for members of the press to cast their transparently self-serving determinations as raw scientific truths. It’s not the opinion of NBC, Axios, or the Washington Post that Twitter would be better left as is; it’s a fact — as determined by the “experts.” That these “experts” have been repeatedly proven to be full of it — remember when the entirely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian disinformation campaign,” and therefore needed to be suppressed just before the election? — seems not to matter. Nor, indeed, does it seem to matter that a great many of our arbiters of truth are rank hypocrites and contemptible lunatics. The temptation to cast one’s preferences as fact is a remarkably strong one, and, for now at least, many modern journalists seem entirely incapable of resisting it.

How else might one explain the contemporary New York Times, which has gotten into the infuriating habit of simultaneously contributing to, and complaining about, America’s “speech problem”? Earlier this year, the Times’ editorial board complained that “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” This development, the editors concluded, was the inevitable product of “the political left and the right” being “caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.”

Which . . . well, would that, by any chance, be the “condemnation and recrimination” of which the Times is routinely guilty itself?

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/23/suspect-in-colorado-springs-shooting-claims-to-be-non-binary-uses-they-them-pronouns/

The suspect in last weekend’s Colorado Springs mass shooting at a gay nightclub isn’t exactly the right-wing Christian boogeyman legacy media immediately painted him as.

According to The New York Times on Tuesday, 22-year-old Anderson Aldrich claims to be “non-binary” and wants other people to refer to him with the plural pronouns “they” and “them.”

“The lawyers refer to their client as Mx. Anderson Aldrich,” reported the paper’s Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs.

Aldrich has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder and five counts of a bias-motivated crime causing bodily injury related to the shooting that left five people dead and at least another 25 injured on Saturday night.

Despite few details about the suspect emerging immediately after the shooting, left-wing talking heads placed blame on conservative media in a knee-jerk fashion. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, whose Monday night monologue included a condemnation of political violence paired with a reminder of the dangers surrounding transgender medical interventions for minors, became a primary target — despite the fact that these interventions have been shown to raise suicide risks, contrary to the left’s constant fearmongering.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/man-calling-voluntary-human-extinction-gets-glowing-new-york-times-profile

As the country celebrates family time on Thanksgiving, The New York Times on Wednesday profiled an environmental activist lobbying for “voluntary human extinction,” comparing the man’s personality to that of the “gentle” children’s host Mr. Rogers. 

The article is headlined “Earth Now Has 8 Billion Humans. This Man Wishes There Were None” and is written by climate reporter Cara Buckley. She highlighted Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement. Their goal is an Earth without people. 

“Beyond advocating for universal access to birth control and opposing what he calls reproductive fascism, or ‘the lack of freedom to not procreate,’ Mr. Knight says that despite our many achievements, humans are a net detriment to the Earth,” Buckley wrote.

In order to avoid confusion about the extinction agenda, “Mr. Knight added the word ‘voluntary’ decades ago to make it clear that adherents do not support mass murder or forced birth control, nor do they encourage suicide.” 

However, the Times journalist broached the negative connotations that could be connected with Voluntary Human Extinction’s goals.

https://reason.com/2022/11/21/sam-bankman-fried-journalism-funding-crypto-fraud-media/

The public is only beginning to understand the full extent of alleged crimes committed by Sam Bankman-Fried (better known as SBF), a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who lost billions of dollars after his exchange, FTX, was revealed to be little better than a Ponzi scheme. SBF’s net worth plunged from $10 billion to effectively nothing in the course of a few days. He has declared bankruptcy and was recently questioned by the police of the Bahamas, where he resides.

John Ray III, who was brought in to manage Enron following that company’s self-destruction in 2001, is now the CEO of FTX. In a court filing last week, he said he has never seen such “a complete failure of corporate control,” including at Enron.

“From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” he said in a court filing.

SBF engaged in extreme levels of deception to trick people into thinking FTX was worth more than it was. He effectively paid investors, employees, and vendors shares of the company—his token, FTT—and loaned out money to his quantitative investment firm, Alameda Research. It was an elaborate house of cards that apparently fooled investors, celebrity sponsors, and politicians: SBF interviewed former President Bill Clinton and and former Prime Minister Tony Blair at a crypto conference he hosted back in April.