RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/08/mark-zuckerbergs-bonfire-of-the-orthodoxies/

Move over Elon Musk, another billionaire has hit the headlines. And he didn’t even have to demand the jailing of a prime minister to do so. It’s Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Meta. Yesterday he released the most extraordinary video. Sporting unruly curls, a black tee and dog-tag chain – the uniform of the millennial oligarch – he announced that Meta’s platforms would give their ‘fact-checkers’ the heave-ho and ‘dramatically reduce the amount of censorship’ they carry out. I doubt a more impactful mea culpa will be issued this year.

We’re coached to be cynical these days, but I’ll be honest with you: Zuckerberg’s statement put a big, dumb smile on my face. Here we had one of the captains of Silicon Valley confessing that the boss class to which he belongs has indeed been enforcing a regime of political censure, while also promising to do something about it. Those of us who think you should be free to wander into the town square of social media and say ‘People with dicks are not women!’ or ‘Covid might have come from a lab!’ have cause to be optimistic this morning.

No longer will users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads have ‘fact-checkers’ peering over their shoulder as they post. Starting in the US, Meta will ‘get rid of fact-checkers’, Zuckerberg said, and ‘replace them with community notes similar to X’. That’s Musk’s user-generated system of correction, where swarms of tweeters can add caveats and additional info to posts that are misleading or untrue. Our fact-checkers have ‘just been too politically biased’ said Zuckerberg, and they’ve ‘destroyed more trust than they’ve created’. Welcome, young man, to we merry few who’ve been arguing for years that ‘fact-checking’ is doublespeak for the sidelining of dissent and enforcement of orthodoxy.

Zuckerberg confessed that the ancien régime of post-policing by ideologues dolled up as fact-checkers led to the punishment of perfectly normal beliefs. On topics like ‘immigration and gender’ there was a ‘bunch of restrictions’, he said. And they were ‘out of touch with mainstream discourse’. Many of us knew this. Many of us knew that Facebook’s memory-holing of ‘anti-immigrant views’ and its sexist disciplining of feminists who think men are not women was an ideological crusade masquerading as a clampdown on ‘hate speech’. But it’s still good to hear the man at the top of that old McCarthyism say it out loud.

https://hotair.com/headlines/2024/12/22/cnn-sees-lowest-ratings-in-network-history-in-2024-n3798138

CNN reportedly wrapped up 2024 with the lowest audience numbers in its history. This is despite election years usually drawing more audience to news outlets in general.  

From December 26, 2023, through December 15, 2024, CNN averaged just 93,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demographic and 488,000 total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research as reported by the Washington Examiner. This trailed Fox News, which dominated with 1.46 million total viewers.   

The poor performance follows disappointing election night coverage, where CNN drew 5.1 million viewers—a massive 44 percent drop from its 2020 election coverage. In comparison, Fox News attracted 13.6 million viewers during the same event.   

CNN wasn’t the only left-wing media outlet that had struggles this year. MSNBC averaged 86,000 viewers in the 25-54 demographic but outperformed CNN in total viewers with 806,000. Reports on Thursday revealed MSNBC requested pay cuts from anchors Joy Reid and Stephanie Ruhle to retain their roles, following a $5 million salary reduction for Rachel Maddow.  

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-expect-media-apologies-ever-for-the-duke-lacrosse-case

For the legacy media, the recent admission by Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the infamous 2006 Duke lacrosse case, that she had fabricated accusations of rape against three players on the university’s team, was at best a one-day story. While Mangum, a deeply troubled woman serving a long stretch at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women for killing a boyfriend five years after the Duke case, was clearly sincere in her contrition, opining on the podcast Let’s Talk with Kat that “saying that they raped me when they didn’t . . . was wrong” and “I made up a story that was wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God,” it hardly qualified as stop-the-presses news. That the allegation was false had long ago been established beyond question. The boys were fully exonerated and had reached a financial settlement with Duke for the school’s appalling response to the allegation. The hyper-ambitious rogue district attorney who in his zeal to nail them withheld key evidence of their innocence had been disgraced and disbarred.

So in that regard, it makes sense that in most accounts of the belated confession, it would come across as an out-of-the-blue footnote to a half-forgotten story, with a paragraph’s review of the case providing background for the uninitiated. The New York Times’s brief story, by Jenna West of The Athletic, does not even appear in the pages of the paper, just online.

In brief, the coverage conveyed not even a fleeting sense of what the Duke case meant at the time, how fully the story gripped the nation, dividing Americans by race and class; how, indeed, it anticipated much of what was to follow in the Trayvon Martin case; in Ferguson, Missouri; in the furious aftermath of the death of George Floyd; and, hardly least, in exposing the rot at the heart of two of America’s key institutions that has since become ever more apparent—academia and journalism.

All these years later, the media’s perfunctory coverage of Mangum’s admission is telling precisely because of what, given the calamitous mis-coverage of the original story, it so conspicuously lacks: self-awareness and accountability.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/20/study-most-cable-networks-coverage-of-trumps-cabinet-nominees-are-uniformly-negative/

A new study by a right-wing media watchdog group has found that the overwhelming majority of the coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees by major cable news channels has been “almost uniformly negative.”

As Fox News reports, the report was released by the Media Research Center (MRC), detailing the coverage of President-elect Trump’s personnel picks by ABC, CBS, and NBC. Within the timespan of December 1st to December 14th, Trump’s nominees – including FBI Director nominee Kash Patel, Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard – received approximately 60 minutes and 47 seconds of coverage. Of this coverage, 96% was negative.

“Across all three networks, the coverage of Gabbard, Patel, and the handful of other nominees mentioned was entirely negative. Only Pete Hegseth, who received the lion’s share of the airtime, enjoyed a scant four positive evaluative statements, all of which cited his mother describing him as ‘redeemed’ and ‘a changed man,’” said MRC senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino in the report.

“To reiterate: the only positive commentary any Trump nominee received on the broadcast networks was from his own mother,” D’Agostino continued. “In addition to a whopping 96 percent negative tilt across their flagship evening newscasts, these networks also appear to have paid the most attention to Cabinet nominees who appeared to have the highest chances of sinking.”

Of the three channels, CBS spent the most time talking about President-elect Trump’s nominees, with just under 25 minutes; of those 25 minutes, 14 minutes were spent on Hegseth alone. Of that coverage, 96.7% was negative. NBC had the second-highest amount of coverage, with 21 minutes; 94.7% of their coverage was negative. ABC spent 19 minutes on the Cabinet nominees, with 90% of that coverage being negative.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/21/walter-duranty-would-be-proud-of-the-way-the-press-covered-for-biden/

Five years too late, the Wall Street Journal finally reports – when it no longer matters – what journalists knew all along but covered up: Joe Biden was not mentally fit to be president.

The mainstream media’s disservice to the public ranks right up there with Walter Duranty’s New York Times reporting, in which he fed Soviet Union propaganda to the U.S. as news and helped cover up the hellscape that was Stalin’s Russia. (The New York Times never returned the Pulitzer Prize that Duranty won for his lies.)

Except in this case, it wasn’t one reporter halfway around the world in a closed society. It was a legion of reporters inside the White House.

The Journal report reads as though it’s the result of hard investigative work. “This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations,” it says.

Bullsh-t.

The Journal’s story is just a catalog of what reporters knew – or must have known – all along but refused to tell the public.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/after-the-biden-revelations-of-what-value-is-the-mainstream-political-media/

When did you first figure out that something was wrong with Joe Biden — seriously wrong, not just in the “bit older, bit slower” way, but in that genuine “oh man, this guy ain’t gonna make it” way? I know many of our readers will be eager to claim the earliest date possible, because we’ve all heartily loathed the man as president for four years, and I doubt any of us liked his vice presidency either. (A tip of the cap to any keen-memoried old-timer who nominates 1987 as the year when Joe Biden actually first truly “lost it.”)

For my part, it came as an instantaneous, shuddering revelation when I saw him address the nation on August 16, 2021, as he inattentively slurred through his eagerly awaited Afghanistan withdrawal speech. I’ve already told this story once — in one of the most alarmingly Cassandra-like pieces I will ever write, one I specifically recall being laughed off by many of my more left-leaning acquaintances as “right-wing fever-swamp nonsense.” Permit me an excerpt:

Instead it was Biden’s demeanor that shocked me: slurred words, a sleepy and distracted tone suggesting periodic loss of mental focus, and his visibly withered face and slump-shouldered bearing. The whole time, I was cringing with an embarrassed empathy that comes not from politics but rather from that human reserve of mercy and shame we all share. He’d already looked slow and out of it during the (abbreviated) 2020 campaign, but his rapid slide since only a year before jarred me. It was ugly and unfortunate to see him looking lost and frail during the speech — the ricketiness of our president revealed to the world, sacrificing not only his own dignity but our national dignity as well. I wanted to turn away, to turn it off. It hurt to watch. It was at that moment that I concluded Joe Biden wasn’t going to be his party’s nominee for president in 2024.

https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-threat-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.

Recently, like a lot of journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”

While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.

This was a mistake.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.

But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/abc-pays-the-price-for-george-stephanopouloss-partisan-irresponsibility/

The fickle gods of irony are at work on this one.

As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.

Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.

It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library! (To complete the victory, ABC will also cover Donald Trump’s attorneys’ fees, a concession that surely occasioned an enormous sigh of relief from Donald Trump’s attorneys.)

The instigating event actually took place on March 10, when South Carolina representative Nancy Mace appeared on ABC’s This Week, a show that, while I was growing up in the D.C. area, was distinguished by the precise, elegantly patrician demeanor of its host, David Brinkley. Brinkley was famous as one of the last news anchors to insist on writing all of his own copy, which is why it bore such a distinct tone.

Nowadays This Week is the province of diminutive ex–hatchet man George Stephanopoulos, a nasty little Dökkálfr who graduated from slandering groped women on behalf of Bill Clinton and his “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign to gently condescending to the nation in a grizzled sneer on Good Morning America — and did all this so quickly that nobody ever stopped to point out that he simulates genuine human warmth as convincingly as AI depicts floor gymnastics. Stephanopoulos has never pretended to be a journalist: He is a Democratic partisan who holds his position because of his unthreatening height and professional connections with establishment power brokers, not his insight or tendency to ask probing questions.