RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/no_youre_not_imagining_the_medias_pravdaization.html

Matt Taibbi is that rare breed – an honest leftist journalist. And make no mistake about his leftism, for this is a man who thinks Noam Chomsky is a great thinker. Despite that serious ideological confusion on his part, Taibbi understands something profoundly important in American politics; namely, that our media has become completely corrupt, and more closely represents the media in Soviet Russia than the media in a free country with a First Amendment. If you haven’t yet, you must read his article, “The Sovietization of the American Press.”

Taibbi, who has collected examples of Soviet newspapers over the years so he knows whereof he speaks, says that, in 2021, there is nothing to distinguish the American media from the Soviet press. The important point he makes about the Soviet media is that its world was divided into heroes and enemies. The governing Communist Party was heroic and anything or anybody that challenged it was part of a vast, evil conspiracy aimed at destroying this heroic party.

After giving examples of the fatuous superlatives that the Soviet media heaped on communist politicians and their actions, Taibbi points out that there is little difference between those words and what we see in today’s reporting now that Biden is in office:

There are not many Congressional committees regularly engaged in substantive and serious work — most are performative — but the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law is an exception. Chaired by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), it is, with a few exceptions, composed of lawmakers whose knowledge of tech monopolies and anti-trust law is impressive.

In October, the Committee, after a sixteen-month investigation, produced one of those most comprehensive and informative reports by any government body anywhere in the world about the multi-pronged threats to democracy raised by four Silicon Valley monopolies: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The 450-page report also proposed sweeping solutions, including ways to break up these companies and/or constrain them from controlling our political discourse and political life. That report merits much greater attention and consideration than it has thus far received.

The Subcommittee held a hearing on Friday and I was invited to testify along with Microsoft President Brad Smith; President of the News Guild-Communications Workers of America Jonathan Schleuss, the Outkick’s Clay Travis, CEO of the Graham Media Group Emily Barr, and CEO of the News Media Alliance David Chavern. The ostensible purpose the hearing was a narrow one: to consider a bill that would vest media outlets with an exemption from anti-trust laws to collectively bargain with tech companies such as Facebook and Google so that they can obtain a greater share of the ad revenue. The representatives of the news industry and Microsoft who testified were naturally in favor because this bill (they have been heavily lobbying for it) because it would benefit them commercially in numerous way (the Microsoft President maintained the conceit that the Bill-Gates-founded company was engaging in self-sacrifice for the good of Democracy by supporting the bill but the reality is the Bing search engine owners are in favor of anything that weakens Google).

While I share the ostensible motive behind the bill — to stem the serious crisis of bankruptcies and closings of local news outlets — I do not believe that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by the public (a bill that limited this anti-trust exemption to small local news outlets so as to allow them to bargain collectively with tech companies in their own interest would seem to me to serve the claimed purpose much better than one which empowers media giants to form a negotiating cartel).

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american

I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

— Biden’s historic victory for America

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/criticizing-public-figures-including?token=eyJ

“Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.”

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/541990-the-power-to-change-what-we-are-social-media-as-the-new-fifth-estate

Could Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey ever have imagined that his social media platform would become a U.S. president’s preferred manner of communicating with the American electorate and beyond? It did, and the pattern became a familiar one: President Trump tweeted out to his Twitter “followers” — mostly his political base — but also, compulsorily, to those in the news media. Journalists then projected his 148-character statements to the country and the world. Trump ended his single presidential term banned from the platform, severely hobbled politically in part because of that.

By now, articles on every topic, from politics to sports to culture, embed tweets and links to actual pages. Since to view these one must possess an account, the ubiquity of the Twitter platform — and others like it — only increases. Putatively, at least, one must be on them to be informed. Whether Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or another site, social media now wield power beyond what possibly could have been imagined at their inception.

Some legislators and editorialists wonder whether this makes us vulnerable to the whims of unelected individuals, in the form of the owners of social media companies. If an American president can be muzzled, can’t anyone?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/the_new_york_times_doesnt_understand_what_a_conspiracy_theory_is.html

Even as Biden blatantly violates American law and sovereignty by erasing our southern border, remember that the Hispanic culture meshes with conservative values. Hispanics are pro-life, pro-marriage, and pro-gun; believe there are two sexes; and, until leftist activists get hold of them, have a solid worth ethic. Unsurprisingly, then, Hispanic men are drawn to conservativism. To the New York Times, this is as baffling as believing in the “conspiracy theory” of violent Black Lives Matter protests.

On Saturday, the New York Times took up “A Vexing Question for Democrats: What Drives Latino Men to Republicans?” The subheading to that caption provides an admirable summary of exactly what it is that makes Hispanic men support conservative values:

Several voters said values like individual responsibility and providing for one’s family, and a desire for lower taxes and financial stability, led them to reject a party embraced by their parents.

In other words, they like conservative values for the same reason people of other races and creeds like them: They’re universal values that create strong, stable families and, in turn, strong, stable nations. Take, for example, Erik Ortiz, 41, a hip-hop music producer who now lives in free and open Florida, but who grew up in the South Bronx:

“Everybody was a liberal Democrat — in my neighborhood, in the Bronx, in the local government,” said Mr. Ortiz, whose family is Black and from Puerto Rico. “The welfare state was bad for our people — the state became the father in the Black and brown household and that was a bad, bad mistake.” Mr. Ortiz became a Republican, drawn to messages of individual responsibility and lower taxes. To him, generations of poor people have stayed loyal to a Democratic Party that has failed to transform their lives.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/03/media-memoryholes-the-sicknick-story/

During his Senate testimony, FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly admitted his agency does not know how Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died. “We’re not at a point where we can disclose or confirm the cause of death,” Wray, clearly uncomfortable, told Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) on Tuesday morning.

Unfortunately, no one on the Senate Judiciary Committee confronted Wray with the now-retracted story that Officer Sicknick was murdered by Trump supporters using a fire extinguisher. Republicans missed a golden opportunity not just to expose the New York Times’ primary role in seeding the bogus account but also to confront their Democratic colleagues who voted to convict Donald Trump partially based on the notion his comments on January 6 led to the death of a police officer. “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher,” according to the House Democrats’ impeachment memo.

But suddenly, the news media have lost all interest in what happened to Sicknick. After nonstop coverage—including somber videos of the police procession in his honor and a memorial in the Capitol Rotunda, attended by Joe Biden, just days before the impeachment trial began in February—major news organizations have memoryholed the initial account about the fire extinguisher; some apparently have forgotten about Sicknick altogether.

The New York Times, the paper responsible for launching the lie, didn’t bother to mention Sicknick in its coverage of Wray’s testimony—the paper of record, however, did publish a lengthy piece Monday detailing how “Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot.” Take a moment and savor the irony.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/washington-post-fact-checkers-called-president-daniel-greenfield/

Once upon a time, the media used fact checkers to check its own facts before publishing a story. And then the media stopped checking its facts and started smearing everyone else.

The media’s false claim that Russia had somehow rigged the 2016 election to help President Trump win with “disinformation” became the basis for a media movement pressuring Big Tech to let the media’s fact checking censors silence conservatives with their ‘fact checking’.

Even as the media discarded all of its remaining standards, it claimed truth as its standard.

“This is an apple. Some people might try and tell you that it’s a banana,” CNN lectured viewers. “They might scream banana, banana, banana over and over and over again.”

At the Washington Post, which had declared war on President Trump early on, fact checking became its own industry. Glenn Kessler, the head of the Post’s fact checking team, and two junior members published a book last year titled, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth. It was the last hurrah for the team which shut down its presidential fact checking operation in 2021

But Kessler and the Post continued touting its fake database claiming that President Trump had made “30,573 false or misleading claims” even while making it clear that the game had changed. When Joe Biden falsely claimed that there was no vaccine when he came into office, Kessler insisted that it was a “verbal stumble, a typical Biden gaffe”, but not false or a lie.

ttps://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/where-are-all-the-retractions-of-the-brian-sicknick-story/
The Capitol Police officer did not die after being attacked by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher on January 6. Yet news organizations and lawmakers refuse to correct the Big Lie.

Law enforcement officials, according to several news reports, now are searching for someone who allegedly released bear spray into a crowd of police officers January 6 outside the Capitol building. The suspect might have sprayed the chemical at Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died January 7 reportedly from injuries sustained in the chaos. 

“In a significant breakthrough in the case, investigators have now pinpointed a person seen on video of the riot who attacked several officers with bear spray, including Officer Sicknick,” the New York Times reported Friday night.

With that one sentence, the Times buried for good its own original account of what happened to Sicknick—the now-debunked claim Trump “loyalists” beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. The Times seeded the fabricated story in a January 8 article; the paper “updated” the article—in reality, a retraction—on February 12 after pressure from a few outlets, including American Greatness.

The “bear spray” assault is just the latest change in the slowly unraveling mystery surrounding Sicknick’s untimely death. (He was 42.) His grieving mother told the Daily Mail last week she believes her son died of a stroke and isn’t sure if any sort of repellent spray caused it. The D.C. Medical Examiner’s office, in what can only be interpreted as a cover-up, refuses to release any autopsy or toxicology report, even though Sicknick was cremated weeks ago.

The public, and his family, may never know exactly how he died.