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MEDIA

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It’s the pro-lockdown lobby that is spreading fake news Covid alarmism is giving rise to myths and misinformation. Brendan O’ Neill

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/04/its-the-pro-lockdown-lobby-that-is-spreading-fake-news/

The Kafkaesque quality of the lockdown was on full display at the weekend. We had the extraordinary sight of lockdown supporters accusing critics of the lockdown of spreading disinformation while they themselves were signal-boosting claims that were either categorically untrue or questionable in the extreme. This is the stage of lockdown authoritarianism we have now reached: anyone who questions the lockdown will be branded a liar and a hoodwinker who should be expelled from public life, while the cheerers of lockdown, those self-styled saviours of lives, can say whatever they want with very few repercussions.

The irony would have been delicious if it were not so serious and disturbing. Just as the lockdown fanatics were gunning for Karol Sikora, accusing the ‘positive professor’ of spreading disinformation, it became clear that they themselves have a somewhat difficult relationship with the truth. From both millennial leftists and tragic centrists, Sikora, a celebrated oncologist, has been getting it in the neck for quite a while, on the basis that he has committed the thoughtcrime of criticising harsh lockdowns and failing to predict there would be a second wave of the virus. Yet his accusers have some serious self-reflection to do, because their orgy of Sikora-bashing over the weekend coincided with an explosion of fibs from their own side.

First there was their vaccine disinformation (or, unlike them, let’s be generous: misinformation). Britain’s lockdown fanclub went wild over a New York Times piece which claimed that the UK is adopting a ‘mix and match’ approach to vaccination. This essentially means that this insane country some of us have the misfortune to live in will allow one vaccine to be given in a person’s first shot and an entirely different vaccine to be given for the second shot a few weeks later. The nutters! As the NYT’s haughty, startled headline put it: ‘Britain opts for mix-and-match vaccinations, confounding experts.’

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People of the Lie Journalism dies in the darkness of collusion. Joseph Hippolito *****

By on January 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/people-lie-joseph-hippolito/

Many Americans know about the New York Post’s exclusive reporting on Hunter Biden’s questionable foreign business deals that implicated his father: Joe Biden, the ostensible President-elect. Many Americans know Hunter Biden’s laptop provided the information. But most Americans have no idea what else that laptop contained:

— Joe Biden’s private e-mails and cellphone numbers.

— The names and contact information for the former vice president’s Secret Service agents.

— Cellphone numbers for such figures as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Mitch McConnell, members of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

— Information identifying Hunter Biden’s passport, driver’s license, Social Security card, credit cards and bank statements.

— Bills for thousands of dollars Hunter Biden spent on pornography and escorts.

No American outlet reported those facts. They came from Britain’s Daily Mail, in another exclusive published Oct. 30, two weeks after the Post’s articles.

“Strangely, the story got little traction in the US media,” the Mail’s Caroline Graham and Ian Gallagher wrote. “Stranger still, Twitter blocked the New York Post’s account while Facebook and Google censored any mention of the article. Under pressure, they relented.”

Stifling that news provides the most dramatic evidence of this disturbing fact: media corporations collude with foreign governments, federal agencies, big business and private foundations to mold public opinion and hide embarrassing facts, often to protect financial interests.

“We are in a scary place right now in the United States,” said Amber Lyon, who won two Emmy Awards for investigative journalism with CNN. “The American public — the poor, trusting American public — are being lied to.”

Lyon saw that collusion at CNN. In March 2011, she covered Bahrain’s brutal response to protesters demanding greater freedom as part of the Arab Spring. Lyon said she was “violently detained” by security.

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THE NRO GOES FULL ANTI-TRUMP

By on January 4th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/
The Folly of the Cruz Eleven

By The Editors

Eleven GOP senators propose to trample federal law and state sovereignty — and blow a hole in the hull of American democracy.

Trump’s Allies Become the Swamp: The ‘Electoral Commission’ Gambit

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Hawley and Cruz are engaged in a flagrant Washington power grab. If these are the Republicans, who needs Democrats?

Liz Cheney: Objecting to Electoral College Votes Sets ‘Exceptionally Dangerous Precedent’

By John McCormack

The Risky Wager of Betting on Trump

By Andrew C. McCarthy

It was always a dice-roll. But in this moment, the case for having supported the president’s reelection bid is harder to make.

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The Trump-Hating Media Prepare For A Long Nap Under Biden

By on January 4th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/31/mad-at-2020-dont-be-it-was-the-far-left-trump-hating-media-who-made-it-such-an-awful-year/

Nearly all would agree that 2020 has been a miserable year. A major reason for that misery, apart from the Chinese COVID-19 pandemic, was the utter failure of the American media. Our information purveyors no longer tell the truth or deal in facts, but rather trade in bankrupt far-left theories of wokeness, political correctness and cancel culture.

And now that Joe Biden could be our next president, the big media’s soft gloves will go back on. No more tough questions, according to The Atlantic.

“As the White House beat became the biggest story in the world, once-obscure correspondents were recast in the popular imagination as resistance heroes fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. They were showered with book deals, speaking gigs, and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers,” wrote McKay Coppins in a piece titled: “The Resistance’s Breakup With the Media Is at Hand.” He goes on to wonder what those who “got famous fighting with (President Donald) Trump” will do next?

The answer appears to be “coast.”

“I don’t think the press should be trying to whip up the Biden presidency and turn it into must-see TV in a contrived way,” CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta told The Atlantic.

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China: Paying US Media to Publish Propaganda ‘Borrowing a Boat to Go Out on the Ocean’ by Judith Bergman

By on January 2nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16865/china-propaganda-us-media

In June, China Daily filed a disclosure with the Justice Department showing that, since November 2016, it had paid $19 million to U.S. media outlets, including $12 million to newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Times.

China Daily’s ads — in a strategy known as “borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean” — come in the form of advertising supplements, inserts called China Watch… camouflaged to look like the other news content of the media outlets in which they appear.

The practice does not seem to have caused any sort of actual uproar in those media circles that engage in it… This reticence is odd… but because so many journalists and editors consider themselves as standing up against racism, ethnic and religious discrimination, and human rights abuses. Taking money from the Chinese Communist regime in exchange for spreading its propaganda would seem to indicate that this stance is simply empty posturing.

The Chinese government-controlled English language newspaper, China Daily, in 2020 paid a variety of US media outlets nearly $2 million for publishing propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to a disclosure that China Daily filed in late November with the US Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), according to Daily Caller.

China Daily has reportedly been registered as a foreign agent under FARA since 1983, which means it is required to report its activities and financial transactions to the Justice Department.

In June, China Daily filed a disclosure with the Justice Department showing that, since November 2016, it had paid $19 million to U.S. media outlets, including $12 million to newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Times. Other newspapers included the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Houston Chronicle and Foreign Policy.

China Daily’s ads come in the form of advertising supplements, inserts called “China Watch,” in a strategy known as “borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean.” According to Sarah Cook, Senior Research Analyst for East Asia, Freedom House, in 2017 testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission:

“This phrase refers to disseminating Chinese state-media content via the pages, frequencies, or screen-time of privately owned media outlets that have developed their own local audiences… In recent years, its robust expansion to English-language media has garnered much attention and public debate. One of the most prominent examples has been the emergence of China Watch — a paid insert sponsored by the state-run China Daily — that has appeared both in print and online in prominent U.S. papers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.”

This form of advertising is sometimes also known as advertorials, or native advertising: the stories are camouflaged to look like the other news content of the media outlets in which they appear.

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EDUCATION, MEDIA, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

How a Vindictive Classmate and a Cowardly University Ruined a Girl’s Life By Isaac Schorr

By on December 31st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/how-a-vindictive-classmate-and-a-cowardly-university-ruined-a-girls-life/

And how the New York Times helped justify it.

ARacial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning”

That’s how the New York Times headlined its hit piece on a college freshman for something she had said as a high school freshman. Mimi Groves was still a child when she said, in a Snapchat recording, “I can drive” followed by the “n-word” — the racial slur.

Jimmy Galligan, a half-black student who graduated from Heritage High School in Virginia this past spring with Groves, obtained this video during their senior year. Per Galligan himself, he waited until Groves had been accepted to, and chose to enroll at, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to release the video — which went viral.

The resulting firestorm led to a torrent of abuse, and to an ultimatum from the University of Tennessee to Groves: withdraw voluntarily or have your offer of admission rescinded. Groves, who is white, chose the former and is now taking courses at a local community college instead of at her dream school — the reckoning.

Should the former two have led to the third on the scale that Groves is now facing? Any reasonable person would say no. Even conceding the obvious — she shouldn’t have used that slur in any context — there’s little indication she used it out of hatred for black people. In fact, the context seems clear: Groves said it casually, as hundreds of hip-hop tracks do every year. That doesn’t excuse the behavior, which should be considered unacceptable. But it is an important distinction from using the slur with animus, which was obviously not her intention.

There are many to blame for what’s happened. If Groves can be held responsible for a poor decision rendered in her mid teens, surely Galligan can be as well for deliberately trying to ruin a classmate’s life four years later — a worse crime at a more mature age. But regardless of Galligan’s culpability, institutions such as the University of Tennessee and the New York Times are far more deserving of scorn than either of these Virginia teens.At the university, cowardice won the day. Facing calls on social media for Groves’s acceptance to be rescinded, administrators bowed to pressure from a vocal minority, forgoing what was right to do what was most convenient. It was easier for university officials to hang Groves out to dry than to withstand the intense but brief storm themselves. So that’s what they did.

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What Big Tech Didn’t Want You To See On The Federalist In 2020 Google, Facebook, and Twitter ultimately don’t want you to see anything from The Federalist. They also hope you don’t notice. By Joy Pullman

By on December 29th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/29/what-big-tech-didnt-want-you-to-see-on-the-federalist-in-2020/

Leftist media has skewed U.S. politics for decades, but Big Tech’s amplified influence over global discourse and governments is new. While Congress passed no legislation related to this political and national security emergency, we the people were held captive in lockdowns during a major election while crucial public information was filtered, hidden, and surveilled by unaccountable companies with no allegiance to the United States and obvious disdain for hundreds of millions of its inhabitants.

This is a huge social problem. Regaining our freedom to speak and to share and compare information may be the first task towards redressing our grievances against those who claim to govern us. For how can consent of the governed be truly granted when the people’s ability to inform their consent is manipulated? It cannot.

To regain our self-governance, then, we all need to develop new habits of information-gathering and -sharing. As a tiny part of and precursor to more of that effort, here is an accounting of Federalist work that Google, Facebook, and Twitter tried to keep people from seeing in 2020.

You will notice it fits the pattern of big tech censorship that big tech claims isn’t censorship: it all goes one way politically. All of it also comprises election-meddling by effectively promoting misinformation and disinformation on key voting issues.

Just Plain Hiding the News They Can’t Use

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Soviet-Style Media Propaganda in America Jeffrey Lord

By on December 28th, 2020

www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jeffrey-lord/2020/12/26/soviet-style-media-propaganda-america

Over there in The Wall Street Journal as we travel through the Christmas holiday season, was this very perceptive piece by one David Satter. Mr. Satter is identified as the “author of Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union and a member of the academic advisory board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.”

At one stage in his earlier life he was the Moscow correspondent for The Financial Times of London, arriving in the Soviet capital in 1976. He went on to work for The Wall Street Journal as a special correspondent covering Soviet affairs. Suffice to say, he knows well how a state-run media runs.

Among other things in his WSJ article Satter says this: 

“One of the pillars of the Soviet Union was a controlled press in which all coverage was organized to confirm a mendacious ideology.

…Soviet practices would have once been unthinkable in the U.S. media. But in August 2016, Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for the New York Times, wrote that if journalists believed that Mr. Trump was a “demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies,” it was necessary to “throw out the textbook of American journalism.” The Times started to characterize Mr. Trump’s statements as “lies” in news stories and suppress news that worked to Mr. Trump’s advantage, such as the Hunter Biden story this fall.”

Satter’s reference to the 2016 story by The Times’ Jim Rutenberg is indeed worth recalling. Here is an excerpt from that column: 

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.”

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A Year’s Worth of Media Malfeasance It was a dirty job, but someone had to sort through the year’s worst examples of media bias. Douglas Andrews

By on December 25th, 2020

https://patriotpost.us/articles/76709-a-years-worth-of-media-malfeasance-2020-12-23

Putting one’s finger on the five biggest media failures in any one year is a daunting task. It’s like trying to list the five worst plays during a Detroit Lions football season or Hollywood’s five worst movies of the year — there’s just too much terrible material to sift through.

The Daily Wire’s Hank Berrien, though, has given it a thoughtful effort, while The Federalist’s Tristan Justice took the “easy” way out and built a list of 20 journalistic failures.

As an aside, if there’s a first prize for Photojournalistic Failure of the Year, it has to go to CNN, whose “mostly peaceful” footage of the Kenosha riots was mostly accurate in the same way that Baghdad Bob was mostly credible:

It’s hard to quibble with Berrien’s top five, though one might move them around a bit in order of importance and impact. There can be no argument, though, with his choice as worst of the worst: the media’s utter refusal to cover the Hunter Biden story in the weeks just prior to the election. In doing so, the media didn’t just put its finger on the scale; it put its shoulder on the scale.

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Why Is Media Stoking Disinformation Campaigns By Yuri Vanetik

By on December 23rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/22/why-is-media-stoking-disinformation-campaigns/

Americans need to insist that legacy media be held to account as a treacherous culprit in the mass deception campaigns attributed to politicians, shady public relations operatives, and foreign powers.

Disinformation media campaigns operated by the Russians and the Chinese may also have a domestic origin. It is not what one would think. They don’t come from sleeper cells. Instead, the American legacy media, by way of its greed and lack of accountability, is responsible for the deception. 

Stealth public relations operatives drive conspiracy theories and smear campaigns using the complicit media of record as their echo chamber. Whether you are a supporter of President Trump or you consider him to be a lawless authoritarian is irrelevant because all Americans should be concerned that what is presented as news may actually be part of a paid public relations campaign or a sensation-oriented spin that is not newsworthy at all. 

Often the media is doing the dirty bidding of fringe groups and paid reputation assassins solely to maximize profits, knowing that their malfeasance is relegated to that of a protected class of free speech and free press. Media today is like the clergy in the middle ages—their profession considered sacred and their actions above the law.

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law professor, led a team of researchers that dissected the way information is amplified. Benkler’s team just published its study, which examines President Trump’s alleged “disinformation” campaign against mail-in voting and details the techniques the Trump world used to share Trump’s opinions on the election. Benkler and his team began from the biased position that a difference of opinion on policy questions qualifies as disinformation, nevertheless, the findings inadvertently run contrary to the popular idea on the Left that it is the Russian and Chinese foreign troll factories that are interfering with our elections with “disinformation.”

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