Tag Archives: Bias

NBC News Uses Ex-FBI Official Frank Figliuzzi to Urge Assange’s Extradition, Hiding His Key Role, by Glenn Greenwald

It is barely an exaggeration to say that the mainstream media is an arm of the intelligence agencies and the FBI. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

The most dangerous, and under-discussed, development in corporate media is the spate of ex-security state agents now employed to deliver the “news.”

Twitter profile of former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi, now of NBC News

Two of the television outlets on which American liberals rely most for their news — NBC News and CNN — have spent the last six years hiring a virtual army of former CIA operatives, FBI officials, NSA spies, Pentagon chiefs, and DOJ prosecutors to work in their newsrooms. The multiple ways in which journalism is fundamentally corrupted by this spectacle are all vividly illustrated by a new article from NBC News that urges the prosecution and extradition of Julian Assange, claiming that the WikiLeaks founder, once on U.S. soil, will finally provide the long-elusive proof that Donald Trump criminally conspired with Russia.

The NBC article is written by former FBI Assistant Director and current NBC News employee Frank Figliuzzi, who played a central role during the Obama years in the FBI’s attempt to investigate and criminalize Assange: a rather relevant fact concealed by NBC when publishing this. But this is how U.S. security state agents now directly control corporate news outlets.

During the Cold War and then in the decades following it, the U.S. security state constantly used clandestine measures to infiltrate U.S. corporate media outlets and shape U.S. media coverage in order to propagandize the domestic population. Indeed, intelligence agencies have a long, documented record of violating their charter by interfering in domestic politics through formal programs to manipulate U.S. media coverage.

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Print the Legend, by Steve Sailer

Too many times the mainstream media either starts or mirrors widespread misconceptions of facts. From Steve Sailer at takimag.com:

Print the Legend
This past week’s events in Wisconsin’s Kenosha and Waukesha offer useful perspectives on a recent clash between pundits Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark over the accuracy of the news media. Sullivan argues that the press makes numerous errors, while Last suggests that they get almost all matters of fact correct.

On his Substack newsletter, Sullivan complained:

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny.

Indeed, the amount of Sailerbait with which the news media humiliates itself has definitely grown during the Great Awokening. But it’s also easy to exaggerate the relative number of factual errors compared to the thousands of details printed daily by newspapers.

Instead, the larger problem is the worldviews inculcated by the press, which in turn lead to mistakes. For instance, millions of loyal readers were shocked by the jury’s courageous acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse because they had come to believe in the antiwhite male mythos peddled by the press. Therefore, the actual facts of the case couldn’t stick to their brains because they’d been indoctrinated that armed white men are The Problem.

“The amount of Sailerbait with which the news media humiliates itself has definitely grown during the Great Awokening.”

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If The Rich Were Propagandizing Us, We’d Have Heard About It In The News, by Caitlin Johnstone

They wouldn’t lie to us, would they? From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The primary obstacle in getting people to realize that they are being propagandized by our rulers is their unquestioned assumption that if there were a mass-scale narrative management operation geared at manufacturing consent for the status quo, they would have heard about it in the news or learned about it in school.

And, of course, they would not have, because both the plutocratic media and the modern schooling system are designed to indoctrinate people into accepting the status quo. From the time we are children our minds are deliberately and systematically warped to psychologically align us with the interests of the ruling class, and then we are passed on to the news media to ensure that we are continually shaped and reshaped in real time throughout our adult lives based on the specific needs of the oligarchic empire from year to year. A brainwashing institution is never going to teach you to be skeptical of their brainwashing.

Our indoctrination into the establishment worldview is not just in training us to espouse certain beliefs and think a certain way, it’s in training us to look to the sources of our indoctrination for guidance throughout our lives. What do we do when we are unsure about something, class? That’s right, we go to reliable, authoritative sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and any other outlet that has consistently supported every war we’ve ever been deceived into by our rulers.

Our indoctrination isn’t just in what to think, it’s in how to think.

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Should You Hate The Media? by Bill O’Reilly

This looks like a fairly standard alternative media rant, but consider the source. From Bill O’Reilly at billoreilly.com:

Should You Hate the Media?
1975 was an exciting time to be at Boston University’s School of Public Communication. There we were, about 30 students seeking a Master’s Degree in Broadcast Journalism.  All of us thought our quest was noble, that we would become purveyors of truth, skilled fact-finders and truth-tellers in the Watergate tradition. The lessons presented were well worth the tens of thousands of dollars I had to pay for them.
Forty-five years later, having reached the top of my profession, I generally despise my own industry, something I never could have predicted.  Here’s why.
The national TV press is presently controlled by six major corporations that use their vast power to profiteer while attempting to destroy ideological enemies. The coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency has proved that statement beyond any reasonable doubt.
The stage was set early when a New York Times columnist wrote that because Mr. Trump was so loathsome (to him and his liberal colleagues), the basic tenets of fair journalism no longer applied.  Get Trump was the new rule.

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Bad, Press, by Charles C. W. Cooke

There are valid reasons why the public hates the press as never before. From Charles C. W. Cooke at nationalreview.com:

A White House press briefing (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

How the media fail

Our national press is a national joke. Vain, languid, excitable, morbid, duplicitous, cheap, insular, mawkish, and possessed of a chronic self-obsession that would have made Dorian Gray blush, it rambles around the United States in neon pants, demanding congratulation for its travails. Not since Florence Foster Jenkins have Americans been treated to such an excruciating example of self-delusion. The most vocal among the press corps’ ranks cast themselves openly as “firefighters” when, at worst, they are pyromaniacs and, at best, they are obsequious asbestos salesmen. “You never get it right, do you?” Sybil Fawlty told Basil in Fawlty Towers. “You’re either crawling all over them licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff adder.” There is a great deal of space between apologist and bête noire. In the newsrooms of America, that space is empty.

It’s getting worse. Despite presenting an opportunity for sobriety and excellence, the election of President Donald Trump has been an unmitigated disaster for the political media, which have never reckoned with their role in Trump’s elevation and eventual selection, and which have subsequently treated his presidency as a rolling opportunity for high-octane drama, smug self-aggrandizement, and habitual sloth. I did not go to journalism school, but I find it hard to believe that even the least prestigious among those institutions teaches that the correct way to respond to explosive, unsourced reports that just happen to match your political priors is to shout “Boom” or “Bombshell” or “Big if true” and then to set about spreading those reports around the world without so much as a cursory investigation into the details. And yet, in the Trump era, this has become the modus operandi of all but the hardest-nosed scribblers.

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Former NY Times Boss Slams Newspaper Over Anti-Trump Coverage, by Tyler Durden

William M. Arkin resigns from CBS and a NY Times editor criticizes the paper for its one-sided Trump coverage. Is there change in the air? Probably not. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A former New York Times executive editor has slammed her former employer for being “unmistakably anti-Trump,” while invoking Steve Bannon’s claim that the mainstream media has become the “opposition party” united against the president, according to Fox News.

Jill Abramson, who led the Times from 2011 to 2014, knocked the newspaper for exploiting financial incentives to bash Trump and says that the bias has eroded the paper’s credibility.

In her upcoming book, “Merchants of Truth,” Abramson puts the news industry under a microscope – at times defending her former employer, while levying harsh criticism for her successor, Dean Baquet.

“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” writes Abramson – who says the Washington Post is no different. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.

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How Social Media Is Becoming an Arm of the State, by Jose Nino

The “Is Becoming” in the title should be replaced with “Has Become.” From José Niño at mises.org:

Say the wrong things and you might get kicked off of your favorite social media platform.

Tech titans Apple, Facebook, and YouTube have wiped out talk-show host Alex Jones’s social media presence on the Internet. But the social media crusades weren’t over.

Facebook recently took down popular pages like Liberty Memes and hundreds of other prominent libertarian-leaning pages . In the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, social media network Gab was on the receiving end of suspensions from payment processors like PayPal and Stripe and cloud hosting company Joyent. Although these companies did not provide clear explanations for their dissociation with Gab, the media had a field day when they learned that the synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers, had an account with the social media network.

Should libertarians fear social media de-platforming? Or is this a case of private actors exercising their legitimate property rights by excluding those they wish to no longer do business with?

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Start Shredding the News, from The Burning Platform

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/10/13/start-shredding-the-news/