Tag Archives: Credibility

The Fall Of The Mainstream Media And The Biggest Lies They Told In 2021, by Brandon Smith

People are turning to the alternative media. Brandon Smith mentions his site’s increased readership in 2021. The same thing is going on at SLL. Viewership was up 30 percent over 2020, which in turn was up 58 percent over 2019. The mainstream media has destroyed its credibility. For SLL or any other alternative media site, credibility is its chief asset, and sites that lose it find themselves quickly consigned to oblivion. (Whatever happened to the Drudge Report?) From Smith at alt-market.com:

If the past year has confirmed anything it is that the mainstream media is thoroughly dishonest. Yes, most people already suspected this, but the last 12 months have provided more confirmation than the past several years combined. 2021 has made it clear that the mainstream media is a propaganda arm of political and corporate elitists, from big government to big pharma.

While there have been a few shining examples of independent and mostly unbiased journalism in the MSM, these moments are as rare as Loch Ness Monster sightings and almost as unbelievable. The public has been lied to so consistently that sometimes we ignore legitimate journalism when it pops up because it’s safer to assume the media is disingenuous at all times.

I’ve personally noticed a wash of commercials lately paid for by major legacy media platforms like the New York Times desperately trying to convince the public that they are still relevant. The message is that they are the only “true source” of news information while they beg people to start subscribing and reading their hot garbage once again. Leftist media is crumbling, with online propaganda peddlers and click-bait prostitutes like Buzzfeed and Vox imploding. The lack of profits is obvious and the layoffs have been aggressive.

These platforms survived for the past few years on tech media hype and venture startup capital, but the free money has run out and now they don’t know what to do. Buzzfeed’s scheme was to go public and sell shares, but this plan failed so completely and the company’s stock plunged so hard that the event has exposed all other fledgling tech media to wider scrutiny. In other words no one has faith in these outlets, at least not enough to invest in them, and now the veil of their supposed “success” has been lifted. Buzzfeed used to claim they were worth $1.5 billion; reality revealed they are worth almost nothing.

Legacy media has also seen its audience numbers plummet over the past ten years, but the last year in particular has been especially unkind to them. ALL of the major corporate news channels saw their audience ratings decline, with CNN seeing the largest drop overall. CNN is facing an epic cut of 68% in its prime time numbers in 2021, while MSNBC now has the smallest prime time audience it has witnessed since 2016. Fox also dealt with audience declines this year but continues to remain the most watched cable news outlet so far, probably because of the continued popularity of commenters like Tucker Carlson.

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I will never trust another doctor, by Randi Pinkerton

The members of the professional that fell into line with the official propaganda without question or protest have spoiled it for the 2 percent who didn’t. From Randi Pinkerton at americanthinker.com:

It happened again yesterday, twice. Reading through comments on a blog post I found this: “I will never trust another doctor again.” I long ago lost count of the number of times I have seen that written.

You hear it, too. In private conversations with people they trust, American citizens are heaping contempt on doctors for forcing a narrative on us that had no basis in science. Many of us, perhaps even the majority, immediately recognized this virus for what it is: a common flu virus maybe engineered to be more contagious if not more fatal but hardly differing substantially from other influenza strains. We have lived with seasonal flu all our lives. We saw no reason to fear it until the medical community, and Anthony Fauci specifically, started telling lies.

And once the lies started, they never stopped. From a trickle — “It’s going to make everyone sick” — to the massive flood of lies about masks, “vaccines,” effective treatments, “We’re all going to die!,” and even rigging the numbers to prove those lies, this scam has been one continual government operation. It was exploited to allow for the theft of the 2020 election by means of mail-in ballots. Having accomplished that, its purpose now is to keep the knee of government firmly on the population’s neck.

It seems that our doctors went along with the hoax to a large degree because it put them in the spotlight. Amazingly, almost none of them questioned the lies. They abandoned everything they’d learned in Virology 101 and went full “cry wolf.” It worked out well for them. Suddenly, they were the focus of attention, and their words were hung on breathlessly. They soaked it up, reveled in it, strutted down the halls in their white coats, and followed the diktats of D.C. religiously. Many of them went even farther. They wrote scholarly articles promoting the fairy tale and hectoring us peons on how to behave. Masks and social distancing — laughable advice in the face of reality — became the ironclad rule. They lied, too, in order to promote their own importance. They refused to see patients unmasked, treated the sick in their parking lots, abandoned patients’ follow-up care, delayed needed tests and surgery endlessly, and generally ignored the hell they were putting the rest of us through. Worst of all, they denied us treatment with medications that had been proven effective. Because, you see, those things were horse pills not meant for humans…right up until that was proven a lie also.

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Analysis: The Pentagon has a credibility problem, and it’s only getting worse, by Andrew Clevenger

Actually, the Pentagon has had a credibility problem since at least the Vietnam War, when it kept assuring the American people that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. From Andrew Clevenger at rollcall.com:

The Defense Department’s waffling on casualties from Jan. 8 Iran strike latest in a growing trend

Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief when, the morning after Iran’s Jan. 8 ballistic missile attack on Al Asad air base in Iraq, Defense Department leaders said there were “no casualties.”

That initial assessment hasn’t held up, and neither have the department’s varying statements on the matter since then.

The Pentagon confirmed Friday that 34 personnel have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries or concussions from the strike. While half have subsequently returned to duty, 17 continue to be treated in Germany and the United States, Jonathan Hoffman, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told reporters.

In the intervening weeks, details on the wounded have been reported in dribs and drabs, from eight initially, to 11. On Wednesday, a top commander in Iraq told reporters the number of injured was “in the teens.”

In the midst of this, President Donald Trump weighed in, saying Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland, that he “heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things.” He added: “But I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious, not very serious.”

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Faith No More: America’s Trust in Mainstream Media Hits Rock Bottom, by Robert Bridge

It’s taken a long time, but the mainstream media has managed to destroy the public’s trust in it. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.org:

Gone are the days when US consumers looked to the nightly news and print media as a trusted source of information, and especially if they hold conservative views, according to a new poll by the Columbia Journalism Review.

Things are going from bad to worse for the US legacy media as its trust credentials have reached an all-time new low, as if that were possible. It has even achieved a lower trust rating than lawyers and members of Congress.

The introduction to the CJR poll provided the following ominous opening: “For decades, we’ve known that Americans don’t trust the press. What we haven’t known is how people view the makings of journalism, from the use of fact checkers and anonymous sources to the question of whether money skews journalistic decision-making. This new national poll for CJR answers those questions, and points to how big the trust gap remains.”

Indeed, the cynicism on the street should have every mainstream media purveyor in a state of absolute panic.

In one particular finding, it was revealed that many news consumers believe that reporters, seemingly in an effort to push forward with a political agenda, are too quick to run with a story before knowing all of the facts. This has never been more true before than in the Trump era where anything goes, so long as it trashes conservatives.

We have just witnessed ample proof of that media tendency in several high-profile cases. This week, attorneys for Nick Sandmann, a student from Covington Catholic High School, filed a lawsuit against the Washington Post, seeking $250 million in damages for negligence.

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Christine Ford vs. Brett Kavanaugh: Two Definitions of “Credibility”, by Jack Kerwick

How can Christine Ford be considered credible? From Jack Kerwick at lewrockwell.com:

To hear numerous GOP and GOP-friendly (“conservative”) commentators tell it, both Christine Ford and Brett Kavanaugh are highly “credible.”

Of course, none of these pundits claim to believe that Ford was telling the truth when she claimed that she was sexually assaulted by Judge Kavanaugh.  What they claim to believe is that she was indeed sexually abused—but by someone else.

Aristotle, the Father of Western logic, identified numerous fallacies. One of these is the fallacy of equivocation.

This is the fallacy of which those of Kavanaugh’s defenders who simultaneously find Ford “credible” stand convicted.

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