Tag Archives: Legacy media

Media Concern Trolling About Afghanistan Withdrawal Again, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on April 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

There will always be an excuse for interventionists not to quit intervening. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

“Concerns mount that US withdrawal from Afghanistan could risk progress on women’s rights,” blares a new headline from CNN.

“Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women’s rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country,” CNN tells us.

What follows is yet another concern-trolling empire blog about why US troops need to stay in Afghanistan, joining recent others geared toward the same end like this CNN report about how the US military will open itself up to “costly litigation” if it withdraws now because it signed defense industry contracts into 2023, and this one by The New York Times about a US intelligence report urgently warning that a withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to the nation being controlled by the people who live there.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Horseshit, Media

Tagged ,

Study: U.S. Media’s Covid Coverage Slants Heavily Negative, by Brian McGlinchey

Posted on March 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

You can’t scare people to death with positive stories. From Brian McGlinchey at starkrealities.substack.com:

Mainstream outlets stoke fear while shielding us from encouraging facts

If you’ve felt the media has heavily emphasized bad news throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, your judgment now has some scholarly corroboration.

Dartmouth College and Brown University researchers have analyzed tens of thousands of Covid-19 articles and found major U.S. media outlets have overwhelmingly pushed negative narratives about the virus.

“The most striking fact is that 87 percent of the U.S. stories are classified as negative, whereas 51 percent of the non-U.S. stories are classified as negative,” according to the study by Dartmouth economics professor Bruce Sacerdote, Dartmouth’s Ranjan Sehgal and Brown University’s Molly Cook.

Thwarting Public Clarity About Covid-19

Though the study doesn’t delve deep into the societal implications, there’s little doubt excessive media negativity has contributed to public misunderstanding of the nature of the disease and the risk it poses to various segments of society.

Consider one of study’s most glaring findings: Even when Covid-19 cases were falling nationally between April 24 and June 27, major media discussed rising caseloads 5.3 times as frequently as falling ones.

The impact was evident: A June CBS News poll found a record number of Americans felt the fight against coronavirus was going badly. Of course, news of the poll was itself another negative story, feeding a media-facilitated vicious circle of fear.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Governments, Media, Medicine, Propaganda

Tagged ,

Society Federal Judge Calls Left-Leaning Media a ‘Threat to U.S. Democracy.’ So Who Will Tell the People? by Robert Bridge

Posted on March 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

The monolithic and captured legacy media will not be the instrument that conveys to the people that is monolithic and captured. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.org:

The American people are presently trapped in a Catch-22 situation in that any criticism that is leveled against the U.S. mainstream media is channeled away from social discourse by the very institutions under attack.

A prominent DC circuit judge has delivered a scathing attack on the Democratic Party’s “ideological control” of the U.S. media landscape. Yet who will heed the call if legacy and social media are empowered to suppress news and debate at will?

Donald Trump, the first sitting president in U.S. history to have had his voice deliberately blocked from reaching the American people, is not the only one who has a beef with the control-freak liberal media. Senior Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman, 85, appointed in 1985 to the U.S. Court of Appeals by Ronald Reagan, thrust the question of liberal media bias into the spotlight during an otherwise ordinary libel case.

Silberman took umbrage against the 1964 court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which made it incumbent upon those parties looking to sue media outlets to prove that the latter’s reporting was the result of “actual malice,” or a “reckless disregard for the truth.” That ruling, critics say, has made it exceedingly difficult to hold media outlets accountable for what Trump regularly denounced as “fake news.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

How The Censors Won, by Michael Tracy

Posted on March 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Step outside the bounds of acceptable, mainstream political debate as dictated by liberal politicians and the captured legacy media and you’re a Russian stooge. From Michael Tracy at mtracey.substack.com:
Thomas Rid testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017

On March 30, 2017, the Senate Intelligence Committee convened one of what would become an endless series of exhaustive hearings on “Russian interference in the 2016 election.” Media, cultural, and political elites — bewildered and angry — were desperate to get to the bottom of how a former beauty pageant proprietor and reality TV show host could have possibly just won the presidency

Understandably dissatisfied with explanations that would require any kind of reckoning with their own seismic faults, politicians and journalists poured an enormous amount of resources into directing blame for the ascendance of Donald Trump at nefarious external actors, with Russia and its devious online trolling initiatives suddenly catapulted to public enemy no. 1.

The star witness in that 2017 hearing, appearing right alongside former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander, was Thomas Rid. Impressively presented by C-SPAN as a “War Studies Professor” at King’s College London, Rid made a passionate case that the US body politic had been woefully unprepared to contend with an onslaught of what he called “the dark art of disinformation.” Rid’s mission was to alert the Senate and the Nation as a whole to just how dire a threat this new breed of “disinformation” posed.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged , , ,

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

Posted on March 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, Media, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged , , ,

The Sovietization of the American Press, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on March 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

The legacy media is Pravda and the Democrats are the Communist party. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

The transformation from phony “objectivity” to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement

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.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

The Dystopian Western World, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on December 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

Just because nobody but Trump partisans wants to look at the actual evidence of election fraud doesn’t mean the evidence isn’t real. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

The West is living the worst of Orwell’s 1984 and Raspail’s Camp of the Saints

As the second decade of the 21st century comes to an end, democracy and free speech no longer exist in the Western World.  In all its respects, Western civilization no longer exists.

In the United States, which poses as the model for democracy, a presidential election has just been stolen in full view of everyone.  There is expert testimony by qualified experts about how the voting machines and software were used to bias the vote count for Biden.  There are hundreds of signed affidvits of eyewitnesses who saw the fraudulent use of mail-in ballots to boost Biden’s vote count.  We know for facts that dead people were voted, illegal aliens were voted, out of state residents were voted, and some precincts had more votes cast than there are registered voters and even residents in the precincts.

Despite the abundance of evidence, except for members of state legislatures in some of the swing states, no one is acquainted with the evidence.  The presstitutes speak with one voice and deny that any evidence exists.  So do the Democrat election officials in the Democrat-controlled counties in the swing states where the presidential election was stolen.  The courts have refused to even look at the evidence.  The presstitutes misrepresent the courts’ refusals to examine the evidence as the judiciary’s ruling against the validity of the evidence despite the fact that no court has looked at the evidence.  

The level of hostility of Biden supporters toward those who protest the electoral fraud is extraordinary.  Biden supporters threaten Trump supporters with loss of employment and with arrest and prosecution.  Tucker Carlson on Fox News reviews the extraordinary situation here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ki6S-WsKU  

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, Law, Media, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

Stupid, Stupider, Stupidest, by Patrick Armstrong

Posted on December 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

Maybe the really stupid people in the world are those who think they can propagate truly stupid stories and that most people will believe them. From Patrick Armstrong at strategic-culture.org:

The British newspaper the Sunday Times, relying on the usual unnamed Western intelligence sources (German this time they say, but as they’re unnamed, who knows?), has just re-animated the Navalny poisoning story by informing us: “Revealed: Kremlin made a second attempt to poison Alexei Navalny in botched assassination: Russian spies tried to kill Putin’s fiercest critic with the deadly nerve agent novichok before he could be flown to Berlin, western intelligence sources reveal.” This story, picked up by other outlets, presents us with three possibilities. All three involve the word “stupidity” – a word that is becoming gravely inadequate to describe today’s reality. English needs a stronger word to cover this concept.

The simple facts are that Aleksey Navalny fell sick on an internal flight in Russia on 20 August, the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was taken to hospital, a couple of days later he was flown to a hospital in Germany – at Putin’s urging, we are told – from which he has been released apparently in good health.

And the Gadarene swine of the West rushed straight for the cliff. Poisoned by tea, or was it a water bottle? maybe his clothing. Cancel last! – cocktail the night before. Ignore all rumours about coke or diabetic shock – it’s gotta be Putin’s poison du jour, novichok (has he run out of polonium, mercury and dioxin?) and, what is more, by a variant “more malicious and deadly than all known offshoots of the Novichok family”. Russian doctors found no poison – but who would believe a Russian? Russia gave “no credible explanation” to the accusations. But how could any Russian ever say anything “credible” as Canada’s Globe and Mail wondered: “The Kremlin, predictably, says it didn’t poison Alexey Navalny. So what can the West do?” The West in general, and the European Union in particular, likes to boast about values among which is that “Everyone who has been charged shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.” But not if you’re Russia. Russia must answer questions demands UK, Europeans on OPCW, Merkel, NATO, When Russia was unable to prove its innocence, the EU sanctioned “guilty” Russian officials as did most of the West. That the story was the usual slipshod assemblage of orphic assertions was revealed when the opposition party Alternative für Deutschland forced German government spokesmen to answer its questions: it was “not aware” of many things.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Crime, Governments, Media, Politics

Tagged , ,

Is America’s Fourth Estate (Free Press) in Foreclosure? by Leni Friedman Valenta with Jiri Valenta

Posted on December 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

The legacy media is not a free press, it’s an arm of the government and the powers that be. From Leni Friedman Valenta with Jiri Valenta at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • The modern meaning [of the fourth estate]… refers to the press as a fourth and free power — as even a “watchdog” — over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. Today, however, it is the watchdog that needs watching.
  • It was all right for the New York Times, as its editor-in-chief, Dean Baquet, admitted, to have “built our newsroom” around the fake Russia Hoax for two years, but substantiated facts concerning the Biden family’s influence peddling were apparently “not fit to print.”
  • So far, still to be answered, is the question: If election officials can ignore legalities with impunity, how, going forward, can there be trustworthy elections?
(Image source: iStock)

The “fourth estate” refers to freedom of the press. The term may have first been used by the philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke, who in 1787 highlighted the press as free and apart from the other three British “estates” — clergy, royalty and commoners.

The modern meaning, however, refers to the press as a fourth and free power — as even a “watchdog” — over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. Today, however, it is the watchdog that needs watching.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Media, Politics

Tagged ,

How NBC News Helped the Biden Campaign Ruin an Innocent Man and Bury the Hunter Laptop Story, by Jeff Reynolds

Posted on December 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

The legacy media buried an explosive report on Hunter Biden and his corrupt family by casting spurious aspersions on one of the publishers of the report. From Jeff Reynolds at pjmedia.com:

Hunter Biden and Joe Biden (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool)
Hunter Biden was the October Surprise that wasn’t—a report so explosive, so potentially damaging, so dangerous for national security that it should have destroyed Joe Biden’s bid for the White House. In any other election, fleets of investigative reporters would have been unleashed to verify the claims in the report. Instead, in the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a major media company set out to personally destroy the man they thought put the report together and thereby discredit the report to the point that the entire media complex in America took turns ridiculing the story instead of investigating it. The results could have dire implications for national security.

But hey, at least they got rid of the Bad Orange Man.

The week before Election Day, RedState published a series of articles about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, based on a 64-page report from researchers who combed public records to reveal how compromised the Biden family is to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). You can read Part 1 here. The four-part series lays out deeply disturbing connections between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and the CCP.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Government, Investigations, Law, Medicine

Tagged , , ,