Why is everything now subject to political propaganda?
Abasic tactic of political propaganda is to brand your opponents as dishonest or stupid. No one trusts a known liar, and no one wants to be associated with beliefs they consider stupid. Unfortunately, propaganda is generally a tool of liars, and many people are too stupid to recognize the difference between propaganda and news.
The biggest papers of record in the U.S. — The New York Times and The Washington Post — have been forced to retract a report about the FBI’s communication with former President Trump’s longtime lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
The Post on Thursday was the first to report that Giuliani was explicitly warned by the FBI that he was the target of a Russian effort to influence the 2020 presidential election. Citing unnamed sources — identified only as people familiar with the matter — also said the conservative news network One America News (OAN) was also warned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
When Donald Trump was president and Republicans were questioning the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, left-wing media outlets like The Washington Post couldn’t call them liars fast enough. Back then, the Post insisted that only a stupid conspiracy theorist would suggest or question whether the coronavirus may have come from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Weeks after the New York Times failed in its motion to dismiss Project Veritas’s defamation suit, the NYT was forced to answer the allegations in writing. The answers were recently made public. Though carefully tailored to reveal as little as possible, the answers betray incredible insight as to how the “Newspaper of Record” works behind the scenes, as well as the division of labor in the manufacturing of American political propaganda.
I’m leaving the big show, canceling my print subscriptions, packing up my DC apartment and chucking away all those unread back issues of the Atlantic
I’m about to fly home to London after five years of reporting from America for the Sunday Times, first from New York, then Washington, taking in really a lot of strange and surprising places along the way. Fortunately, I got one of the last doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine before its suspension sparked yet another wave of national hysteria. I’m proud to be taking a little shot of all-American adenovirus back with me to the Old Country.
No foreigner can ever really claim to know America; there’s just one of you in a country of 330 million. But misapprehensions can be corrected. And of all the many misguided views I had about this country when I arrived, few have changed more than my perceptions of its media.
What the media did (and didn’t) cover at Atlanta, Boulder, and the Capitol
Nearly a week after Robert Aaron Long opened fire at two Atlanta-area spas, killing eight people, including six Asian women, MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart offered a stirring sermon to his viewers on the attack, insisting it was yet another instance of “discrimination and violence” against Asian Americans.
“We must not be cowed by the terror unleashed by white men drowning in the deep end of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny,” Capehart said. “We must not let fellow Americans of Asian descent think for one minute they’re alone.”
Numerous Capitol riot myths, pushed by the media, have completely collapsed.
When a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in January, America’s liberal elite went into meltdown.
‘Insurrection’ was the catchword. Commentators called for a ‘domestic war on terror’ in response. A terrible blow had been struck at the heart of American democracy, they said – and it was all Donald Trump’s fault.
… Nicholas Fondacaro of the Media Research Center made a nice catch with this NBC News report on the shooting last night. Instead of just freeze-framing the knife to show viewers that Bryant was attacking, NBC attributed the claim to police: Police say that Bryant had a knife in her hand and a knife was found next to her after she fell. That leaves the viewer with a bit of unwarranted doubt about what Bryant was doing when she lunged at the girl in pink in the clip. Was she maybe just throwing a punch, and the knife fell out of her back pocket after she was shot?
She sounds like a charmer!
In new video, Makhia Bryant can be heard screaming “I’m gonna stab the fuck out of you, bitch,” while lunging at two unarmed people who were posing no imminent physical threat to her
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 22, 2021
… The bottom line is, a false account of Sicknick’s death became an integral part of the national conversation about the Capitol riot. Now, the damage from that false account cannot be un-done. But the news organizations and commentators who fed the frenzy should report the medical examiner’s findings and their implications prominently and accurately — and tell viewers and readers that they had it wrong.
‘This information was hidden from you on purpose’: Buck Sexton
For four years, the liberal media led the Left’s fierce resistance to the Trump administration, slamming the President night after night after night. Now, a new study by the Media Research Center finds the broadcast evening newscasts have executed a full flip-flop, as they aid and abet liberal President Joe Biden’s administration with mostly positive coverage.
Last night, as I scrolled through my newsfeed on Facebook, I saw multiple posts referring to the shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by Chicago police officer Eric Stillman, video (warning: graphic) of which had just been released by the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
All the posts linked to news stories with headlines emphasizing one detail: at the moment Toledo was struck by the officer’s gunfire, his hands were raised and appeared to be empty.
CBS News deceptively cropped body camera footage that showed a 13-year-old boy holding a gun before he was fatally shot by Chicago police in March.
The President’s policy is identical to Donald Trump’s — but that’s not how CNN sees it
This week Joe Biden announced that the United States would begin withdrawing it’s military from Afghanistan in May, with the aim of leaving the country entirely by September 11th.
Biden is not the first President to announce this move. President Trump did so in 2019, and again in 2020.
Given that Biden is enacting exactly the same policy Trump wanted to pursue, you might expect the media coverage of these announcements to be similar.
New emails from the camp of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) handed to Fox News underline the shady way the CBS 60 Minutes team operated before their Sunday night hatchet job suggesting (without actual connecting evidence) that DeSantis engaged in a “pay to play” scheme with the Publix supermarket chain on vaccine distribution.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald on Tuesday lamented how historically trustworthy major corporate news outlets have destroyed their own credibility, especially during the years of the Trump administration.
“I’ve been a critic of corporate media outlets for 15 years but always assumed one could get basic facts (even if flawed) by reading them. I now no longer think this,” Greenwald tweeted. “Their journalistic and business model makes me distrust everything I read there.”
