Tag: corruption

The Historic Collapse of Journalism

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

“There are sort of these force multipliers. We have our compadres. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be putting out this message on their own.”

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

“All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I wrote at length about the Times piece in Salon, where I was foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning media and the nature of public space altogether.

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FBI Doctored Mar-a-Lago Photo, Added Their Own Docs to Create a Crime Scene that Didn’t Exist

The DOJ responded in a lawsuit by President Trump asking a judge to review the FBI raid of his iconic property Mar-a-Lago.  In the DOJ’s response, the DOJ included a document they claim was taken at Mar-a-Lago.

The photo was all over the news on Wednesday, August 31, the day after it was provided to the court.  The Independent made fun of the Time Magazine cover on the right side of the photo that the DOJ apparently wanted to include in the photo so that they could show that President Trump is so vain.   There was no need for this Time Magazine piece in the picture.

The Daily Mail said “Trump KEPT framed Time cover of ‘enemies’ knocking at his window among the collection of classified files – including documents marked ‘Top Secret’ and those based on ‘human intelligence’ – sprawled across Mar-a-Lago”.

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We’re Being Trained To Worry About ‘Russian Propaganda’ While Drowning In US Propaganda

One of the weirdest, most insane things happening today is the way the entire western world is being trained to freak out about “Russian propaganda” — which barely exists in the west — while ignoring the fact that we are spending every day marinating in billions of dollars worth of US empire propaganda.

CNN has an article out titled “Darya Dugina’s death provides a glimpse into Russia’s vast disinformation machine — and the influential women fronting it” on the recently assassinated daughter of Alexander Dugin, a Russian political thinker of wildly exaggerated influence.

The article uses Dugina’s assassination to further stoke its audience’s ever-growing panic about Russian disinformation, quickly becoming a commentary on Russia’s entire propaganda network without bothering to articulate how Dugina’s death “provides a glimpse” into its workings.

Without the slightest hint of self-reflection or irony, this CNN article about Russian propaganda cites as its two main experts a think tanker from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and a think tanker from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). The Atlantic Council is a NATO narrative management firm that is funded by NATO, the US government, the UK government, various other US-aligned states, the arms industry, and numerous billionaires. CEPA’s donor list looks similar to the Atlantic Council’s and includes US arms manufacturers and the US government through both the US State Department and the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy. Both are used to promote the information interests of the US-centralized power alliance in Europe and North America.

As we’ve discussed previously, the way news media cite corrupt warmongering think tanks to discuss foreign policy without ever mentioning their immense conflicts of interests is plainly journalistic malpractice. But this practice is ubiquitous throughout the western news media, the because western news media are propaganda outlets.

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The typical US Congress member is 12 times richer than the typical American household

Every year, members of US Congress are required to report on the value of their households’ income and assets. The data reveal that the lawmakers, who just passed a massive tax cut, are a very rich bunch.

In 2015, the most recent year for which Quartz could access this information, the median member of the US Congress was worth at least $1.1 million. That is more than 12 times greater than the net wealth of the median US household. And that doesn’t tell the whole story, since the chambers of congress are not equal in wealth terms. The median net worth of a senator was $3.2 million, versus $900,000 for members of the House of Representatives.

These are conservative estimates. Congress members are not required to report on the value of their residence, though many do. US household wealth estimates, which come from a survey conducted by the US Federal Reserve, include all real estate wealth.

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Notes From the Memory Hole: When the Establishment Buries You

After my book Family of Secrets was published, a promised wave of positive reviews from major news organizations never appeared. 

Much of what did appear bordered on character assassination. 

The Los Angeles Times review, written by the paper’s media critic, Tim Rutten, was relentlessly negative.

Rutten accused me of being a fabulist trafficking in the “paranoid style.” He labeled my work “preposterous” and “a reprehensible calumny.” He concluded by advising the public to “avoid Baker’s Family of Secrets.” 

But then he spiced up his salvo with some misdirection: 

I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health. In fact, I think there are three things that every serious American needs to believe about our recent history: Kennedy was killed by a lone lunatic, Americans really did land on the moon and the Twin Towers were destroyed when they were struck by two fully fueled airliners that had been hijacked by Islamic extremists organized by Al Qaeda. People who do not believe in these things are, within reasonable limits, entitled to sympathy. They are not entitled to a seat at the table where serious discussions occur.

I was perplexed. I had written nothing at all about the moon landing, and my brief discussion of 9/11 focused only on the Bush family’s business and political ties with the bin Laden family and Saudi Arabia. 

Only the Kennedy assassination got hefty attention — with loads of fresh evidence that, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations found and as most Americans believe, there was much more to the story. 

Rutten did not engage with the facts. His snide swipe at those whom he labeled nutcases was a deliberate gambit: falsely representing a reporter’s thesis — then accusing him of failing to prove what he never claimed.  

This is what the Times and other outlets did to Gary Webb after he published his “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In one of the internet’s very first viral stories, Webb used court records and other government documents to reveal that cocaine-trafficking profits funded right-wing Nicaraguan rebels trained by the CIA. (Finding an alternate funding source, like Oliver North’s arms sales to Iran, was necessary after Congress prohibited the CIA from spending money to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.) That same drug pipeline fueled the crack epidemic that tore apart Black neighborhoods across the country. 

Just as I never addressed the moon landing or 9/11 — let alone questioned either narrative — Webb never claimed that the CIA deliberately engineered the crack epidemic to undermine Black communities. He reported that the CIA’s contacts somehow managed to run a massive drug smuggling ring unnoticed — or at least unmolested. Whether the CIA should have known about it — or did, and turned a blind eye — was outside the scope of his reporting, as he patiently insisted and as a subsequent Justice Department review noted.

But the false imputation was a central pillar of the subsequent “debunking” effort — a New York Times reporter assigned to the gang of journalists who published merciless follow-ups called it the “Get Gary Webb team” — that effectively ended Webb’s career. Less than a decade later, impoverished and disgraced, Webb shot himself.

So, reading Rutten’s disingenuous hatchet job, I was momentarily astonished — and yet, as I reflected on the history, not really so surprised after all. 

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FACEBOOK TELLS MODERATORS TO ALLOW GRAPHIC IMAGES OF RUSSIAN AIRSTRIKES BUT CENSORS ISRAELI ATTACKS

AFTER A SERIES of Israeli airstrikes against the densely populated Gaza Strip earlier this month, Palestinian Facebook and Instagram users protested the abrupt deletion of posts documenting the resulting death and destruction. It wasn’t the first time Palestinian users of the two giant social media platforms, which are both owned by parent company Meta, had complained about their posts being unduly removed. It’s become a pattern: Palestinians post sometimes graphic videos and images of Israeli attacks, and Meta swiftly removes the content, providing only an oblique reference to a violation of the company’s “Community Standards” or in many cases no explanation at all.

Not all the billions of users on Meta’s platforms, however, run into these issues when documenting the bombing of their neighborhoods.

Previously unreported policy language obtained by The Intercept shows that this year the company repeatedly instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Like other American internet companies, Meta responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.

No such carveouts were ever made for Palestinian victims of Israeli state violence — nor do the materials show such latitude provided for any other suffering population.

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FBI Knew of Potential Hunter Biden Story Leak Before Warning Facebook

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop story because of warnings it had received from the FBI.

In response to Zuckerberg’s statement, the FBI issued a vague statement late on Friday, claiming that it had warned Facebook of “potential threat information.” Notably, the FBI did not dispute Zuckerberg’s account.

Any kind of collusion or cooperation between government actors and private companies to censor American citizens is a direct infringement of the First Amendment. But what the FBI did may be much worse than that as it now appears that the bureau actively interfered in the 2020 election to gift Joe Biden the presidency.

The FBI first found out about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in the Summer of 2019 when they were notified by the repair shop where Hunter had left it. At first, the FBI appears to have shown no interest, but then, in December 2019, the FBI seized the laptop from the repair shop.

The FBI would have quickly realized that the information contained on the laptop was extremely damaging to Hunter Biden’s father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, as it proved that the older Biden had on multiple occasions met Hunter Biden’s business associates when he was vice president. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings.

The laptop also contained incriminating information about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ye Jianming, the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated owner of CEFC China Energy Company Limited who mysteriously disappeared in 2018, shortly after another Hunter Biden associate, CEFC official Patrick Ho, was arrested by U.S. authorities on corruption charges.

Despite knowing that the laptop and its contents were real, FBI agent Brian Auten shut down the laptop investigation in August 2020, falsely claiming that derogatory evidence against the Biden family was Russian disinformation.

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