Tag: mainstream media

NPR puff piece on Atlanta leftist gunman revealed to be written by Antifa supporter

NPR on Saturday published a “misleading” piece on the circumstances surrounding the Atlanta police shooting of Antifa extremist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, where Antifa-supporting journalist Kaity Radde claimed the accused cop-shooter had his hands up when he was killed, and promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that the officer shot by the gunman was supposedly hit by friendly fire.

“The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says officers killed [Terán] in self-defense after they shot a state trooper, but the City of Atlanta released videos in which an officer suggests the trooper may have been injured by friendly fire,” Radde wrote of the January 18 incident, referring to a claim made by Antifa sympathizers that investigators maintain is false.

As reported by FOX 5, the GBI said that law enforcement came across Terán camped out in a tent in the woods in the Antifa-controlled autonomous zone near “Cop City,” what rioters are calling the site of Atlanta’s future Public Safety Training Facility.

According to investigators, officers fired at the suspect in self-defense after he refused to follow verbal commands and shot a state trooper, who was injured and treated at an intensive care unit.

The GBI has said that no footage of the actual shooting exists, but video the Atlanta Police Department shared captured by one trooper who heard the shooting take place out of eyesight’s body camera has fueled conspiracy theories from supporters of the Antifa gunman, with the family’s lawyer saying it confirmed their “worst fears that Manuel was massacred in a hail of gunfire.”

In the footage, one of the officers heading towards the sound of several gunshots says to others in the group, “Did they shoot their own man?”

“We don’t know who he got shot by, if it was by a deputy,” another one responds.

In a statement regarding these comments, APD said these officers were simply speculating on what the multiple gunshots could’ve been.

Keep reading

Matt Taibbi rips ‘spineless’ media for ignoring FTC’s demand for Twitter to reveal journalists

The Federal Trade Commission’s demand that Twitter reveal the names of journalists who were granted access to company records is being assailed as “an outrageous attack on the First Amendment.”

Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist, blasted his “former colleagues in mainstream media” for failing to cover what is being billed as “insane overreach” by FTC Chair Lina Khan.

He wrote that the lack of media outrage was “particularly infuriating” given that none of the journalists who published the “Twitter Files” had “asked for nor received access to private user data” whereas “the Files themselves are full of instances of government agencies improperly asking for the same.”

“Which journalists a company or its executives talks to is not remotely the government’s business. This is an insane overreach,” according to Taibbi.

In a Twitter thread, Taibbi referred to mainstream reporters as “spineless, corrupt, amoral f–kwits.”

Author Michael Shellenberger, who was among those given access to Twitter Files, blasted the Biden administration for its “outrageous attack on the First Amendment.”

Keep reading

CNN ex-boss Jeff Zucker told staff not to probe ‘lab leak’ theory because it was ‘Trump talking point’

CNN’s then-president Jeff Zucker told his staffers not to investigate the “lab leak theory” behind the origins of COVID-19 because he thought it was a “Trump talking point,” according to a report.

A “well-placed” CNN insider told Fox News Digital on Monday that Zucker gave the order in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox News Digital.

“It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”

Mainstream news organizations including CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC and others have been pilloried in recent days following a recent government report that concluded that an accidental leak from a Chinese laboratory is the most likely explanation for the COVID outbreak.

In the initial weeks and months of the pandemic, prominent media personalities, public health officials, and elected officials from the Democratic Party dismissed the “lab leak” theory as “debunked” — with some suggesting it was racist to even discuss the topic.

The Post has sought comment from CNN and Zucker.

Keep reading

Capitol Cop Sicknick’s Family is ‘Outraged’ After J6 Security Footage Proves He Wasn’t Murdered

The family of Capitol cop Brian Sicknick says they are “outraged” and are calling for Tucker Carlson to be “silenced” after he aired J6 security footage from the US Capitol building that shows Officer Sicknick was unharmed by election integrity protestors before dying of a stroke the following day. Initially, The New York Times claimed in a now-retracted and proven false report that Sicknick had been beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. Uni-party politicians and their associated media outlets have continued to regurgitate the false claim in an effort to paint January 6th demonstrators as killers and insurrectionists.

The video footage revealed by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, shows Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, himself a Trump supporter, walking about the Capitol building and waving at demonstrators AFTER he was supposedly killed by “insurrectionists.”

The Democrats, together with the Sicknick family, who are calling for Tucker Carlson and other J6 truth-tellers to be “silenced” in the wake of the narrative disruption, have insisted for over two years, along with their corporate media allies, that Sicknick was murdered during the anti-fraud demonstrations. First, they claimed that he was killed after receiving a beating from a fire extinguisher. Then, after a medical examiner ruled that Sicknick died a stroke, they claimed that he died as a result of a fire extinguisher beating, which we now know never happened. 

Though their claims were patently false, the narrative surrounding Officer Sicknick’s death played a central role in the formation of Nancy Pelosi’s J6 Committee, and in the hunting down of American Citizens for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

Keep reading

Elon Musk Says He Might Put A Propaganda Warning Label On CNN’s Tweets

Twitter owner Elon Musk suggested Monday that he may be compelled to place propaganda warnings on tweets posted by CNN after it emerged that the network actively discouraged staff not to look into or share any COVID lab origin information.

Fox News reports that an inside source at CNN has charged that the former president Jeff Zucker gave the order to everyone at CNN to back off any talk about COVID having originated in a Chinese lab, labelling it a “Trump talking point.”

After a bombshell leak revealed that the Department of Energy has concluded, in addition to the State Department and the FBI, that the virus did likely leak from the Wuhan lab, the CNN insider said “People are slowly waking up from the fog,” adding “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”

Not only did CNN back off the lab leak theory, it began actively trying to debunk it with minions like Oliver Darcy writing stories headlined “Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family.”

With all of this in mind, Musk responded Monday to a Twitter user who asked him, “When are you going to label CNN as State Affiliated Media?”

Keep reading

NBC Journalist Added to Ukraine’s ‘Kill List’ After Reporting the Truth About Crimea

NBC News journalist Keir Simmons has been added to Ukraine’s CIA-backed “kill list” after he reported the truth about Crimea, the contested region that seceded from Ukraine to join Russia in 2014, voting in favor of a secession referendum by more than 95%. That action kicked off the first phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Now, in 2023, the Ukrainians say that they will not stop fighting until they’ve invaded Crimea and control it once more, albeit, against the population’s will.

Keir Simmons of NBC News issued a recent report from the ground in Crimea, interviewing residents first-hand and asking for their opinions on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, and the political tensions at the center of it. According to Simmons, everyone he interviewed was pro-Russia. As a result, Simmons has been added to Ukraine’s CIA-backed “kill list,” joining American citizen Jackson Hinkle and Pink Floyd lead man plus anti-war activist Roger Waters as those who’ve been declared top enemies of Ukraine for not buying into their war and promoting the continued supply of NATO financial and military aid.

Keep reading

‘Oops! … I did it again!’ Establishment media forced into major recent retractions

Establishment media outlets, including NPR and The Washington Post, have been forced to issue major retractions in recent days, correcting misreporting on matters ranging from FBI whistleblowers to how President Joe Biden’s son Beau Biden died. 

NPR was forced to issue a correction Saturday to clarify that Beau Biden died from brain cancer in 2015, not from injuries he received while stationed with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, as stated in the original report.

The public outlet is not the only source to misrepresent Beau Biden’s death. The president himself has previously claimed that his late son died in Iraq, not from cancer.

NPR also walked back a claim in an article last month headlined “Speaker McCarthy leads first border trip in his new role. Critics call it a photo op.” The piece inaccurately reported that no Democrats attended a hearing at a Texas border town, bolstering critics’ claims that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans were using the border visit to generate media coverage.

“In fact, some Democrats attended,” NPR later clarified.

The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone all issued corrections to articles over the weekend about a Democrat House Judiciary Committee report criticizing Republican whistleblowers and GOP-led House investigations.

The Times admitted Saturday it had incorrectly stated that FBI whistleblower Stephen Friend worked for the Center for Renewing America, largely funded by former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows’ Conservative Partnership Institute, in an article headlined “G.O.P. Witnesses, Paid by Trump Ally, Embraced Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theories.” The Times issued a correction stating: “The center is affiliated with the institute and sustained mostly by donations; it is not largely funded by the institute.”

Rolling Stone corrected an inaccurate claim regarding former FBI analyst George Hill, whose attorney Jason Foster says retired from the agency on “good terms.”

Rolling Stone reported originally that Hill’s FBI security clearance had been “revoked” when in fact it was in good standing. The magazine said it mistook Hill for another whistleblower, Steve Friend, whose clearance had been suspended for a review but not revoked either.

“This story has been corrected to reflect that Steven Friend’s security clearance was suspended and George Hill retired of his own volition,” Rolling Stone stated.

“Obviously, they couldn’t keep the details of George Hill’s and [Stephen Friend’s] cases straight,” Foster tweeted. “So, they just blended them together with some fiction out of thin air about how Hill had to retire because his clearance was revoked and he couldn’t find work anymore.”

Rolling Stone has been called out before for media ethics issues. 

In November 2014, the magazine published an article titled “A Rape on Campus” claiming that a University of Virginia student was the victim of a fraternity gang rape. The story was retracted in April 2015, and the outlet lost a defamation lawsuit brough by a university official and settled other cases with the fraternity and some of its members. 

The Columbia Journalism Review said at the time that “Rolling Stone needs a transparency lesson” and the outlet “damaged the credibility of an important movement” bringing attention to sexual assault. 

The Washington Post, which still uses the slogan “Democracy Dies in the Darkness,” has issued an alarming number of corrections this year alone to stories dealing with conservatives.

Most recently, the outlet issued a correction to a Friday article headlined “Democrats challenge credibility of GOP witnesses who embrace false Jan. 6 claims,” stating: “An earlier version of this article erroneously said former FBI official Stephen Friend had not reported to a supervisor one of his concerns related to the use of a SWAT team in arrests related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riots. He said he did tell the supervisor, but he did not mention it in a written declaration.”

Keep reading

CNET’s AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism

The prominent tech news site CNET‘s attempt to pass off AI-written work keeps getting worse. First, the site was caught quietly publishing the machine learning-generated stories in the first place. Then the AI-generated content was found to be riddled with factual errors. Now, CNET‘s AI also appears to have been a serial plagiarist — of actual humans’ work.

The site initially addressed widespread backlash to the bot-written articles by assuring readers that a human editor was carefully fact-checking them all prior to publication.

Afterward, though, Futurism found that a substantial number of errors had been slipping into the AI’s published work. CNET, a titan of tech journalism that sold for $1.8 billion back in 2008, responded by issuing a formidable correction and slapping a warning on all the bot’s prior work, alerting readers that the posts’ content was under factual review. Days later, its parent company Red Ventures announced in a series of internal meetings that it was temporarily pausing the AI-generated articles at CNET and various other properties including Bankrate, at least until the storm of negative press died down.

Now, a fresh development may make efforts to spin the program back up even more controversial for the embattled newsroom. In addition to those factual errors, a new Futurism investigation found extensive evidence that the CNET AI’s work has demonstrated deep structural and phrasing similarities to articles previously published elsewhere, without giving credit. In other words, it looks like the bot directly plagiarized the work of Red Ventures competitors, as well as human writers at Bankrate and even CNET itself.

Jeff Schatten, a professor at Washington and Lee University who has been examining the rise of AI-enabled misconduct, reviewed numerous examples of the bot’s apparent cribbing that we provided. He found that they “clearly” rose to the level of plagiarism.

Keep reading