Tag: mainstream media

A BBC Instruction Manual For Kids To Propagandize Their Parents

The day before yesterday, the BBC carried a piece titled “Earth Day: How to talk to your parents about climate change.”

The article begins addressing their target underaged readers:

You want to go vegan to help the planet, but you’re not paying for the shopping. You think trains are better than planes, but your dad books the summer holiday.

Young people are some of the world’s most powerful climate leaders and want rapid action to tackle the problem.

Big changes are difficult, especially when they involve other people. Where do you begin? For this year’s Earth Day, we spoke to people who have successfully had tricky climate chats at home. Here are their top tips:

The piece is broken into three sections targeting what they imply are evils of our times.

The first section focuses on “How to talk about going meat-free.”

The section begins by claiming that “eating less meat is one of the best ways to reduce our impact on the planet, say scientists.”

The piece introduces us to 17-year-old Ilse who has dyed her hair bright red, and her parents, Antonia and Sally.

The BBC claims that the family ate meat twice or even thrice a day, but when Ilse was 13, she “decided to do more about climate change and read that cutting out meat was a good start.”

Sally and Antonia were understandably skeptical about the plan initially. They were concerned about not getting enough protein and the fact that Ilse was too young to make that decision.

But they still complied with Ilse’s wishes and began with a one-day-a-week trial, they proceeded to scale up, and after a year, went totally meat-free.

Sally says that seeing the emotional impact of the topic on her daughter helped to persuade her it was the right thing for her family.

The BBC reveals that Ilse is part of ‘Teach the Parent’, a U.K.-based campaign that “encourages these conversations between generations.”

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Just 0.3% of Scientists agree Humanity is causing Climate Change; NOT 97% as falsely spread by the UN

You have likely heard that 97% of scientists agree on human-driven climate change. You may also have heard that those who don’t buy into the climate-apocalypse mantra are “science deniers.” The truth is that a whole lot more than 3% of scientists are sceptical of the party line on climate. A whole lot more.

The many scientists, engineers and energy experts that comprise the CO2 Coalition are often asked something along the lines of: “So you believe in climate change, then?” Our answer? “Yes, of course we do: it has been happening for hundreds of millions of years.” It is important to ask the right questions. The question is not, “Is climate change happening?” The real question of serious importance is, “Is climate change now driven primarily by human actions? That question should be followed up by “is our changing climate beneficial or harmful to ecosystems and humanity?”

There are some scientific truths that are quantifiable and easily proven, and with which, I am confident, at least 97% of scientists agree. Here are two:

  1. Carbon dioxide concentration has been increasing in recent years.
  2. Temperatures, as measured by thermometers and satellites, have been generally increasing in fits and starts for more than 150 years.

What is impossible to quantify is the actual percentage of warming that is attributable to increased anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2. There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 that was directly caused by us.

We know that temperature has varied greatly over the millennia. We also know that for virtually all of that time, global warming and cooling were driven entirely by natural forces, which did not cease to operate at the beginning of the 20th century.

The claim that most modern warming is attributable to human activities is scientifically insupportable. The truth is that we do not know. We need to be able to separate what we do know from that which is only conjecture.

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Disaster Troll Propaganda

So-called conspiracy theories abound, especially among those who attack others by calling them conspiracy theorists. There are official conspiracy theories, such as the government-approved stories about 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, the Manchester Arena attack and so on. There are also unofficial conspiracy theories, such as the expressed opinion of Richard D. Hall that the Manchester arena attack was a staged simulation without injury or death but performed and reported as if real.

We have to use the term “conspiracy theory” advisedly because, as we shall see, conspiracy theory, as we understand the term, doesn’t exist. “Conspiracy theory” is really just an opinion that the state does not wish anyone to either hold or express.

The BBC’s special disinformation and social media correspondent, Marianna Spring, calls Richard D. Hall a “disaster troll.” She claims that Hall lives in a “dark world” and that his “warped views” have “led him to the doors of terror victims.” Spring says that Hall is spreading “obscene lies” and that he is “at the centre of a network of conspiracies.”

Spring is utilising the propaganda technique of “othering.” She is trying to cast Hall as subhuman—a troll—and, by association, applies the same dehumanising propaganda label to anyone who shares Hall’s concerns about the official account of the alleged Manchester Arena bombing.

“Othering” is an applied psychological strategy widely used by authoritarian political regimes. Prominent historical examples include the “othering” of Jews in Germany during the 1930s by Nazi propagandists.

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NBC disinformation reporter is actually a partisan opinion writer

Ben Collins has made a name for himself around the media cool kids table as NBC News’s disinformation reporter. Except that Collins is actually an opinion writer.

His work doesn’t focus on breaking news stories nearly so much as it does on spreading naive disinformation. Collins’s intent appears to rest with scoring cheap Twitter hits and accruing the associated endorphin release gained when his sympathetic colleagues then praise his hot takes. Take what happened on Thursday when the SpaceX Starship rocket lifted off and shortly thereafter exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. This was a result predicted by SpaceX founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk and by engineers on the massive project. Still, Collins couldn’t help but weigh in on his Twitter feed, saying, “The kid gloves we in the press give this man is unbelievable.”

To be sure, Musk isn’t perfect. His commitment to free speech is flexible, for example. But again, Collins’s rhetoric isn’t exactly reporter-style rhetoric. It’s clearly a statement of loaded opinion. Of course, this isn’t the first time Collins has prioritized scoring cheap points against Elon Musk. Indeed, he was reportedly suspended by NBC News for a brief period for his rabid hyperventilating surrounding Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

Just a day prior to Collins’s foray into rocket science, he reacted after Twitter suspended a journalist from Wired for soliciting hacked information pertaining to conservative commentator Matt Walsh. That solicitation was a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. But Collins instead offered his familiar hyper-partisan glibness, tweeting, “Fun fact: This is the very same rule that was used to block distribution of the New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the greatest First Amendment violation in American history.”

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Corporate Media Are the Anti-WikiLeaks

It was impossible to imagine four years ago when WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown in Belmarsh Prison that corporate media, which had smeared Assange, could stoop to new lows of government servitude.

But it has now happened with the arrest of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, for allegedly leaking top secret government documents. The leaks exposed a number of significant lies told by both the U.S. government and corporate media about the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Among many items of interest, the documents revealed that U.S. Special Forces as well as NATO forces are on the ground in Ukraine; that Ukraine is significantly unprepared for its planned spring offensive;  as well as evidence of U.S. spying on its allies and  António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations.

According to Al Jazeera:

“Several purported U.S. intelligence assessments paint a more pessimistic outlook for the Ukrainian military than the U.S. has provided publicly. They suggest Kyiv is heading for only ‘modest territorial gains’ in its much-anticipated spring counteroffensive.”

In other words, the content of these leaks expose lies told directly by the U.S. and NATO, as well as the corporate media that serve them.

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The US Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State

The US State Department’s spokesperson Ned Price is being replaced by a man named Matthew Miller. Like Price, Miller has had extensive prior involvement in both the US government and the mass media; Price is a former CIA officer and Obama administration National Security Council staffer who for years worked as an NBC News analyst, while Miller has previously had roles in both the Obama and Biden administrations and spent years as an analyst for MSNBC.

Like every high-level government spokesperson, Miller’s job will be to spin the nefarious things the US empire does in a positive light and deflect inconvenient questions with weasel-worded non-answers. Which also happens to be essentially the same job as the propagandists in the mainstream media.

In journalism school you are taught that there’s supposed to be a sharp line between government and the press; journalists are meant to hold the government to account, and there’s an obvious conflict of interest there if they’re also friends with government officials or are looking to the government as a potential future employer. But at the highest levels of the world’s most powerful government and the world’s most influential media platforms the line between media and state is effectively nonexistent; people flow seamlessly between roles in the media and roles in the government depending on who’s in office.

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“You just lied” – Elon Musk dismantles BBC reporter over “hate speech” claims, accuses BBC of spreading “misinformation”

In an interview with the BBC at Twitter headquarters on Tuesday night, owner Elon Musk called out the BBC reporter for lying about an increase in hateful content since he took over.

BBC reporter James Clayton asked Musk why there is “so much more hate speech on Twitter” since his takeover. Musk responded by challenging the reporter to provide one instance.

After Clayton hesitated, Musk said, “You said you’ve seen more hateful content but you can’t name a single example. Not even one.”

Clayton responded, “I’m not sure I’ve used that feed for the last three or four weeks, and I…”

“Then how could you see the hateful content?… I’m asking for one example. You can’t give a single one.” Musk interjected. “Then I say sir that you don’t know what you’re talking about … because you can’t give a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. And yet, you claimed that the hateful content was high. That’s false. You just lied!”

Clayton then said there are “many organizations that say that kind of information is on the rise.”

“Give me one example,” Musk insisted.

Musk also referred to a thread by Twitter user @KaneokaTheGreat, which included a video of venture capitalist David Sacks explaining that the left “uses hate speech as a red herring to mask their true intention of exerting political censorship and controlling the narrative.”

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WHY THE MEDIA DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NORD STREAM BLASTS 

No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.

Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.

In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.

Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas. It was an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.

If Washington had been able to pin the explosions on Russia, as it initially hoped, it would have done so with full vigor. There is nothing Western states would like more than to intensify world fury against Moscow, especially in the context of NATO’s express efforts to “weaken” Russia through a proxy war waged in Ukraine.

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Nashville Shooting Has Been Erased From Memory Due To Inconvenient Narrative

Journalist Glenn Greenwald noted Monday that the Nashville shooting, which occurred less than three weeks ago, has already been “erased from memory” because it was perpetrated by a trans individual and represents an “inconvenient narrative”.

Appearing on SiriusXM with Megyn Kelly, Greenwald succinctly noted how Kamala Harris and others within the Biden administration have attempted to sweep the school shooting, in which three children lost their lives, under the rug.

“This Nashville shooting has been erased from memory even though it happened very recently because it’s such an inconvenient narrative given that the shooter was not just someone who was trans but very possibly acted on behalf of this radical ideology,” Greenwald told Kelly.

“And amazingly they won’t show us the manifesto even though we always see the manifesto when they can link it to the right,” greenwald continue, adding “We’ve retained counsel in Nashville to try to obtain that manifesto because it’s journalistically in the public interest.”

The journalist continued, “Kamala Harris goes there and pretends there are no victims because they want to forget about that shooting completely except to the extent they can exploit it for gun control issues.”

“So somehow a shooting by what appeared to be somebody motivated by at least in part radical theories of gender ideology and killed Christian children in the name of that ideology,” Greenwald continued, “Somehow that has been turned around so that whoever is concerned about that competent of the story is now back to being a 1960s Jim Crow racist.”

“Of course it wouldn’t work without the media’s cooperation, that’s how they frame everything in partnership with their partisan allies,” greenwald asserted.

He then tore into Harris specifically, noting “The Democratic Party is about nothing other than criminalizing dissent and protest. Everything she just said there is so cynical and so disingenuous. It’s hard to know where to start.”

Greenwald continued, “Let’s remember the only good moment of her ill-fated presidential campaign… was when she accused Joe Biden of being a racist because he had opposed bussing and desegregation of schools and she had that moment in that debate where she said ‘That little girl was me, Joe.’ Really strongly implying he was a racist.”

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Eat Me, MSNBC

I’m going to be interviewed on MSNBC today by Mehdi Hasan, the author of a book called Win Every Argument. I’m looking forward to it as one would a root canal or rectal.

I accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion. If you’re reading this, things have gone another way.

I last appeared on MSNBC six years ago, on January 13, 2017, to talk with Chris Hayes and of all people Malcolm Nance, about the then-burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal.

The Trump-Russia story was white-hot and still in its infancy. That same day, news leaked from Israel that Americans warned the Mossad not to share information with the incoming administration, because Russia had “leverages of pressure” on Trump. Asked by Chris about the scandal generally, I made what I thought was a boring-but-true observation, that we in the media didn’t “have any hard evidence” of a conspiracy, just not a lot to go on. This was the TV equivalent of a shrug.

Nance jumped on this in a way I remember feeling was unexpected and oddly personal. “Matt’s a journalist. I’m an intelligence officer,” he snapped. “There is no such thing as coincidence in my world.” Chris jumped in to note reporters have different standards, and I agreed, saying, “We haven’t seen anything that allows us to say unequivocally that x and y happened last year.”

“Unequivocally” seemed to trigger Nance. With regard to the DNC hack, he said, “That evidence is unequivocal. It’s on the Internet.” As for “these links possibly with the Trump team,” he proclaimed, “You’re probably never going to see the CIA’s report.” Nance went on to answer “no” to a question from Chris about whether leaks “were coming from the intelligence community,” Chris wrapped up with a sensible suggestion that we all not rely on a parade of “leaks and counter-leaks,” and the segment was done.

To this day I get hit probably a hundred times a day with the question, “What happened to you, man?” What happened? That segment happened, but to MSNBC, not me.

That exchange between Nance and me was symbolic of a choice the network faced. They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.

We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.

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