Tag: mainstream media

For Five Straight Years, The Pulitzer Prizes Have Rewarded Misinformation

The way the Pulitzer Prizes work seems simple enough – an Ivy league university hands out annual awards that ostensibly recognize important journalism. In practice, however, my former colleague Phil Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist who has served on the nominating committee, described the inner workings of the Pulitzers this way:

The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year. If you’re a connoisseur of unrestrained self-praise, may I recommend the citations when the Times awards itself the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

While the Pulitzer Prizes have always been little more than self-dealing masquerading as journalistic beauty pageant, it was a lot easier to believe in this manufactured prestige back when journalism was at least slightly more competent and concerned with the appearance of objectivity. In fact, a spin through the last five years of Pulitzer recipients reveals some interesting choices that add up to a clear pattern.

In 2018, a Pulitzer for national reporting was given to The New York Times and Washington Post for reporting on the Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. A 2019 Pulitzer for “Explanatory Reporting” was given to The New York Times for reporting on Trump’s taxes.

The 2020 Pulitzer for commentary was given to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times for the 1619 Project. In 2021, a public service Pulitzer was given to The New York Times for its coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic “that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond.” In 2022, the Washington Post won a public service Pulitzer for its coverage of January 6.

Every one of these major stories was badly handled by the media writ large, served activist political narratives, frequently involved credulously regurgitating actual misinformation, or some combination thereof. While there is always reason to be suspicious of Pulitzers, historically most of the objections to the awards handed out never rose beyond the level of newsroom gossip.

The Pulitzers always reflected journalism’s skewed priorities. However, this many high-profile failures in such a short time underscores the rapid and catastrophic descent of American journalism into radical political activism and makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.

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BUSTED: Rolling Stone Editor-in-chief spiked reporting on friend getting arrested for child porn

A new report has revealed that the man who edited Rolling Stone’s initial story on the FBI raid of ABC producer James Gordon Meek, who was later revealed to have been charged with possessing child pornography, removed all references to the charge from the report, and was an associate of the accused producer.

On October 18, former Rolling Stone journalist Tatiana Siegel broke the news that the FBI had raided Meek’s home in April and that the Emmy award-winning ABC producer had disappeared from the public eye.

According to a new report from NPR, Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman had removed from her piece key information from Siegel’s sources that Meek had been raided by the FBI as part of a child pornography federal investigation.

Shachtman, the outlet reported, considered Meek “a peer with whom he was friendly,” a concern that Siegel had brought up to corporate officials. Shachtman reportedly told colleagues that the two travel in the same professional circles. A 2021 tweet, from before Shachtman taking the helm at Rolling Stone, Meek was seen on Twitter suggesting a Niger band for Shachtman to listen to.

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John Bolton’s Prominence In The Media Proves Our Entire Society Is Diseased

In order to narrative-manage the public conversation about the Iraq War on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, those who helped unleash that horror upon our world have briefly paused their relentless torrent of “Ukraine proves the hawks were always right” takes to churn out a deluge of “Actually the Iraq War wasn’t based on lies and turned out pretty great after all” takes.

Council on Foreign Relations chief Richard Haas — who worked in the US State Department under Colin Powell when Bush launched his criminal invasion — got a piece published in Project Syndicate falsely claiming that the US government and his former boss did not lie about weapons of mass destruction, and that “governments can and do get things wrong without lying.”

Former Bush speechwriter David “Axis of Evil” Frum cooked up a lie-filled spin piece with The Atlantic claiming that “What the U.S. did in Iraq was not an act of unprovoked aggression” and suggesting that perhaps Iraqis are better off as a result of the invasion, or at least no worse off than they would otherwise have been.

Neoconservative war propagandist Eli Lake, who has been described by journalist Ken Silverstein as “an open and ardent promoter of the Iraq War and the various myths trotted out to justify it,” has an essay published in Commentary with the extraordinary claim that the war “wasn’t the disaster everyone now says it was” and that “Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.”

But by far the most appalling piece of revisionist war crime apologia that’s come out during the 20th anniversary of the invasion has been an article published in National Review by the genocide walrus himself, John Bolton.

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PBS Fauci Documentary Shows Washington Man Rejecting COVID Vaccine: ‘It’s About Inciting Fear in People’

PBS’ new documentary about Dr. Anthony Fauci features a scene in which Fauci and Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) visit the Anacostia neighborhood to encourage residents to get the COVID-19 vaccine in an effort to combat vaccine hesitancy.

But the door-to-door effort prompted harsh blowback from one resident, who accused Fauci on camera of trying to incite fear in the population.

PBS’ documentary Dr. Tony Fauci, which is part of the network’s American Masters series, is set to debut Tuesday. In the scene, the unnamed man tells Fauci and Bowser that he won’t get the vaccine.

“People in America are not settled with the information that has been given to us right now,” he said. “So I’m not going to be lining up to be taking a shot on a vaccination for something that wasn’t clear in the first place.”

The man refuses to believe Fauci and Bowser’s arguments for taking the vaccine, even casting doubt on their motives.

“When you start talking about paying people to get vaccinated, when you start talking about incentivizing people to get vaccinated, something else is going on with that,” he said.

He added: “Your campaign is about fear.  It’s about inciting fear in people. You all attack people with fear. That’s what this pandemic is. It’s fear, this pandemic. That’s all it is.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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