Tag: mainstream media

‘It Can Ruin Your Career’: Glenn Greenwald Explains Why Journalists Are Terrified To Question Paul Pelosi Narrative

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald said Sunday that there was a very simple reason that members of his chosen profession seemed unwilling to question the narrative surrounding the alleged attack on Paul Pelosi — namely the possibility that asking questions could put their careers at risk.

Greenwald laid out his theory in a Twitter thread, saying that it didn’t even matter whether or not the prevailing narrative — that the person who was arrested at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) was a far-right conspiracy theorist and election denier — was true. The point, he said, was that it couldn’t be questioned.

“It’s very possible that the instantly formed media narrative — Paul Pelosi’s attacker was a MAGA fanatic who broke in to murder Nancy — will be proven true. But right now there are so many glaring doubts and holes in that story that it just takes common sense to question this,” Greenwald began.

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New York AG Probe Says LAPD Officer Helped Cover Up Allegations of Sexual Assault Against Former CBS Exec

An investigation has allegedly found that a commanding officer in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) tipped off former CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves about a confidential sexual assault complaint against him and worked with the company for months to ensure the complaint did not become public knowledge.

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the results of the investigation in a 37-page report (pdf) published on Wednesday.

In a statement, James said the investigation conducted by her office had found that a complainant had visited an LAPD station house in the Hollywood division on Nov. 10, 2017, to report a sexual assault by Moonves in the 1980s before he was employed at CBS.

The complaint was marked “confidential” multiple times, James said. However, later that night, an LAPD commanding officer with the Hollywood division allegedly called the Senior Vice President of Talent Relations and Special Events at CBS, Ian Metrose, and left the following voicemail: “I know we haven’t talked in a while. I am a captain at LAPD Hollywood. Somebody walked in the station about a couple hours ago and made allegations against your boss regarding a sexual assault.”

The voicemail continued: “It’s confidential, as you know, but call me, and I can give you some of the details and let you know what the allegation is before it goes to the media or gets out. So, all right, talk to you after a while. Bye.”

James’s report claims that the officer who phoned Metrose knew him personally because he had been hired by CBS to work as Moonves security aid at the Grammy awards from 2008 to 2014.

Metrose allegedly alerted his supervisors about the complaint the following day, according to the report, and the LAPD commanding officer allegedly provided Moonves and CBS executives with the unredacted police report, thus revealing the complainant’s identity and personal information.

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Historian Michael Beschloss: If GOP Wins ‘Our Children Will be Arrested and Conceivably Killed’

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss is officially broken and needs a timeout because lost his damn mind on MSNBC on Wednesday night.

You guys, the GOP will arrest and kill our children! I’m shocked he didn’t say the GOP will also eat them as the parents watch. Or go all Titus Andronicus and feed the kids in a pie to their parents.

Just accept the fact that Americans do not like your policies because they suck.

No one should ever take this man seriously ever again. What a clown:

Well, [Biden] was absolutely candid and he was absolutely right, because, as you know, Chris, six nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country. There are signs that that may happen. May God forbid. That losers will be declared winners by fraudulent election officers or secretary of state candidates or governors or state legislatures.

We could be six days away from losing our rule of law and losing a situation where we have elections that we all can rely on. You know, those are the foundation stones of a democracy.

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‘Democracy Dies In Darkness’ – Unless You Want Pelosi Video Released

In a Wednesday article, columnist Philip Bump draws a line from 2020 election deniers, to QAnon, to people who think there’s something fishy about last week’s attack on the Pelosis’ San Francisco house by a mentally ill homeless man who was living at a house with a BLM flag, and who back-dated posts on one of his websites after registering it in September.

Bump writes;

The internet makes all of this so depressingly easy. Not only is it a warehouse of information, it is also the corkboard and the colored yarn. You can forage for evidence of your belief system to your heart’s content and you can see how other sympathetic allies have strung together their own theories.

I frequently come back to Lawrence Lessig’s 2009 essay “Against Transparency” in which he warned that publishing information in the interests of governmental transparency would simply give people scads of material to generate their own narratives. That’s exactly what happened, though Lessig didn’t foresee that the advent of social media would vastly speed up the narrative-building process.

As an employee of a newspaper, I would, in fact, like to see the video that the Capitol Police overlooked, and the body-cam footage. It is the media’s job to question authority and to ensure accountability. It is also the media’s job to present accurate information to the public and to stamp out misinformation. So while seeing that footage would be useful, there is not at this point any reason to believe that the attack on Paul Pelosi was anything other than what various legal documents have suggested.

The lure of conspiracy is too strong to accept that, however, and the public understanding of how logic works is too weak. -WaPo

So – people might continue to spread conspiracy theories despite video evidence, so best not to release it.

In closing, Bump puts conditions on transparency; “More transparency and more information are good when considered responsibly. The challenge is that one can no more control how that information is applied than the people who, say, write magazine articles scrutinized for patterns of numbers by the corkboard set can control getting looped into a delusion.”

So – no transparency for you, if you aren’t qualified to process it.

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“You Murderous Hypocrites”: Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests ‘Amnesty’ For Pandemic Authoritarians

The Atlantic has come under fire for suggesting that all the terrible pandemic-era decisions over lockdowns, school closures, masking, and punishing an entire class of people who questioned the efficacy and wisdom of taking a rushed, experimental vaccine – for a virus with a 99% survival rate in most, should all be water under the bridge.

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID,” writes Brown Professor Emily Oster – a huge lockdown proponent, who now pleads from mercy from the once-shunned.

“Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward,” she continues.

Except, they weren’t “in the dark” about Covid.  There were numerous sources pointing out the actual science that ran contrary to the mandate claims, and they were deliberately silenced by a vast media campaign.  Evidence suggests that media platforms worked in tandem with Big Tech, the CDC and the Biden Administration.  It was not a simple matter of overreaction, there was collusion to remove all counter-information.  

Nice try, Emily.

As the Daily Sceptic‘s Michael P. Senger puts it: “There’s a lot wrong here. First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say, “We didn’t know any better at the time!” Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and cancelling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.”

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‘Missing’ ABC producer James Gordon Meek is seen for the first time since he went into hiding in April – but refuses to answer questions on mysterious FBI raid on his penthouse that brought his storied career to an abrupt halt

‘Missing’ ABC producer James Gordon Meek has emerged from hiding – but refuses to discuss the mysterious FBI raid that brought his storied journalism career to an abrupt halt.

Meek, an Emmy winner and celebrated investigative reporter, resigned from the network just hours after heavily-armed agents swooped on his penthouse apartment in Arlington, Virginia in April.

DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal that Meek also ducked out of a glittering award ceremony held one week later where he was due to collect a prize for his coverage of Joe Biden‘s chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Instead, the 53-year-old news veteran contacted stunned organizers at the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to tell them he couldn’t accept.

Meek’s pals say he’s been AWOL for the past six months after he packed his stuff and moved out of his upscale digs at the six-story Siena Park building in the wake of the raid.

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How the Left Became Cheerleaders for US War and Imperialism

One of the biggest problems for the left, as it confronts what seems like humanity’s ever-more precarious relationship with the planet – from the climate emergency to a potential nuclear exchange – is that siren voices keep luring it towards the rocks of political confusion and self-harm.

And one of the loudest sirens on the British left is the environmental activist George Monbiot.

Monbiot has carved out for himself a figurehead role on the mainstream British left because he is the only big-picture thinker allowed a regular platform in the establishment media: in his case, the liberal Guardian newspaper. It is a spot he covets and one that seems to have come with a big price tag: he is allowed to criticize the corporate elite’s capture of British domestic politics – he occasionally concedes that our political life has been stripped of all democratic content – but only, it seems, because he has become ever less willing to extend that same critique to British foreign policy.

As a result, Monbiot holds as a cherished piety what should be two entirely inconsistent positions: that British and Western elites are pillaging the planet for corporate gain, immune to the catastrophe they are wreaking on the environment and oblivious to the lives they are destroying at home and abroad; and that these same elites are fighting good, humanitarian wars to protect the interests of poor and oppressed peoples overseas, from Syria and Libya to Ukraine, peoples who coincidentally just happen to live in areas of geostrategic significance.

Because of the vice-like corporate hold on Britain’s political priorities, Monbiot avers, nothing the corporate media tells us should be believed – except when those priorities relate to protecting people facing down ruthless foreign dictators, from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Then the media should be believed absolutely.

Monbiot’s embrace of the narratives justifying Washington’s “humanitarian” interventions abroad has been incremental. Back in the late 1990s, while generally supporting the aims of NATO’s war on the former Yugoslavia, he called out its bombing of Serbia as a “dirty war”, highlighting the ecological and economic destruction it entailed. He would also sound the alarm – if ambivalently – over the Iraq war in 2003, and later become a leading proponent of jailing former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair as a war criminal for his involvement.

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NBC News Walks Back Report There Was Third Person Inside House During Attack on Paul Pelosi

NBC News walked back a report Sunday that there was a third person in Paul Pelosi’s home during the attack.

“The SFPD also says that there were only TWO people inside the Pelosi home (Paul Pelosi and DePape) when they responded, clarifying statements made at Friday’s press conference which seemed to indicate there was a third person inside the home who opened the door,” wrote NBC investigative correspondent Tom Winter on social media on Sunday afternoon.

Winter reported Sunday morning on Meet the Press that there was a third person inside the home, who opened the door for police.

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott indicated there was a third person during a press conference on Friday evening when he recounted details of what occurred when police arrived on the scene.

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