Tag: mainstream media

CNN TO AIR REPORT ON IMMACULATE CONCUSSION: THE TRUTH BEHIND HAVANA SYNDROME

In a CNN Special Report Immaculate Concussion: The Truth Behind Havana Syndrome, airing Sunday at 8pmET/PT, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta investigates one of the most complex and controversial health mysteries in recent years known as “Havana Syndrome.”

The special explores a cluster of unexplained health incidents resembling concussion-like injuries, which were first reported by American officials and covert personnel serving in Havana in late 2016. The victims describe suffering from vertigo, headache, brain fog, and in some cases, pain or ringing in the ears without any apparent mechanism of injury. Since 2016, similar incidents have been reported by US government officials around the world.

But what causes the mysterious illness? Dr. David Relman, who co-authored the influential American Academy of Sciences report, concluded that microwave energy is a plausible explanation. This finding takes Gupta’s journey down an eye-opening road into how microwave energy interacts with the brain and what types of directed energy technologies are potentially capable of doing this.

CNN Special Report Immaculate Concussion: The Truth Behind Havana Syndrome will stream live for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com and CNN OTT and mobile apps under “TV Channels,” or CNNgo where available. The doc will also be available On Demand beginning Monday, September 26th, to pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN apps, and Cable Operator Platforms

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US Media Held Murdered Russian Journalist to a Dangerous Standard

After the August 20 car-bomb assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a Russian ultranationalist political philosopher, US media outlets quickly branded the 29-year-old as an agent in Russia’s “disinformation war.” Rather than treating her as a member of the civilian press, they seemed to downplay her death as a casualty of war.

CNN (8/27/22) ran an article to this effect, failing to characterize her murder as an assassination, instead stating Dugina was “on the front lines” of Russia’s war effort, linking her to “Russia’s vast disinformation machine.” NPR (8/24/22) reported that  Dugina was a “Russian propagandist” whose killing signaled the war was coming to Russian elites in their own territory. Foreign Policy (8/26/22) called Dugina a “dead propagandist” whose “martyrdom” did more to achieve her goals in death than she could have hoped for in life.

It is certainly true that during her life, Dugina, who espoused the philosophy of Russian Eurasianism, an expansionist political doctrine veiled as an objective analysis of Russian interests, had very little impact on Western audiences. This is true of most Russian journalists, despite the frequent warnings in US corporate media about the threat posed by Russian media messages. For instance, RT, often considered the foremost Russian outlet in the West, accounted for only 0.04% of Britain’s total viewing audience in 2017 (New Statesman, 2/25/22), and reached about 0.6% of the UK’s online population from February 2021 to the start of 2022—and this was before Western media platforms sharply restricted access to RT and other pro-Moscow outlets in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

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Ex-CIA Ray McGovern: Conditioned For War With Russia

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden — I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the U.S. cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”

The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former national intelligence director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former national intelligence officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” 

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Why has fact-checking disappeared under Biden?

Fact-checking under President Trump was a bustling business. Seemingly every day, and sometimes by the hour, the 45th president’s every word was scrutinized, which all comes with the job. 

But under President Biden, fact checkers are enjoying what feels like extended vacations or have simply checked out in terms of scrutinizing the many ways that he is misleading the public.

Take CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale as a prime example of apathy around holding the current president accountable. 

From June 2019 until November 2020, Dale appeared or was mentioned on CNN more than once per day, on average, according to Mediaite. Estimating conservatively,

that’s more than 500 appearances or mentions on a national network in the span of just 16 months. 

But Dale has become the fact-checker version of Edward Snowden under Biden. He’s almost impossible to find these days. In fact, Dale has not conducted even one fact-check of the president since June.

Of course, Biden supporters will insist that Dale simply doesn’t have any material to work with. But that’s not true. In August, Biden declared that inflation in July was zero, despite the number being near a 40-year high at 8.3 percent. 

Last week, Biden claimed the Inflation Reduction Act, which numerous studies have concluded will do almost nothing to reduce inflation, had already “helped reduce inflation at the kitchen table.” In a related story, food prices rose again in August, with the Consumer Price Index up 10.6 percent year-over-year. 

There are many other examples from the summer, but you get the point: The most powerful man in the country needs to be held accountable for his words and actions, particularly in an election year, when each side is attempting to shape the narrative through the press. But fact-checkers at mainstream outlets refuse to do it.

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CNBC Anchor Proud of Orwellian Nightmare He Created for Gun Owners

As part of his appearance on NBC’s Today show on Friday, CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin bragged that his Orwellian idea to monitor gun owners through their credit card purchases at gun stores was becoming a reality.

Leading into the segment, NBC anchor Craig Melvin touted how “major credit card companies are going to start using a new code to keep track of sales at gun stores” by using what are called “merchant category codes, or MCCs.” Although, he did note that, “when it comes to firearms, critics fear a loss of privacy.”

It wasn’t until the very end of the segment that Sorkin admitted that he was an early proponent of this Orwellian scheme to track those who purchased stuff at gun stores:

And I should say in full disclosure, I wrote columns about this in 2018 after Parkland. I started – as a business correspondent – to thinking about the connection between business and Wall Street and these shootings and how to prevent them. And this was one of the ideas that I present inside a column then, that now, four years later, is being implemented.

Sorkin’s main argument for tracking law-abiding gun owners is some vague “pattern” that banks would be looking out for to spot potential mass shooters.

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Oops: NBC Deletes Tweet Where Martha’s Vineyard Migrants Were Likened to ‘Trash’

Whether you agree with it or not, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to send two planes carrying nearly 50 migrants on Wednesday to Martha’s Vineyard, the tony island playground of the rich off the south shore of Massachusetts, has thrust the issue of illegal immigration into the national spotlight – in a big way.

Needless to say, debate over the move dominated the airwaves, where opinions fell mostly along party lines.

Liberal elites, who support the politicians responsible for our open southern border both at the ballot box and through large political donations, have remained largely insulated from the crisis it has created — until now.

NBC News reported on Friday that DeSantis’ political stunt has divided Venezuelan Americans. The network spoke to advertising executive Max Lefeld, a Venezuelan American and a founding member of the Casa Venezuela Dallas foundation, an organization that provides assistance to asylum-seekers.

“It’s like me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there,” Lefeld said.

NBC used Lefeld’s comparison of asylum seekers to “trash” as the caption on a Twitter post that included the article.

Conservatives were quick to point out how much Lefeld’s comment revealed about the left’s true feelings about migrants.

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NBC News Asks Twitter, TikTok to Censor Videos of John Fetterman Speaking

NBC News falsely claimed that footage of John Fetterman struggling to speak during a recent rally was “doctored” and urged social media companies to censor. Fetterman, who suffered a stroke earlier this year, has struggled with public speaking while recovering, something the senate hopeful has himself admitted to. The outlet flagged videos of Fetterman speaking to Twitter and TikTok, baselessly claiming that they were in violation of their political misinformation policies. TikTok complied and removed the videos.

NBC News took issue with highlight reels of a recent Montgomery County rally in which Fetterman struggled through parts of his speech. The outlet accused one prominent conservative social media account of deceptively editing video of speeches to “create the perception that what he was saying was nonsensical.”

The report accused social media platforms of ignoring their own policies “against political misinformation” in allowing the videos to stay up.

NBC News Deputy Editor of technology Benjamin Goggin wrote, “Deceptively edited videos that have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter and TikTok exaggerate the speech issues that have plagued John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat, after he had a stroke in May.”

Explaining the alleged edits, Goggin claimed they consisted of “cutting out the sound of the audience to make it appear as if he had abruptly stopped speaking (some of the stops occurred when he was pausing during moments of applause and crowd reaction, according to unedited videos seen by NBC News).”

The NBC News reporter singled out popular digital strategist Greg Price, whose supercut of Fetterman’s speech had been 600,000 times when the report was published.

Goggin claimed that the videos violate Twitter and TikTok’s policies “against political misinformation,” and the outlet flagged these videos for the platforms itself. TikTok ultimately removed the videos from its platform.

“So NBC News decided to accuse me of doctoring videos of John Fetterman that I posted. (I didn’t doctor anything),” Price wrote in a tweet. “They also reached out to Twitter to try and get them censored.”

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Crime Claims of CNN’s New Police Expert Don’t Hold Up to Facts

In its latest move to the right, CNN recently hired former NYPD flack John Miller as its “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.” As Josmar Trujillo observed more than five years ago (FAIR.org, 6/21/17), Miller “has spun the revolving door between law enforcement and media like perhaps no one else,” moving back and forth between jobs at the NYPD, FBI, ABC and CBS.

Just last year, while working for the NYPD, Miller falsely testified that there was “no evidence” the department had spied on Muslims in mosques—when, in fact, AP had won a Pulitzer in 2012 for uncovering how after 9/11 the NYPD “systematically spied on Muslim neighborhoods, listened in on sermons, infiltrated colleges and photographed law-abiding residents” (Popular Information, 9/7/22). Shahana Hanif, the Muslim city council member who called out Miller’s lies, told Popular Information:

John Miller had the audacity to lie under oath about the nature of this program to my face…. Someone like John Miller should not be in public service nor should they be given a platform on a mainstream cable news network.

Predictably, within days of joining CNN, Miller offered up a healthy dose of dishonest copaganda to the network’s audience.

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