Tag: mainstream media

A Weird, Stupid Dystopia

The last few days in the United States have seen a parade of wealthy freaks fellating each other’s egos and preening for the cameras in outlandish garb while ordinary Americans suffer more and more.

The weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner saw a gaggle of media celebrities congregate to congratulate one another on what a great job they’ve been doing bravely telling the truth and holding the most powerful government on earth to account. The host, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, gushed with enthusiasm about how much freedom the press have in America to say things the powerful don’t like.

“As we sit in this room tonight, people, I really hope you all remember what the real purpose of this evening is,” Noah said. “Yes, it’s fun. Yes, we dress nice. Yes, the people eat, they drink, we have fun. But the reason we’re here is to honor and celebrate the fourth estates and what you stand for — what you stand for — an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one.”

“And if you ever begin to doubt your responsibilities, if you ever begin to doubt how meaningful it is, look no further than what’s happening in Ukraine,” said Noah. “Look at what’s happening there. Journalists are risking and even losing their lives to show the world what’s really happening. You realize how amazing it is. In America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth even if it makes people in power uncomfortable, even if it makes your viewers or your readers uncomfortable. You understand how amazing that is? I stood here tonight and I made fun of the president of the United States, and I’m going to be fine. I am going to be fine, right? Do you really understand what a blessing it is?”

Of course there are people who’ve said things that US presidents don’t like who are not in fact fine. Julian Assange continues to waste away in Belmarsh Prison as the US government continues its efforts to extradite him to he can become the first publisher ever tried under the Espionage Act. Edward Snowden, an American, remains in exile because one US president after another continues to refuse to pardon his heroic whistleblowing about the sinister surveillance practices of the US intelligence cartel. Daniel Hale, also an American, sits in prison for exposing the depravity of America’s monstrous drone program.

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Panicked CNN Guest Wonders “How We’re Going To Control The Channels Of Communications In This Country”

A CNN talking head declared Sunday that if Elon Musk is allowed to buy Twitter, the platform will have to be government regulated to prevent ‘discourse’ being open and free, and not subject to establishment controlled censorship.

While discussing the Musk take-over on CNN’s potato time with Brain Stelter, “media analyst” David Zurawik proclaimed that Musk is “dangerous” and shouldn’t be allowed to restore free speech on the platform.

Zurawik suggested that the U.S. look to Europe, which has recently brought in new laws to limit social media, and even threatened to ban Twitter if Musk doesn’t play ball.

“There’s a bigger problem here about how we’re going to control the channels of communications in this country,” Zurawik frothed, panicking at the notion of the likes of CNN not being able to dictate what Americans think.

“This is dangerous! We can’t think anymore in this country!” Zurawik whined, adding “I’m serious! We don’t have people in Congress who can make regulations, that can make it work.”

“I think we can look to the Western countries in Europe for how they are trying to limit it. But you need controls on this,” the talking slap head continued.

“You need regulation. You cannot let these guys control discourse in this country or we are headed to hell,” Zurawik further suggested.

“We are there,” he added, further claiming that “Trump opened the gates of hell and now they’re chasing us down.”

“We gave over what amounts to our airwaves or our internet waves to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and we are in so much trouble because those guys believe in making money,” he said.

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Video Appears to Show Local NBC Anchor Get Busted in Underage-Sex Sting – Station Issues Statement

A group that hunts sexual predators in New York state posted a video on Friday that it says shows a local TV anchorman trying to meet up with an underage boy to have sex with him.

Although not fully identified in the video posted to YouTube by the 607 Predator Hunters, the man looks very similar to Zach Wheeler of NBC affiliate WETM-TV in Elmira, New York, and is addressed as “Zach.” At one point he offers to do a TV spot on the group — “607” is an area code in the Elmira area.

On its Facebook page, the 607 Predator Hunters say its mission is “exposing child predators, protecting our communities.” Members of the group pose as minors online in an effort to entrap predators.

WETM posted a statement on the video on its Facebook page.

“WETM has been made aware of a video posted to YouTube regarding one of our employees. The local group that posted the video claims that the employee engaged in inappropriate behavior. WETM management is looking into the questions raised by the video, and the employee will remain off the air until the situation is resolved. No charges have been filed in connection with the video.”

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Time writer knocks free speech as an ‘obsession of the mostly white, male members of the tech elite’ like Musk

In a Friday piece for Time magazine, the outlet’s national correspondent Charlotte Alter dismissed Elon Musk’s quest for free speech on Twitter as a white male “obsession,” and merely an entrepreneurial way to acquire influence and power in the world.

She also claimed that Musk’s idea of free speech is about the right to spread “disinformation” and has nothing to do with the Founding Fathers’ original intent.

Alter began her piece by insinuating that Musk should have put his $44 billion into something more worthwhile than what he sees as “free speech,” a phrase she put in scare quotes throughout the piece.

She wrote, “They say that something is worth what someone will pay for it. If that’s true, then protecting ‘free speech,’ which Elon Musk has cited as a central reason he agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion this week, may be worth twice as much as solving America’s homelessness problem, and seven times as much as solving world hunger.”

She added, “It’s worth more (to him, at least) than educating every child in nearly 50 countries, more than the GDP of Serbia, Jordan, or Paraguay.”

The author then proceeded to wonder why a rich techie like Musk would even care about freedom of speech and how it “had become paramount concern of the techno-moral universe.”

She asked, “Why does Musk care so much about this? Why would a guy who has pushed the boundaries of electric-vehicle manufacturing and plumbed the limits of commercial space flight care about who can say what on Twitter?”

She then cited professor of communication at Stanford University Fred Turner for the answer, who agreed, “It does seem to be a dominant obsession with the most elite.” He stated, “[F]ree speech seems to be much more of an obsession among men,” and part of “the entrepreneurial push: I did it in business, I did it in space, and now I’m going to do it in the world.“

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How the White House Correspondents Dinner Broke the Democratic Party

When I was a political reporter in Washington, I used to loathe the White House Correspondents Dinner. I hated how it portrayed Beltway journalism as a game. How it reduced the project of government accountability to performative antagonism practiced daily by reporters in White House press briefings — a performance exposed annually at a dinner where the most powerful people in the world would rub elbows and yuck it up about funny “inside jokes” like George W. Bush’s bungling of the Iraq War and the media’s culpability in helping him do it.

Maybe because I was a reporter at the time, I always considered the dinner’s rottenness from the perspective of the relationship between the media and politicians, lamenting that images from the Washington Hilton of the press mingling with administration officials in black tie undercut the public’s faith in an independent media.

But the further away I’ve gotten from the experience — and the faster our republic has tumbled toward oblivion — the more I’ve considered how the dinner contributed in other, significant ways to the brokenness of our current political moment: The dinner highlights the laughable disconnect between the people in Washington with the power to do something (the dinner attendees) and the rest of us mere mortals (people largely not watching the dinner at home on C-SPAN).

The presidency of Barack Obama transformed the Democratic Party in ways many pundits already have explored ad nauseum, from a revolution in data analytics to Obama’s creation of an entire political infrastructure outside of the Democratic National Committee. Yet, the White House Correspondents Dinner, now that it’s back from its hiatus in the two years we acknowledged the ongoing pandemic as real, is also a reminder of perhaps Obama’s worst contribution to modern politics: the marriage between actual Hollywood and the “Hollywood for ugly people” known as Washington.

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It’s Time We Get Answers About the FBI’s Involvement In the OKC Bombing

This past week marked the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As the worst terrorist act committed on U.S. soil at the time, we all know the reported facts of the horrific event well: a 27-year-old Desert Storm-vet, Timothy McVeigh, acting with minimal help from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, detonated a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb from a parked Ryder truck outside the federal Alfred P. Murrah building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.

Two years later, in 1997, McVeigh was convicted of “Using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” among other federal charges. For a time, he was held on the same cell block as the Unabomber and WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef (who tried to convert him to Islam), before being put to death by lethal injection in 2001.

There is much we still don’t know about the case, however. Thanks to years of heroic work by people like Salt Lake City-based attorney Jesse Trentadue, writer and researcher J.M. Berger, and independent investigative reporter Wendy S. Painting, the American public is slowly learning more and more key (and disturbing) facts about the case. Facts involving the FBI’s possible incitement of McVeigh and the subsequent cover-up of these facts by Newsweek magazine.

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If Ghislaine Maxwell Got the Same Coverage as Johnny Depp, Epstein’s Clients Would Be in Jail Already

One of the primary elements of social manipulation and control is the establishment’s ability to distract. The public’s attention is like the needle on a compass only instead of pointing north, the needle chases the hidden magnet wielded by the political and economic elites.

As pointed out in the reportedly top secret manual said to be found by accident in 1986, titled Silent Weapons for Quiet War, this elite power structure floods the populace with irrelevant and insignificant information to prevent interest in essential knowledge — information that can actually affect their lives for the better.

“Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals.”

Perfectly illustrating the sentiment in this manual is the establishment media’s infatuation with celebrity. People who are paid to lie for a living — otherwise known as actors and actresses — are intermingled into the state apparatus and the celebrity status used to influence the population. This is why the White House began bringing in TikTok influencers to convince you to take the jab.

Another tactic is when the corporate media obsesses over details of the private lives of celebrities and constantly bombards the masses with this vacuous, mundane, and entirely irrelevant pig slop.

Case in point: Johnny Depp’s trial coverage.

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