The state of things…
Tag: mainstream media
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN skip DOJ whistleblower revealing ‘threat tag’ targeting parents at school board meetings
The media have largely ignored the explosive allegation made by a DOJ whistleblower about the counterterrorism targeting of outraged parents that appears to undercut sworn testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland.
On Tuesday, a whistleblower revealed the FBI created a “threat tag” to aid in tracking alleged threats against school board officials, teachers, and staff as part of its implementation of a controversial memo issued by Garland last month.
An Oct. 20 internal email from the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions, released Tuesday by House Republicans, instructed agents to apply the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” to all investigations and assessments of threats directed specifically at education officials.
“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” the email stated.
The email also directs FBI agents to consider whether the criminal activity being investigated is in violation of federal law and what the potential “motivation” is behind it.
The Rittenhouse Verdict Is Only Shocking If You Followed The Last Year Of Terrible Reporting
Kyle Rittenhouse was found innocent on all six felony charges today, already causing a great exploding of heads in the pundit-o-sphere. Unrest wouldn’t be surprising. How could it be otherwise? Colleagues in national media spent over a year telling the country the 18-year-old was not just guilty, but a moral monster whose acquittal would be an in-your-face affirmation of systemic white supremacy.
It used to bother me that journalists were portrayed in pop culture as sniveling, amoral weenies. Take William Atherton’s iconic portrayal in Die Hard of “Thornburg,” the TV-news creep who gasps, “Tell me you got that!” with orgasmic awe when an explosion rocks the Nakatomi building. I got that — I’d seen that face on reporters.
But risking the life of hero John McClane’s wife Holly by putting her name on TV, and getting the info by threatening the family nanny Paulina with an immigration raid? We’re bad, I thought, but not that bad. I got that it was a movie, but my father was a local TV man, and that one stung a bit.
MSNBC Thursday pulled a Thornburg in real life. Police stopped a man named James Morrison who was apparently following a jury bus, and said he was acting at the direction of a New York-based MSNBC producer named Irene Byon. Even if all you’re after is a post-verdict interview, if a jury gets the slightest whiff that the press is searching out their names and addresses, that’s clear intimidation. People will worry about the safety of their spouses and children as they’re deliberating. Not that it matters to anyone but the defense, prosecution, judge, jury, and taxpayers, but you’re also putting the trial at risk. I’ve covered plenty of celebrity trials, from Michael Jackson to the Enron defendants, and know the identifying-jurors practice isn’t unheard of. However, in a powder-keg case like this, it’s bonkers to play it any way but straight.
We’ve seen Die Hard-level indifference to social consequence from the beginning of this case. The context of the Rittenhouse shootings involved a summer of protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake. We saw demonstrations of all types last summer, ranging from solemn candlelight vigils and thousands of protesters laying peacefully on their backs across bridges, to the burning of storefronts and “hundreds” of car thieves stealing “nearly 80” cars from a dealership in San Leandro, California. When the population is on edge, and people are amped and ready to lash out, that puts an even greater onus on media figures to get things right.
In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.
This is separate and apart from the question of whether or not you like Kyle Rittenhouse, or agree with his politics, or if, as a parent, you would want your own teenager carrying an AR-15 into a chaotic protest zone. The huge media error here was of the “Walls are closing in” variety, except the context was far worse. The “Walls are closing in” stupidity raised vague expectations among #Resistance audiences that at some unfixed point in time, Donald Trump would be pushed from office by scandal. In this case, the same people who poured out onto the streets last summer were told over and over that Rittenhouse was guilty, setting the stage for shock and horror if and when the “wrong” verdict came back.
Media figures got every element of this story wrong. As documented by TK contributor Matt Orfalea, the Young Turks alone spat out all sorts of misconceptions with shocking inattention: that Rittenhouse was “shooting randomly at people” after falling down, that he’d fired first, that there was no evidence that anyone had raised a gun at him, among many, many other errors. Belatedly, the show conceded some of these problems. However, they had access to the correct information in most of these cases on the night of the shootings.
Progressives, Democrats erupt over Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal: ‘This is disgusting’
Prominent Democrats, progressives, and left-leaning groups erupted Friday following Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal on all charges in his closely watched trial in Kenosha, Wis., calling it a miscarriage of justice.
The 18-year-old Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all five counts, including the two most serious of intentional homicide, in last year’s shootings during violent unrest in Kenosha. Rittenhouse successfully argued he acted in self-defense when he wounded one man and shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, D., fumed over the verdict.
“Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum are victims. They should be alive today. The only reason they’re not is because a violent, dangerous man chose to take a gun across state lines and start shooting people. To call this a miscarriage of justice is an understatement,” he said.
Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, N.Y., called Rittenhouse a “murderer” whose “white tears” prevented justice, calling “our system is terribly broken.” Rittenhouse was widely mocked on the left when he cried on the stand while testifying about the shootings last week.
Left-wing MSNBC contributor and former Obama aide Ben Rhodes weighed in, calling it a “very dark message” to other “heavily armed would-be vigilantes.” Rittenhouse was repeatedly called a vigilante and even a murderer by left-leaning pundits in the volatile coverage of the emotional case.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee staffer Dyjuan Tatro tweeted, “No justice, no peace,” and added that the “American legal system is rooted in racism and functions to uphold white supremacy.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin criticized the verdict as well, and a “heartbroken” Democratic Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., called the verdict “white supremacy in action.”
“Depressing. And pathetic,” said former Biden deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ niece Meena Harris wrote, “I have no words. This is disgusting.”
10 heinous lies about Kyle Rittenhouse debunked
Of all the willful lies and omissions in the media’s coverage of the Steele dossier, Brian Sicknick, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, the Wuhan lab, Hunter Biden’s laptop and so on, nothing beats the evil propaganda peddled about Kyle Rittenhouse.
They try to make the Rittenhouse case about race, but it’s about class, punching down at the white working-class son of a single mother because they don’t see him as fully human, and it makes them feel good.
They lie about him because they can.
The central media narrative is that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist whose mother drove him across state lines with an AR-15 to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. All lies.
“A white, Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving Blue Lives Matter social media partisan, 17 years old, picks up a gun, drives from one state to another with the intent to shoot people,” was typical from John Heilemann, MSNBC’s national affairs analyst.
‘At CNN, We Start With Facts First’: How Media Fact-Checkers Mislead About Facts
While legacy news outlets continue to pride themselves on their reputation as “the most trusted name in news,” they have often fallen short of the facts in the one department most pivotal to maintaining journalistic credibility: their fact-checkers.
“Facts are facts. They aren’t colored by emotion or bias. They are indisputable. There is no alternative to a fact,” wrote CNN’s Creative Marketing department. “That’s why, at CNN, we start with the facts first.”
CNN’s purported commitment to truth goes so far that prime time host Don Lemon said that U.S. internet users should only be able to express their opinion if it is “true,” because social media outlets should only print “opinions based in fact.”
The use of “fact-checking” to silence others long ago escaped CNN and metastasized throughout all media, traditional and online.
As Mark Hemingway recently wrote in a Reader’s Pass article for The Daily Wire, the great social media purge of all things conservative began with its decision to ban Infowars founder Alex Jones. Jones’ ouster “came shortly after a pressure campaign launched by CNN, a network that, ironically enough, had spent the last few years indulging in nonstop Trump-Russia reporting that wasn’t any less conspiratorial than many of Jones’ rantings,” Hemingway writes.
Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles
On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.
This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”
This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.
What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.
Australian War Propaganda Keeps Getting Crazier
60 Minutes Australia has churned out yet another fearmongering war propaganda piece on China, this one so ham-fisted in its call to beef up military spending that it goes so far as to run a brazen advertisement for an actual Australian weapons manufacturer disguised as news reporting.
This round of psychological conformity-making features Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan saying that in three to ten years a war will be fought against China over Taiwan and that Australians are going to have to fight in that war to prevent a future Chinese invasion of the land down under. He argues Australia will need to greatly increase its military spending in order to accomplish this, because it can’t be certain the United States will protect it from Chinese aggression.
“Australia is monstrously vulnerable at the moment; we have this naive faith that American military power is infinite, and it’s not,” says Molan, who is a contributor to government/arms industry-funded think tanks Lowy Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Glenn Greenwald torches ‘amoral sociopath’ Adam Schiff for remaining defiant after hyping Steele dossier
Greenwald, who has long been skeptical of the Russian collusion narrative and outspoken of the media’s uncritical coverage, torched the top Democratic lawmaker for his defiant stance.
“Look at what an amoral sociopath Adam Schiff is,” Greenwald reacted. “He spent years promoting the Steele Dossier. He read it into the Congressional Record. He lied about the ‘smoking gun’ evidence he saw (that Mueller never found). Watch how he worms his way around to avoid even an iota of mea culpa.”
He added, “Notable that Adam Schiff — who appears on every CNN, MSNBC and Sunday morning network news program as often as possible — just had his first truly adversarial questioning about his pathological Russiagate lies not on any of those networks but from Morgan Ortagus on the View.”
Thomas Sowell on the media…
Hellbound and Down 
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