Tag: mainstream media

Media Mistakes in the Biden Era: the Definitive List

1. Friday, Jan. 8, 2021

The New York Times reporters Marc Santora, Megan Specia and Mike Baker report Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by “pro-Trump supporters” who “overpowered” him and “struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

But other reports the same day referenced Sicknick dying from a stroke.

The Times waited until mid-February to issue a correction, but still claimed– citing no evidence and no autopsy report– that Sicknick had died “from injuries in pro-Trump rampage.”

There was no explanation as to who fabricated the fire extinguisher story.

2. Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021

The Washington Post‘s Amy Gardner, AP, CNBC, Rolling Stone, and others falsely report that President Trump pressed a lead Georgia elections investigator to “find the fraud,” and told the investigator it would make them a national hero.

However, the actual recording of the call later made public revealed that Trump did not say either of those things.

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Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves

The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more than double The Washington Post. Only The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation numbers.

On Sunday, the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent article complaining that “defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies.” It provided a road map for snitching on how these private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S. Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in “a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to another” in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous defense.

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In other words, the only purpose of the article — headlined: “Insurrection fundraiser: Capitol riot extremists, Trump supporters raise money for lawyer bills online” — was to pressure and shame tech companies to do more to block these criminal defendants from being able to raise funds for their legal fees, and to tattle to tech companies by showing them what techniques these indigent defendants are using to raise money online.

The Fact That Americans Think Biden Has Changed Things Shows How Narrative Rules Our World

Nothing of significance has changed since Trump left office, apart from the narratives about how much things have changed.

The wars are still going. Washington is still the hub of an oligarchic globe-spanning empire. Americans are still being impoverished and propagandized into political impotence by an unfathomably wealthy plutocracy. Sanctions are still squeezing people to death in Venezuela, Syria, Iran and North Korea. The world’s worst mass atrocity is still continuing in Yemen. The kids are still in cages. Authoritarian creep continues to metastasize. All the old abuses roll on completely uninterrupted, along the same trajectories they were on before.

If you were to take the entire US-centralized power structure and assess its overall behavior as a whole, you would find that the actual behavioral changes amount to the tiniest fraction of a single percentile of the total. If you’d just been analyzing the raw data without looking at the news stories, you’d see that the money, troops, weapons and resources have continued to move in more or less the same ways after January 20th as they were moving before.

What has changed is the narratives, the stories that Americans are being fed by those who are responsible for controlling the way people think, act, organize, and vote. If you are a Democrat, you have been hearing that the country is now a thousand percent better without the Orange Menace in charge. If you are a Republican, you’ve been hearing that it’s a thousand percent worse. In reality, in terms of the overall operation of the empire both domestically and internationally, hardly anything of significance has changed apart from the narrative overlay.

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The media’s false narrative about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally being a COVID-19 superspreader event

One of the largest motorcycle rallies in the world was still held in Sturgis, South Dakota, during the COVID-19 pandemic last summer, which the media claimed led to more than 266,000 COVID-19 cases, or nearly one in five of every case reported in America at the time. 

The number of cases came from a study by San Diego State University professors published in September, just a month following the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. 

However, the Sturgis city manager, Daniel Ainslie, said the study and other models that predicted their hospitals would be overwhelmed were wrong. 

“I think at the peak during the rally, and even after the rally, about five percent of the [hospital] beds were used for COVID,” Ainslie told Sharyl Attkisson on her show, Full Measure After Hours.

The media linked anywhere from one to about five fatalities to Sturgis, but Ainslie said none were scientifically traced.

“The hard data showed that there were about 260 cases that came from here,” Ainslie said. “Now, the reality was there were probably some additional cases beyond those 260 that were immediately traced here, but to try to state that there were a quarter million, that’s just ridiculous, and it was fanciful, and it was just pushing their narrative.”

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed the San Diego State University study.

“Results from this study should be interpreted cautiously,” analysts write, adding that “the associated data analyses used to obtain nationwide estimates were relatively weak.”

Last year, 460,000 bikers attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, but that was fewer than usual. Although, Ainslie said, the media used footage from previous years to make it look busier than it actually was. 

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AP’s Orwellian push to change the news

President Biden’s Homeland Security secretary says migrant apprehensions are hitting a 20-year high, and record numbers of unaccompanied minors are already in federal custody — but the Associated Press is ordering its reporters to ignore reality and not call it a “crisis.”

In an internal memo from “the Standards Center,” the AP told staff, “The current event in the news — a sharp increase in the arrival of unaccompanied minors — is a problem for border officials, a political challenge for Biden and a dire situation for many migrants who make the journey, but it does not fit the classic dictionary definition of a crisis.”

A “crisis,” it explained, might be a “decisive or crucial time” or “a time of, or a state of affairs involving, great danger or trouble, often one which threatens to result in unpleasant consequences.”

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