Tag: mainstream media

Meet NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny — The Woman In Charge of Doxxing and Destroying Trump Supporters

Zadrozny was a major contributor to the Verification Handbook, a book for online journalists. Specifically, Zadrozny wrote a guide on how to unethically dox anonymous people online. Zadrozny appears to use paid, dark-data search engines to dox the personal information of anonymous Trump supporters online — obtaining property records, phone information, and even their Amazon wish lists.

Zadrozny is part of a press corps deployed to cover “misinformation, disinformation, and extremism” after the Internet fueled President Donald Trump’s win in 2016. This new journo beat was created to surveil, slander, and censor online voices that counter ruling class narratives.

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The Mainstream Press Is Desperate To Help Joe Biden, Even If It Means A Media Blackout

It’s hard to imagine a media establishment more corrupt and insular than the American political press, which refuses to cover one of the biggest political stories of the 2020 presidential election unfolding just weeks before Election Day. Despite the best efforts of the corporate media and Big Tech, the story of Hunter Biden’s emails keeps getting out there, and with each passing day it gets worse for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Of course, the story is not just about the younger Biden’s emails anymore. It’s about the extent of Joe Biden’s role in what can only be described as a massive foreign corruption scheme worth tens of millions of dollars.

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NPR: We’re Not Covering Biden Laptop Scandal Because It’s ‘Not Really’ A Story, ‘Pure Distractions’

Taxpayer-funded NPR announced Thursday on Twitter that it is not covering the Hunter Biden laptop scandal because it’s not really a story, which prompted widespread backlash online.

“Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story?” NPR wrote on Twitter.

NPR then answered the question, writing: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Almost instantly, the tweet sparked accusations of bias, which comes after one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners said in a statement on Thursday that Hunter Biden allegedly asked his father, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, to “sign-off” on his business deals. The statement contradicts Joe Biden’s public statements that he never spoke to his son about his son’s overseas business dealings.

Top political and media figures responded immediately to the tweet, expressing shock and disgust.

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Don’t Be Fooled By Our Media Wars: Everybody Hates Free Speech

As America’s acid bath of a presidential campaign boils to a merciful close, the political clamor is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from a shouting match about, over, and against the media. Twitter is still blocking the New York Post‘s main account a week after the tabloid’s controversial article on Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption. President Donald Trump has been waging preemptive war against upcoming debate moderator Kristin Welker and 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. Sacha Baron Cohen, in a Borat sequel that ends with a plea for viewers to vote, just tried to honey-pot Rudy Giuliani.

The partisan lopsidedness to this debate, between attempted authoritarian and “enemy of the people,” can give off the misleading impression that the divide over free speech and its applications is a clean philosophical schism, with conservatives on one side, progressives and most journalists on the other. In fact it is not.

The fight over media is more a fight over power, and who gets to wield it, than a fight over principle, and how it should be applied. Trump and Joe Biden both want to roll back the speech protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; the difference is that the president would do it in the name of protecting conservatives and the former vice president would do it in the name of restricting conservative misinformation. Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) agree that Facebook and Twitter are guilty of “election interference”; it just depends on which election. Google faces antitrust enthusiasm from House Democrats and Bill Barr’s Justice Department alike. (This morning, on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, Donald Trump, Jr., asserted that this election would be a referendum on the First Amendment, because only his father could be trusted with following through on his promise to break up Big Tech, because Democrats who talk a big game are actually in bed with their censorious Silicon Valley overlords.)

The more politics (and its worst form, war) subsumes life, the more free speech is treated as a means to an end rather than as a magnificent if always-threatened achievement of the Enlightenment. It is no accident that the bipartisan clampdown on speech in the governmental realm is coinciding in the intellectual realm with a noisy right-left rethink of the Enlightenment itself.

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