Tag: mainstream media

Former WaPo ‘Fact-Checker’ Admits He ‘Screwed Up’ by Dismissing Lab Leak Theory 5 Years Later

Former Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler admitted Thursday that he was “completely wrong” to label the COVID lab leak theory as “doubtful” in 2020, conveniently coming clean five years later after recently leaving the publication.

During an interview with The Editors, Kessler’s 2020 Washington Post fact-check article entitled, “Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful,” was discussed.

“I screwed up… I was completely wrong,” Kessler told editor Ira Stoll. He expressed “infinite regret” and tried to brush it off by saying, “Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect.”

The problem is that when Kessler wrote this headline, the country was tearing itself apart with fear.

As President Donald Trump was rightfully blaming China for the Wuhan lab leak, others in the media were dismissing the president, while sowing doubt and blaming it on transmissions from bats to humans.

The nation lost valuable time by arguing over the origin of the virus, and it hobbled Trump’s ability to lead.

This allowed China to shirk its responsibility a bit longer and delayed Trump’s ability to place the blame where it rightfully belonged. It also took the focus off Dr. Anthony Fauci’s involvement.

That amounts to a huge mistake. It could even be argued it was done on purpose to sabotage Trump and avoid aggression toward Chinese interests. This isn’t something that can simply be apologized away.

Yet Kessler continued his contrition speech all the same.

“When you’ve got a title like ‘the fact checker,’ when you make a mistake, people notice,” he said. “So, you know, you’ve got to own it.”

He even had the gall to say his entire body of work outweighed the error, despite being previously accused of running a “propaganda mill” by the New York Post editorial board.

“I wrote or edited 3,000 fact-checks. Yes, there might be a dozen bad apples there,” Kessler added. “It’s easy and kind of facile to pick at a particular piece and say that defines a person.”

But we’re not talking about a mistake that can be fixed with an editor’s note, or a spelling error that can be tweaked with the click of a button.

This headline drove a narrative that resulted in real life consequences. It helped contribute to mass censorship against any dissenters.

The media drove the narrative on how America should tackle the virus, and what policies would work best, especially in the early weeks and months of the outbreak.

“One of the reporters on the piece came up to me the next day and said, ‘I think you made a real mistake by putting ‘it’s doubtful,’” Kessler confessed. “‘Because I’m uncertain where it stands, and you framed it in a way that made it seem more definitive than what we came up with.’”

He added, “That’s on me. I screwed up. She recently left The Washington Post to go to another place. In my goodbye remarks, I mentioned, this explains why you should always listen to Sarah, because she’s right, and I was completely wrong about this.”

He was referring to Sarah Cahlan, who co-authored the piece.

He admitted that he ignored advice from one of the reporters who wrote the article. And the headline still hasn’t been changed! One year later, a note was added to the 2020 article that still didn’t confirm COVID came from a lab.

Part of the note read, “A year later, the source of the coronavirus is still unknown. But in recent months new evidence has tipped the lab leak theory onto firmer ground.”

Why wasn’t Kessler suspended or punished for such a glaring error? Quite the opposite happened when Kessler was allowed to stay on, and took a buyout less than three weeks ago after working there for almost 30 years, according to the New York Post.

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Trump Said It: “There’s No Better Word Than Stupid.”

For anyone who still thinks Donald Trump does not represent the interests of what is called “the deep state” but is actually the shallow or official US state, it is time to think again. If he is not a figurehead for those alleged hidden forces, then he will agree to a Russia-Ukraine settlement on Russia’s fundamental terms – that is, a mutual security agreement that stipulates the pulling back of US/NATO forces encircling Russia, etc. – when he meets with Putin in Alaska today.

There will be no further delay.

This, however, is extremely unlikely. Trump knows little but bullying and the use of the English language as a hammer. “I’m very highly educated,” he has said, without a scintilla of irony, “I know words, I know the best words. But there’s no better word than stupid.”

On the latter assertion he is right: there is no better word than stupid when it’s applied correctly.

During his campaign for the presidency, Trump used words more than fifty times to say that he would end the war in Ukraine “within twenty-four hours” of assuming the presidency. He could have accomplished this on day one by issuing an executive order (beside all he did issue), stopping all military aide to Ukraine, but he didn’t. Seven months of game-playing have elapsed and the war goes on with Trump’s backing laced with doubletalk about how he is seeking peace in Ukraine, is a man of peace, is bringing all American troops back home, and of course he gave a grateful ah-shucks when his brother-in-genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu, showed him a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

He fully supports the destabilization of Russia, overtly or covertly, as have his predecessors, and this in incompatible with any deal Russia can agree to when he meets with Putin in Alaska.

This past weekend, and starting up again late Tuesday in the more conservative corporate media, August 12th as I write, CNN, The NY Times, and the Washington Post, three prominent establishment media (organs of propaganda) published their usual reminders to all presidents that they are watching:

CNN: “Trump-Putin summit in Alaska resembles a slow defeat for Ukraine”

The New Tork Times: “After Almost Losing Trump, Putin Gets His Ideal Summit”

Max Boot op ed, the Washington Post: “Putin is setting up Trump for another Munich”

For these media know that the Russians are coming still, as they have been for nearly a century, so don’t swim too far out into the Atlantic or Pacific, for they are waiting with Jaws to seize you. They are red and ravenous and have huge teeth.

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Hateful anti-white posts of woke writer for prestigious Conde Nast magazine

A staff writer for The New Yorker has sparked backlash over a slew of shocking anti-white tweets. 

Doreen St. Felix, a journalist who has also written for Vogue and Time Magazine, swiftly deleted her social media after X users brought up her tweets about how ‘whiteness fills me with a lot of hate.’ 

In other tweets, she wrote that ‘whiteness must be abolished’, that she ‘would be heartbroken if I had kids with a white guy’ and that white people’s lack of hygiene once started a plague. 

‘I hate white men,’ the 33 year-old Haitian-American writer said in yet another post, which was first highlighted by conservative journalist Chris Rufo. 

‘You all are the worst. Go nurse your f***ing Oedipal complexes and leave the earth to the browns and the women.’ 

St. Felix found her corrosive missives in the spotlight after writing for the Conde Nast-owned magazine about the controversy surrounding actress Sydney Sweeney‘s American Eagle jeans campaign. 

The article slammed Sweeney’s fans for ‘wanting to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess’, and said there were plenty of reasons’ not to like the actress’s advert. 

Social media users flooded the New Yorker’s X post on the article with St Felix’s tweets, with one responding: ‘She doesn’t seem very neutral…’ 

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Misinformation Scholarship Exposed As Liberal Activist Grift

A funny thing happened when the NY Times reported a month back that Elon Musk’s exit from DC politics had been facilitated by a group of activists targeting his electric car company after he abandoned Democrats, helped fund Trump’s election, and then ran DOGE.

In short, Musk supports zero Democratic Party politicians and none of their priorities.

Enter Democratic activists who protested against the company run by the party’s main boogey man—protests that sometimes veered into violence and started at the impetus of sociology professor Joan Donovan.

The problem with Times story is what the Times journalist doesn’t tell us, namely the function professor Joan Donovan has served at the New York Times and other legacy news. Labeling Donovan a “sociology professor at Boston University,” skips over this purported academic’s role as a central character in the Time’s fake narrative that America is awash in “disinformation” that can only be fixed by legacy media and professors, like Joan Donovan—a misinformation authority who allegedly publishes objective scholarship with neutral, verified facts and reliable truths.

“Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns,” explains one news site. “She conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.”

In reality, the entire arena of disinformation studies has been exposed as a jobs program for liberal activists who dress up in academic garb, to provide quotes to the Times when they run articles claiming anything not published in the New York Times might be disinformation.

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NPR’s Langfitt: Some D.C. Residents Told Me They Stopped Reporting Crime Because Much of It’s ‘Unpunished’

On Wednesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” NPR National Correspondent Frank Langfitt stated that in the Congress Heights area of D.C. some of the people he spoke to told him “crime is worse than the statistics show,” because some “have given up reporting to police because they feel a lot of crimes go unpunished.”

Langfitt stated that in the U Street area, people he spoke to “said crime didn’t seem that bad to them.”

Langfitt further stated that after talking to people in the U Street area, “I went across the Anacostia River to Congress Heights. This is among the poorest areas of the city, vast majority of the population is black. And, also, the D.C. Police say this is part of an area with among the highest crime — violent crime rates in the city. But unlike U Street, people in Congress Heights said crime is a really big problem there, shootings, robbery, burglaries. In fact, some say crime is worse than the statistics show, because, many say, have given up reporting to police because they feel a lot of crimes go unpunished.”

He added that “there was a general sense that any greater armed presence would be a good thing” but people in Congress Heights were skeptical that any federal agents would be in their neighborhood because many there view the dispatching of federal agents as just about style, and people said that it would be better to increase federal funding to hire more police.

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MSM Forced to Report That Ukrainian Forces Face Dire Lack of Manpower, as Millions of Citizens Will Not Fight for the Kiev Regime

As we await US-Russia Alaska summit tomorrow (15), the MSM continues their painful process of recognizing the realities on the ground in the battlefields of Ukraine.

One of the most difficult realities to face is the realization that literally millions of Ukrainian citizens will not fight for their country and hide from the conscription officers.

More than half a million Ukrainian men of military age have fled the country, while many others are still in hiding.

Add to that the desertion epidemic plaguing the Ukrainian forces, with hundreds of deserters abandoning their positions at the front every single day.

Russian forces have breached Ukrainian defenses near Dobropillia and advanced nine miles into territory around the city of Pokrovsk.

Ukraine deployed Azov brigade troops to face the attackers, but the situation remains ‘chaotic’.

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Meet the Leakers! Russiagate Was More Incestuous Than You Could Believe

Many years ago, Bill Whittle gave me the sharpest definition you might ever read for the proper role of journalism in a healthy republic: “They’re the antibodies of the body politic.” But we do not live in a healthy republic — and journalists too often are part of the cancer we’re trying to eliminate. 

Case in point: So-called journalists who, instead of investigating Russiagate claims, performed as marionettes for the Obama-era intelligence community, determined to rig and then undo a presidential election.

And now we have at least two names.

I’ll get to those in just a moment, but first, this important reminder.

At the center of the Obama White House’s fabricated Russia collusion narrative is Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — currently under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland for mortgage fraud.

The first name is Ellen Nakashima, whom RealClearInvestigations senior reporter Paul Sperry dryly calls “the Washington Post’s handmaiden for the deep state.” Her most recent appearance, Sperry reported on Tuesday, isn’t under her WaPo byline, but in “FBI 302s as the likely key recipient of classified intelligence leaks from Adam Schiff regarding Russiagate.”

Sperry previously reported in July that “Declassified docs show Obama’s spooks used Washington Post stenographer Ellen Nakashima to plant 3 major Russiagate stories,” so the idea that Nakashima was also on Schiff’s speed dial is hardly outrageous.

“It has come to my attention that Washington Post reporter @nakashimae appears to be actively harassing ODNI staff,” administration intel chief Tulsi Gabbard posted on X last month. “Instead of reaching out to my press office, she is calling high-level Intelligence Officers from a burner phone, refusing to identify herself, lying about the fact that she works for the Washington Post, and then demanding they share sensitive information.”

Nakashima also helped bury the Hunter Biden Laptop from Hell story.

Another name is New York Times investigative reporter Michael Schmidt.

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Media as Weapon: Western Propaganda Machine’s Complicity in Chuguyev False Flag Plot

The same mainstream outlets that proved “instrumental in perpetuating the Russiagate narrative” have “demonstrated a clear opposition to any meaningful rapprochement with Russia,” with their deployment to cover a planned provocation in Chuguyev to sabotage the Putin-Trump summit a reminder of their deleterious role, says analyst Adriel Kasonta.

“Given this pattern, it would not be surprising to witness a provocation reminiscent of the Bucha incident, which could be swiftly reported by outlets aligned with the Zelensky government,” Kasonta, a former chairman of the Bow Group’s International Affairs Committee, said, commenting on Zelensky’s desperate resistance to ending the conflict.

A Bucha-like incident in Chuguyev involving the false flag targeting of a hospital or residential neighborhood “would serve to postpone what many see as an inevitable resolution: lasting peace in Ukraine and an end to hostilities between two nations with deep historical and cultural ties,” the analyst said.

Ultimately, Kasonta hopes that the “political and media actors” ready to commit such provocations are “remembered as the primary impediments to a conflict that should arguably have been avoided from the outset, had more authentic and courageous leadership been present in Europe. The need for genuine diplomacy and meaningful dialogue has never been more critical for navigating this crisis and restoring stability to the region.”

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Disgraced news anchor admitted to COVID fraud scheme in text to hubby: ‘We don’t quite qualify’

A former Emmy-nominated TV news anchor convicted in a billion-dollar COVID fraud scheme sent a scandalous text to her partner in crime that joked about cheating the taxpayers.

Stephanie Hockridge-Reis, who worked for a local station in Phoenix before becoming a fintech entrepreneur, sent the message to her husband, Nathan Reis, after applying for Payment Protection Program (PPP) loans during the height of the pandemic.

“This is us trying to apply for free money — when we don’t quite qualify. lol,” she texted Reis, 47, according to a federal indictment obtained by the Arizona Republic.

The couple was accused of fraudulently obtaining over $300,000 in PPP loans for themselves, including one application that falsely claimed he was a veteran and an African American.

Reis took a plea deal on Monday and will be sentenced in November.

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Declassified Memos Reveal Comey’s Secret Media Mole Leaked Classified Information to The New York Times to Push For Special Counsel to Investigate Trump in Russia Hoax

Newly declassified memos reveal James Comey’s secret media mole Daniel Richman leaked classified information to The New York Times’s Michael Schmidt to help push for a special counsel in May 2017.

It was previously reported that James Comey penned nine memos stemming from his conversations with President Trump – and then leaked them through his Columbia University law professor ‘friend’ Daniel Richman.

Comey told the Senate Intel Committee in a June 2017 testimony that he asked a ‘friend’ of his to leak contents from memos he kept regarding his conversation with President Trump to the New York Times.

Comey admitted this after Senator Susan Collins asked him why he kept the memos. She then asked if he ever shared any of them outside the DOJ.

Daniel Richman confirmed to the Washington Examiner that he was Comey’s friend at Columbia. He has been referred to in the New York Times as a “longtime confidant and friend of Mr. Comey’s,” and his bio at Columbia’s website lists him as an “adviser to FBI Director James B. Comey.”

Not once did he ever disclose Daniel Richman was one of his personal lawyers or an unpaid employee of the FBI until right before his testimony.

In newly declassified memos, it was revealed that Comey shared classified information with Daniel Richman.

Richman told agents conducting the FBI’s “Arctic Haze” investigation that some of the classified information was all the way up to the SCI level [Sensitive Compartmented Information].

According to Just The News, the Arctic Haze investigation focused on four articles stemming from Richman’s leaks.

“The first was a New York Times article by four reporters — Schmidt, Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Eric Lichtblau — from late April 2017 titled “Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. from Politics. Then He Shaped an Election.” The second was a Washington Post story by Ellen Nakashima from early April 2017 titled “New details emerge about 2014 Russian hack of the State Department: It was ‘hand to hand combat’.”” Just The News reported.

“The third was another Washington Post piece by Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett from late May 2017 titled, “How a Dubious Russian Document Influenced the FBI’s Handling of the Clinton Probe.” The fourth was a Wall Street Journal article by Holman Jenkins Jr. from late May 2017 titled, “The Trump-Russia Story Starts Making Sense.”” Just The News reported.

The leaks ultimately worked. On May 17, 2017, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to serve as Special Counsel to investigate the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

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