Tag: media

What? AP Claims ‘White Colonists’ Known For ‘Scalping’ Native Americans

In a bizarre article claiming American conservatives are weaponizing plagiarism against colleges, The Associated Press also randomly re-wrote history by falsely claiming white colonists took up the practice of scalping Native Americans.

First, the Community Notes feature of 𝕏 pointed out Harvard President Claudine Gay was ousted from her position because she DID commit plagiarism and that doing so violated the university’s rules.

After the entire premise of the article was essentially exposed as fraudulent by Community Notes, many social media users also pointed out the strange remark about scalping.

Discussing conservative activist Christopher Rufo celebrated the ousting of Gay online by writing “scalped,” which is commonly used to express a victory over a political opponent, AP claimed he invoked violence.

The outlet then alleged scalping was “a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans,” before later adding that “some tribes” also scalped their enemies.

AP wrote, “Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote ‘SCALPED,’ as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.”

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Just 3.4 Percent Of American Journalists Identify As Republican

The percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who identify as Republicans has dropped significantly over the last decade, while journalists who said they are Democrats and Independents have increased, a study finds.

According to a survey by Syracuse University titled “The American Journalist Under Attack,” only 3.4 percent of journalists in 2022 identified as Republicans, compared with 36.4 percent of Democrats and 51.7 percent of Independents in the profession.

At the time the survey was concluded in April last year, 28 percent of Americans considered themselves Republicans, 28 percent identified themselves as Democrats, and 42 percent viewed themselves as Independents, according to a Gallup poll.

The survey found that the percentage of Republicans in the journalism industry has declined substantially over the decades.

In its first survey in 1971, 25.7 percent of journalists said they were Republicans. In 1982, the number dropped to 18.8 percent and further declined to 16.4 percent in 1992. It showed a slight increase in 2002 with 18 percent but plummeted to 7.1 percent in 2013 and to 3.4 percent last year.

The trend for journalists identifying as Democrats has remained relatively steady at around 35 percent over the decades. Last year’s figure of 36.4 percent marked the third-highest percentage of journalists identifying as Democrat since 1971, the survey noted.

Notably, the survey showed that 60.1 percent of journalists said journalism in the United States was headed in the wrong direction. In comparison, only 22 percent said it was going in the right direction.

“When asked about the ’most important problem facing journalism today,’ the journalists mentioned these issues most often: Declining public trust in the news media (20.8 percent); shrinking local and community news coverage (12.8 percent); perceived bias and opinion journalism (12.7 percent); fake news (9.9 percent); disrupted business model (9.3 percent).”

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Media Outlets Are Already Calling for Online 2024 Election Censorship

The page has only just been turned on 2023 and already the narrative that much policing of online speech will be vital for 2024, an election year, has already stirred.

The legacy media outlet The Guardian, in its piece about Kate Starbird, has already complained that there may be less censorship ahead of the 2024 elections, and claimed that Rep. Jim Jordan’s committee’s reports on Big Tech-government censorship collusion are based on “outlandish claims.” This is ignoring the fact that an injunction was successfully placed on the Biden administration for its censorship pressure on Big Tech, a case that will be ruled on by The Supreme Court this year.

In an era where the policing of online speech is increasingly contentious, Kate Starbird’s role in combating what she terms election misinformation has placed her squarely in the midst of a heated debate. As a leading figure at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Starbird has actively engaged in documenting what she and her team perceive as misinformation during the 2020 elections, particularly focusing on claims of voter fraud.

However, Starbird’s approach and her team’s actions have not been without controversy. Critics argue that their efforts amount to a form of censorship, infringing upon free speech. This criticism extends beyond Starbird’s team to a broader national trend, where researchers engaged in similar work face accusations of partisanship and censorship, challenging the principles of free expression.

Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, has emerged as a key figure in opposing what he views as the overreach of these researchers. He has focused on investigating groups and individuals involved in counteracting misinformation, especially in the context of elections and Covid-19. Central to the controversy is the practice of working with government entities and flagging content to social media platforms, which some argue leads to undue censorship and violates First Amendment rights.

The debate over the role of anti-misinformation efforts has escalated beyond Congress, evidenced by lawsuits from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and from the state of Texas, along with two rightwing media companies. These legal actions challenge the alleged collaboration between the Biden administration, the Global Engagement Center, and social media companies, showing it as a constitutional breach.

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Congress hunts for illegal UFO programs as the media shrug

Over the last week, a flurry of coverage focused on the historic unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) transparency measures that President Biden will sign into law shortly.

But the reporting ignored or glossed over a stunning development, The most powerful member of the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), suggested publicly that elements of the U.S. government are illegally withholding UAP information from Congress. Schumer, citing “multiple credible sources,” made his extraordinary comments on the Senate floor last week.

Given the decades-long stigma associated with UAP, it seems that only a significant amount of credible evidence would convince normally cautious, risk-averse politicians, let alone a Senate majority leader, to level such a stunning accusation in public.

The underlying allegations, which the mainstream media have studiously and curiously avoided, are shocking.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) joined Schumer and a bipartisan group of four other senators to co-sponsor the UAP Disclosure Act. In a rare colloquy with Schumer on the Senate floor, Rounds doubled down with yet more remarkable commentary, noting that the UAP Disclosure Act originally included “a requirement…for the government to obtain any recovered UAP material or [“non-human“] biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoed Rounds’ extraordinary comments in a July interview. According to Rubio, “We have people that have very high clearances both today and in the past who did really important work for our government, or continue to do important work for the government, who have come forward with some claims about the U.S. having in the past recovered exotic materials, and then reverse-engineered those materials to make advances in our own defenses and technologies.”

In an interview last week, Rounds asked a seemingly rhetorical question: “Was there actually something found at some point in the past that helped us to develop some of our technologies? That remains to be seen, or at least remains to be disclosed.”

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CNN Caught Editing RFK Jr Speech To Mislead Viewers

When he appeared on CNN last week, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confronted with a video from one of his speeches — a video CNN clipped to convey a false impression that he had compared Covid restrictions to conditions in Nazi Germany. 

The dishonest ambush came on Dec. 15 as Kennedy was interviewed by former MSNBC anchor Kasie Hunt. Hunt showed a video of Kennedy speaking at a January 2022 rally in Washington, which includes a passage in which he said…

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.

Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.”  

Hunt had framed the clip to suggest Kennedy was specifically comparing Covid mandates to Hitler’s Germany.

As we’ll soon show, that was false.

In the passage from which the above excerpt was drawn, Kennedy was broadly addressing the rise of technology that threatens to enable a “turnkey totalitarianism” that would wildly surpass the capabilities of Hitler’s Nazi regime.   

To spice things up, Hunt next displayed a tweet from Kennedy’s own wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, which came a few days after the speech. 

At the time, Hines had been repeatedly nagged by NBC News reporter Ben Collins and others on social media asking if she stood by Kennedy’s remarks. She eventually folded and posted a tweet in which she threw her own husband under the bus, embracing the ridiculous, politically-correct notion — propped up by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League — that nobody’s allowed to compare anything to the Holocaust.

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US Media Suppressed Their Government’s Role in Ousting Brazil’s Government

In a new peer-reviewed academic article in Latin American Perspectives (11/19/23), “Anticorruption and Imperialist Blind Spots: The Role of the United States in Brazil’s Long Coup,” Sean T. Mitchell, Rafael Ioris, Kathy Swart, Bryan Pitts and I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the US Department of Justice was a key actor in what we call Brazil’s “long coup.” This was the period from 2014, beginning with the lead up to the illegitimate 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, to the November 2019 release of then-former, now-current President Lula da Silva from political imprisonment.

“For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story,” we wrote; “the second half involves justifying, minimizing or denying US involvement.” The article criticized US scholars on Latin America for ignoring a significant body of evidence of this involvement. It called on Latin Americanists to return to the anti-imperialist tradition that established their field as a leading source of informed criticism of US foreign policy.

In this article, I will make the same call to US journalists who lived in Brazil during this period who remained silent about their government’s role in removing Brazil’s front-running presidential candidate in the 2018 elections, opening the door for the right-wing extremist No. 2 candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.

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Narrative vs. Reality

As the march towards election day 2024 approaches, the narratives that define the election season take shape now. The current battle is over the economic narrative. Journalists and pundits are disturbed that Americans do not realize how things are better today than they were in January of 2021. Why can the plebeians not see the contorted statistical truth? This is part of the failed return to normalcy narrative that was the sales pitch in 2020, but it is one that the managerial class is not a monolith on and this makes the most loyal regime elements upset. This gap between message and reality on the ground is an issue and will be a growing issue as the regime is desperate for legitimacy.

In the complex tapestry of political regimes, the manipulation of economic statistics stands as a formidable tool for those seeking to maintain a facade of stability and control. China’s statistics have been mocked for years as detached from reality or unreliable in an effort to sell to Chinese citizens and potential foreign clients that everything is growing fast. The CCP has delivered to millions, but maybe not as fantastic as they proclaim. We can see the intricate interplay between questionable legitimacy and the strategic concealment of recessions, unraveling the motives behind such actions and their profound implications for both governance and the governed.

At the heart of this deceptive play lies the inherent connection between economic performance and political legitimacy. A regime faced with doubts about its mandate to govern may resort to fabricating economic indicators to project an image of prosperity. By doing so, it seeks to bolster public confidence, portraying itself as a capable steward of the nation’s well-being. At this point in American history with the gulf between the ideology of the governing class and nearly half of its internal subjects, delivering on prosperity is a major support for their continued rule.

One primary motive for such manipulation is the fear of unrest and dissent. A government with questionable legitimacy understands that economic downturns can serve as potent catalysts for public discontent. A recession brings with it rising unemployment, falling incomes, and a general sense of insecurity. By concealing the true extent of economic challenges, the regime attempts to maintain a semblance of normalcy, suppressing the potential for mass protests or calls for political change. Americans know the federal government will jail those who walk around the Capitol during a riot, but could they throw thousands more into jail for basic protests.

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Marc Crispin Miller Exposes The “Rolling Thunder Global Propaganda” Campaign

Dr. Miller says from infection to injection, Covid 19 was a global “propaganda masterpiece.”

Propaganda on this level has never happened before in human history. Dr. Miller explains,

“The media has been crucial to this entire operation, and I would take that a little further. I would say since the beginning of 2020, we have been subjected to a ‘Rolling Thunder of Propaganda’ drives one after another. 

First, there was the (CV19) virus panic.

Then, there was the George Floyd moment. Now, there is a new documentary that shows George Floyd was not actually murdered… It’s called ‘The Fall of Minneapolis.’…

There was the 2020 Election. There was the so-called ‘insurrection.’ That was a wave of crackpot hysteria… because it was not an insurrection…or coup attempt.

Then, there was Ukraine, and the entire back story of Russia’s invasion was completely missing from all the coverage…

This is all the result of the media doing the opposite of what it is supposed to do. The ‘Framers’ (of the Constitution) realized the absolute necessity of having a free press…

This was before the corporate media cartels, which is what we have now… The Framers knew… to offer a counterforce to federal power, we absolutely had to have a free press…

The reason why the press has First Amendment protections is it… tells truths the federal authorities does not want us to know.

To say the press has failed abysmally is actually giving them too much credit.

They have been instrumental throughout this nightmare, whose aim is radical depopulation and destruction of democracy… if you just tell the other side of the story, you are public enemy #1.”

With more than 700 million mRNA CV19 bioweapon injections in the US alone and more than 13 billion CV19 injections globally, the implications of this depopulation agenda is the biggest story ever short of a global thermal nuclear exchange.

This, too, was part of the “Rolling Thunder Global Propaganda” campaign.

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NY Times Targets Pro-Trump Memes, Equates Them with Deepfakes and Advocates for Regulation

It’s that time of the US election cycle again: what were formerly known as “newspapers of record” attempting to, for political reasons, promote odd ideas like regulating jokes.

It’s the New York Times this time, looking like it’s terrified that Donald Trump might be successful in his new presidential bid, and so going guns blazing after what it calls his “troll army.”

And “troll” here means – meme creators. As for the memes themselves, the NYT either pretends not to or doesn’t get the joke – namely, that they are jokes, and basically treats them as sinister tools for peddling misinformation and deepfakes.

To add insult to the paper’s injury, the memes not only support the Trump campaign, but Trump also enjoys them, and takes time to communicate with the meme creators.

The article claims that there is a large number of “sexist and racist tropes” being repeated in these memes, but singles out a video collection of some of President Biden’s many gaffes.

Trump apparently liked the original and used it during his rallies, but the gaffes are truly so many, that he thought a few more could be added to the video, which the creator was happy to do.

This, the NYT treats as a very serious matter, referring to the creator as “effectively” being no less than a member of “a shadow online ad agency” for Trump – even though he does not work for him.

What happened to the right to back a presidential candidate, express it in a humorous way, and not be treated with suspicion and described in over-the-top dramatic tone, such as that these creators with the memes, “brutally denigrate” Biden, and show “unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls” who resort to “vulgar invectives”?

But it’s the suggested “solutions” that are the most bizarre part of the article.

One is the implication that memes should be treated as ads that run on TV and radio, meaning, regulated for “accuracy, fairness and transparency.”

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Viral footage showed protesters chanting ‘gas the Jews’. Nobody can verify it

The original source of videos appearing to show pro-Palestine protesters chanting “gas the Jews” has refused to provide unedited footage as police and independent fact-checkers have been unable to verify whether the chants happened.

On October 9, pro-Palestine protesters gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House as it was lit in blue in solidarity with Israel after the October 7 Hamas attack. At least two men were arrested after allegedly clashing with police at the rally, where some members of the crowd shouted anti-Semitic chants such as “fuck the Jews”, according to multiple reports. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong condemned the protests.

Other videos shared by conservative Jewish group the Australian Jewish Association (AJA) taken during the protest purports to show some attendees also chanting “gas the Jews”. This account is significant as the “gas the Jews” chant is likely to meet the criminal threshold for threatening or inciting violence (unlike the other anti-Semitic slogans that were chanted) and because the viral footage has become totemic of the rising wave of anti-Semitism in Australia and around the world.The Israel-Hamas war confirms the erosion of the right to protest in AustraliaRead More

The morning after the protest, the AJA shared two videos to X, formerly known as Twitter, both consisting of multiple shots of the protest cut together along with captioned audio saying “gas the Jews”. The first is a 25-second video shared with the text “Sydney, 2023 Muslim mob of 100s chant ‘Gas the Jews’ ”. The second is a 59-second video with the description “UNCUT VERSION — SHOCKING ‘Gas The Jews’ on the steps of the Sydney Opera House”, and has been viewed more than 6 million times.

Based on these videos, news outlets around the world published reports of the “gas the Jews” chants, including Reuters (which noted that the video was “unverified”), the New York Post and Fox News. 

In the aftermath of the protest, NSW Police rejected an application for a subsequent pro-Palestine protest. Premier Chris Minns declared that activists would not be allowed to “commandeer our streets” — although future protests were approved and have taken place — and his government introduced legislation to “strengthen” hate speech laws by making it easier to prosecute people who threaten or incite violence against protected groups. 

But despite the enormous amount of attention and considerable response to the reports, third parties have been unable to verify the “gas the Jews” claim, and further footage corroborating the chants has failed to emerge. Crikey has reviewed other footage from the protest captured by other attendees but has been unable to find any corroborating the AJA’s claim.

NSW Police told Crikey that no charges hade been laid relating to the alleged chant more than two months after assistant commissioner Tony Cooke told a press conference it was reviewing footage of the protest.

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