Tag: media

NBC disinformation reporter is actually a partisan opinion writer

Ben Collins has made a name for himself around the media cool kids table as NBC News’s disinformation reporter. Except that Collins is actually an opinion writer.

His work doesn’t focus on breaking news stories nearly so much as it does on spreading naive disinformation. Collins’s intent appears to rest with scoring cheap Twitter hits and accruing the associated endorphin release gained when his sympathetic colleagues then praise his hot takes. Take what happened on Thursday when the SpaceX Starship rocket lifted off and shortly thereafter exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. This was a result predicted by SpaceX founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk and by engineers on the massive project. Still, Collins couldn’t help but weigh in on his Twitter feed, saying, “The kid gloves we in the press give this man is unbelievable.”

To be sure, Musk isn’t perfect. His commitment to free speech is flexible, for example. But again, Collins’s rhetoric isn’t exactly reporter-style rhetoric. It’s clearly a statement of loaded opinion. Of course, this isn’t the first time Collins has prioritized scoring cheap points against Elon Musk. Indeed, he was reportedly suspended by NBC News for a brief period for his rabid hyperventilating surrounding Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

Just a day prior to Collins’s foray into rocket science, he reacted after Twitter suspended a journalist from Wired for soliciting hacked information pertaining to conservative commentator Matt Walsh. That solicitation was a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. But Collins instead offered his familiar hyper-partisan glibness, tweeting, “Fun fact: This is the very same rule that was used to block distribution of the New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the greatest First Amendment violation in American history.”

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Corporate Media Are the Anti-WikiLeaks

It was impossible to imagine four years ago when WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown in Belmarsh Prison that corporate media, which had smeared Assange, could stoop to new lows of government servitude.

But it has now happened with the arrest of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, for allegedly leaking top secret government documents. The leaks exposed a number of significant lies told by both the U.S. government and corporate media about the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Among many items of interest, the documents revealed that U.S. Special Forces as well as NATO forces are on the ground in Ukraine; that Ukraine is significantly unprepared for its planned spring offensive;  as well as evidence of U.S. spying on its allies and  António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations.

According to Al Jazeera:

“Several purported U.S. intelligence assessments paint a more pessimistic outlook for the Ukrainian military than the U.S. has provided publicly. They suggest Kyiv is heading for only ‘modest territorial gains’ in its much-anticipated spring counteroffensive.”

In other words, the content of these leaks expose lies told directly by the U.S. and NATO, as well as the corporate media that serve them.

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The US Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State

The US State Department’s spokesperson Ned Price is being replaced by a man named Matthew Miller. Like Price, Miller has had extensive prior involvement in both the US government and the mass media; Price is a former CIA officer and Obama administration National Security Council staffer who for years worked as an NBC News analyst, while Miller has previously had roles in both the Obama and Biden administrations and spent years as an analyst for MSNBC.

Like every high-level government spokesperson, Miller’s job will be to spin the nefarious things the US empire does in a positive light and deflect inconvenient questions with weasel-worded non-answers. Which also happens to be essentially the same job as the propagandists in the mainstream media.

In journalism school you are taught that there’s supposed to be a sharp line between government and the press; journalists are meant to hold the government to account, and there’s an obvious conflict of interest there if they’re also friends with government officials or are looking to the government as a potential future employer. But at the highest levels of the world’s most powerful government and the world’s most influential media platforms the line between media and state is effectively nonexistent; people flow seamlessly between roles in the media and roles in the government depending on who’s in office.

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“You just lied” – Elon Musk dismantles BBC reporter over “hate speech” claims, accuses BBC of spreading “misinformation”

In an interview with the BBC at Twitter headquarters on Tuesday night, owner Elon Musk called out the BBC reporter for lying about an increase in hateful content since he took over.

BBC reporter James Clayton asked Musk why there is “so much more hate speech on Twitter” since his takeover. Musk responded by challenging the reporter to provide one instance.

After Clayton hesitated, Musk said, “You said you’ve seen more hateful content but you can’t name a single example. Not even one.”

Clayton responded, “I’m not sure I’ve used that feed for the last three or four weeks, and I…”

“Then how could you see the hateful content?… I’m asking for one example. You can’t give a single one.” Musk interjected. “Then I say sir that you don’t know what you’re talking about … because you can’t give a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. And yet, you claimed that the hateful content was high. That’s false. You just lied!”

Clayton then said there are “many organizations that say that kind of information is on the rise.”

“Give me one example,” Musk insisted.

Musk also referred to a thread by Twitter user @KaneokaTheGreat, which included a video of venture capitalist David Sacks explaining that the left “uses hate speech as a red herring to mask their true intention of exerting political censorship and controlling the narrative.”

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What one tweet can teach us about “Fake News”

At the time I just laughed it off. It’s an absurd little piece of propaganda, but hardly the most egregious.

But, for some reason, it stuck in my head and started bothering me. After 48 hours or so I realized what about it was bothering me, and that it is actually an interesting microcosmic case study on what the era of “fake news” really means.

Everything about this tweet is fake. Everything.

The letter itself is obviously fake. The absurd zenith of the “children being precociously political” meme that became a running joke years ago.

Even if “Charlotte” exists, those aren’t her words, just a rough regurgitation of her parents’ brainwashing. And Charlotte almost certainly doesn’t exist.

There’s no reason to even suppose any physical letter exists at all and it isn’t just a photoshopped CG image. It easily could be.

The tweet itself is also fake – or at least pretend – because there’s no way President Biden operates his own social media accounts. I honestly doubt he’s even mentally capable of doing so. Rather, as Five Times August points out in another tweet, the Whitehouse employs a few “platform managers” and “social media directors”.

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WHY THE MEDIA DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NORD STREAM BLASTS 

No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.

Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.

In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.

Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas. It was an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.

If Washington had been able to pin the explosions on Russia, as it initially hoped, it would have done so with full vigor. There is nothing Western states would like more than to intensify world fury against Moscow, especially in the context of NATO’s express efforts to “weaken” Russia through a proxy war waged in Ukraine.

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Nashville Shooting Has Been Erased From Memory Due To Inconvenient Narrative

Journalist Glenn Greenwald noted Monday that the Nashville shooting, which occurred less than three weeks ago, has already been “erased from memory” because it was perpetrated by a trans individual and represents an “inconvenient narrative”.

Appearing on SiriusXM with Megyn Kelly, Greenwald succinctly noted how Kamala Harris and others within the Biden administration have attempted to sweep the school shooting, in which three children lost their lives, under the rug.

“This Nashville shooting has been erased from memory even though it happened very recently because it’s such an inconvenient narrative given that the shooter was not just someone who was trans but very possibly acted on behalf of this radical ideology,” Greenwald told Kelly.

“And amazingly they won’t show us the manifesto even though we always see the manifesto when they can link it to the right,” greenwald continue, adding “We’ve retained counsel in Nashville to try to obtain that manifesto because it’s journalistically in the public interest.”

The journalist continued, “Kamala Harris goes there and pretends there are no victims because they want to forget about that shooting completely except to the extent they can exploit it for gun control issues.”

“So somehow a shooting by what appeared to be somebody motivated by at least in part radical theories of gender ideology and killed Christian children in the name of that ideology,” Greenwald continued, “Somehow that has been turned around so that whoever is concerned about that competent of the story is now back to being a 1960s Jim Crow racist.”

“Of course it wouldn’t work without the media’s cooperation, that’s how they frame everything in partnership with their partisan allies,” greenwald asserted.

He then tore into Harris specifically, noting “The Democratic Party is about nothing other than criminalizing dissent and protest. Everything she just said there is so cynical and so disingenuous. It’s hard to know where to start.”

Greenwald continued, “Let’s remember the only good moment of her ill-fated presidential campaign… was when she accused Joe Biden of being a racist because he had opposed bussing and desegregation of schools and she had that moment in that debate where she said ‘That little girl was me, Joe.’ Really strongly implying he was a racist.”

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Legacy Media in Shock as Award-Winning Progressive Blogger Found to Have Never Existed

Germany’s legacy media are in shock after it was found that an award-winning progressive blogger they heaped repeated praise on never actually existed.

Julia “Jule Stinkesocke” Gothe — a paraplegic pediatrician in Hamburg — is a famous blogger in Germany who has repeatedly received awards for her writings on progressive issues ranging from green politics to disability activism.

Operating since 2009, her work has earned her many accolades, with German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle awarding her for running the best German-language blog in 2012.

However, it now appears that the famous blogger never existed in the first place.

According to a report by Bild, numerous inconsistencies with Gothe’s life story have been creeping up over the last number of years, prompting some netizens to question the reality behind the allegedly disabled blogger’s online presence.

Alarm bells however really started to go off after one teacher in the country found that all of the pictures allegedly depicting “Gothe” were actually of Kylie Harris, who is described as being a relatively unknown pornstar from Australia.

From there, it was soon revealed that out of the many progressive causes, Gothe had gotten involved with, nobody claimed to have actually met her in person.

Even when she would win awards, the blogger would reportedly never attend the event in person, and would often only communicate with various activists through a third party.

None of these groups or publications appear to have made an attempt to try and independently verify Gothe’s identity before this point.

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Eat Me, MSNBC

I’m going to be interviewed on MSNBC today by Mehdi Hasan, the author of a book called Win Every Argument. I’m looking forward to it as one would a root canal or rectal.

I accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion. If you’re reading this, things have gone another way.

I last appeared on MSNBC six years ago, on January 13, 2017, to talk with Chris Hayes and of all people Malcolm Nance, about the then-burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal.

The Trump-Russia story was white-hot and still in its infancy. That same day, news leaked from Israel that Americans warned the Mossad not to share information with the incoming administration, because Russia had “leverages of pressure” on Trump. Asked by Chris about the scandal generally, I made what I thought was a boring-but-true observation, that we in the media didn’t “have any hard evidence” of a conspiracy, just not a lot to go on. This was the TV equivalent of a shrug.

Nance jumped on this in a way I remember feeling was unexpected and oddly personal. “Matt’s a journalist. I’m an intelligence officer,” he snapped. “There is no such thing as coincidence in my world.” Chris jumped in to note reporters have different standards, and I agreed, saying, “We haven’t seen anything that allows us to say unequivocally that x and y happened last year.”

“Unequivocally” seemed to trigger Nance. With regard to the DNC hack, he said, “That evidence is unequivocal. It’s on the Internet.” As for “these links possibly with the Trump team,” he proclaimed, “You’re probably never going to see the CIA’s report.” Nance went on to answer “no” to a question from Chris about whether leaks “were coming from the intelligence community,” Chris wrapped up with a sensible suggestion that we all not rely on a parade of “leaks and counter-leaks,” and the segment was done.

To this day I get hit probably a hundred times a day with the question, “What happened to you, man?” What happened? That segment happened, but to MSNBC, not me.

That exchange between Nance and me was symbolic of a choice the network faced. They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.

We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.

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Dem-Linked Dark Money Group Is Masquerading As A Newspaper To Influence Pivotal Court Race

A Democrat-linked dark money group has used a website resembling a Wisconsin news outlet to attack the conservative candidate in the state’s current high-stakes Supreme Court election.

American Independent Media (AIM), a Washington, D.C.-registered 501(c)(4) nonprofit with ties to Democratic political operative David Brock, bought at least $90,000 in Facebook advertisements this month promoting two articles critical of former State Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly on The Wisconsin Independent, a media website labelled as an AIM “project.” Early voting is already underway in Kelly’s officially non-partisan April 4 Wisconsin State Supreme Court election contest against liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz, which will determine whether Democrats take majority control of the court for the first time in 15 years, according to NBC News.

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