Tag: media

Smollett just one in a string of false accusations by Trump opponents

The sad case of actor Jussie Smollett and his now-proven-false claims that he was viciously attacked by racist Trump supporters is not an isolated case.

But the media holds a great deal of blame for reporting initial instances and claims without using normal journalistic practices and standards that would have protected against misreporting.

Lessons should have been taken from numerous cases of high-profile wrongly-accused, whether it’s Richard Jewell falsely blamed (and later cleared) in the Atlanta Olympic bombings, Officer Darren Wilson falsely blamed (and later cleared by the Obama Justice Dept.) in the shooting of Michael Brown (the Justice Dept. concluded the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” claims were fabricated), Wen Ho Lee accused (but never charged and then prevailing in libel lawsuits against media) in the Chinese theft of our most sensitive nuclear secrets, Kyle Rittenhouse accused (but later cleared) of wrongful shootings of his attackers during a riot, the Covington Catholic kids falsely portrayed as being aggressive against a Native American protester, the University of Virginia frat brothers falsely accused of sexual abuse in a Rolling Stone article, Steven Hatfill falsely accused by the FBI in anthrax attacks, Trump and campaign associate Carter Page as supposed Russian spies, well– the list goes on. You can think of others.

If only the media were to follow normal standards and practices when these cases arise (reporting fairly, attributing claims, reporting both sides of a story), then we wouldn’t ultimately shoulder so much of the blame for the out-of-control false narratives that derive from the news reports.

When it. are to Smollett’s accusations, some media outlets responsibly reported and properly attributed allegations. But others did not. Some unskeptically furthered the narrative that Smollett, who is black, was attacked by Trump-supporting racists who put a noose around Smollett’s neck, shouted racial slurs, told him it’s “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) country, and poured bleach on him. The New York Times deserves special mention here for adding a biased non sequitur in its early reporting that treated skepticism of Smollett’s story as if it were unfounded, and fit in a dig at President Trump’s son.


But the lack of progress in the investigation has fueled speculation about whether the report was exaggerated. The president?s son Donald Trump Jr., who is known to disseminate conspiracy theories on his Twitter feed, retweeted an article this week about Smollett declining to turn over his cellphone to the police.

New York Times reporting on the Smollett claims

Here are but a few of the other cases whereby Trump opponents staged fake attacks or made false claims. The initial accusations were widely reported; the follow ups were not so widely reported.

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Why Don’t People “Trust The Science?” Because Scientists Are Often Caught Lying

There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another brand of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.

It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.

For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.

I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”

Not once.

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Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, former partner of Jeffrey Epstein, looks like it is being set up to fail. Prosecutors rested their case after nine days in which victims seemed barely prepared for cross-examination and co-conspirators were notable by their absence.

Even this threadbare reckoning was too much information for Twitter, which banned a popular account reporting daily from Manhattan Federal Court. The new Twitter CEO has previously said the company is not bound by the First Amendment, and blocked posts that were drawing 500,000 views.

The touchy revelation seems to have been that hard drives removed from Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in 2019 already had FBI tags on them, suggesting they’d previously been seized and returned to the predator.

The state-corporatist media, like the federal prosecutors, have ignored the clear implication of surveillance and even blackmail. The court case is limited to six counts relating to sex trafficking and Maxwell’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen women.

Not only does it seem U.S. agencies may have been complicit in compromising individuals — Twitter tries to stop us from knowing. Kudos to The Free Press Report for its daily summary of the trial.

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“This is One of the Most Difficult Stories We Have Ever Had To Tell” – Project Veritas Whistleblower Exposes ANOTHER CNN Producer’s Involvement With Underage Girls

On Wednesday Project Veritas released another shocking investigation on yet another CNN producer fantasizing about sex acts with his fiance’s young daughter.

The investigative video reveals a primetime producer at CNN fantasizing about sex acts with a child in graphic detail.

According to Project Veritas, the source came to Project Veritas after she was uncertain proper action would be taken by authorites.

Project Veritas published a story today featuring graphic texts and videos provided by a source that show a producer for CNN fantasizing about molesting his fiancé’s daughter.

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The Real Disinformation Agents: Watch as NBC News Tells Four Blatant Lies in a Two-Minute Clip

The war on “disinformation” is now one of the highest priorities of the political and media establishment. It has become the foundational justification for imposing a regime of online censorship. Around the world, new laws are being enacted in its name to empower the state to regulate discourse. Exploiting this cause, a small handful of billionaires are working in unison with Western security state agencies — under the guise of neutral-sounding names like The Atlantic Council — to set the limits of permissible thought and decree what is true and false. Corporate media outlets are attempting to rehabilitate their shattered image by depicting themselves as the bulwark against the rising tide of disinformation.

It is an understatement to say that this righteous cause is a scam. That its motive is power and control over speech and thought — to eliminate dissent and discredit competition — rather than a noble quest for truth is almost too self-evident to require explanation. No human institutions should be trusted with the inherently tyrannical power they seek to arrogate unto themselves: to decree truth and falsity with such authoritative power that views they have decreed “false” become prohibited, off-limits, even worthy of punishment.

A foundational view of the Enlightenment was that truth and falsity are best discovered by humans engaging in free inquiry and appealing to reason and persuasion, rather than being captive to the whimsical decrees of centralized authority dictating to citizens what they are and are not permitted to believe. That is why I believe, as I wrote at length in a 2013 Guardian article, that at the heart of every censor lies hubris: the belief that they are so evolved, enlightened and superior that they have risen above the eternal human propensity to err, enabling them to ascertain universal truth whose validity is so unassailable that nobody should be permitted to question it let alone dissent from it.

All that said, there is a core truth — an unintentional one — that lies at the crux of this elite war on “disinformation.” It is absolutely true that U.S. political discourse is drowning in deliberate disinformation campaigns and lies. It is also true that this disinformation epidemic is a serious menace, a toxic plague on our democracy and society. That part they have right.

Where they have gone wrong — very, very wrong — is how they have identified the most harmful sources of this disinformation. It does not emanate primarily from Trump boomers on Facebook or dark web QAnon groups or mischievous and transgressive teenagers on 4Chan. Ordinary citizens are obviously as capable as anyone of believing and spreading false assertions. But the far more damaging, destructive, organized and coordinated disinformation campaigns come from major corporate media outlets themselves and their security-state partners — particularly the corporate outlets that most vocally and flamboyantly claim to be so profoundly concerned about disinformation that they want to censor the internet in the name of stopping it. They are the ones who spent the last five years flooding the country with demented CIA-constructed conspiracies about a Kremlin takeover of the U.S. using clandestine sexual blackmail over the president and hallucinating Russian agents hiding under every bed; so many fabrications were disseminated under the rubric of that fairy tale that it is genuinely hard to choose the worst.

Arguably the most pernicious and prolific disseminator of organized disinformation campaigns is NBC News, which includes its cable unit MSNBC. We have spent the last several months working on a mini-documentary demonstrating how most of the coordinated lies from the U.S. security state were spread by a tiny handful of pundits, three of whom — Rachel Maddow, all-but-official CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian, and former Bush/Cheney spokesperson Nicolle Wallace — work for NBC News. That report will be published shortly.

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Inside the hypocrisy of media manipulators, censors who claim to fight misinformation

There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.

The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder recently released a report that blamed misinformation for a range of social problems: “Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises … Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.”

With $65 million in backing from investors such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the newly organized Project for Good Information also vows to fight fake news wherever it roams. As Recode reported, the group’s marketing materials claim, “Traditional media is failing. Disinformation is flourishing. It’s time for a new kind of media.” The project is run by Democratic operative Tara Hoffman, whose company ACRONYM created the app that spectacularly bungled the Iowa Democratic caucus vote in 2020.

And as Ben Smith reported in the New York Times, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has been hosting a series of meetings with major media executives to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.” Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his platform’s role in spreading misinformation.

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Mainstream media moves against “misinformation” in email

The boundary corporate media want to establish for what they think should be policed and censored as political “misinformation” keeps expanding.

The new “frontier” that seems to be shaping up, if narratives pushed by the likes of the New York Times are to be taken into account, are people’s email communications.

Unlike the politicians’ speech on public platforms like social media and TV broadcasters, that is tightly controlled and often censored by various fact-checkers hired by Big Tech, the medium of email remains elusive, the newspaper laments, even though it is a powerful way to reach constituents.

Mentioning several examples of fund-raising emails that the NYT said contained false information regarding benefits enjoyed by illegal migrants, and Medicare, abortion, etc., the article’s author goes on to qualify email as a tool “teeming” with misinformation.

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