Tag: media

Billionaire political meddlers, disinformation agents launch ‘Good Information Inc.’ to fight disinformation

Billionaire CIA-linked “overt operative” George Soros teams up on a shady media venture with tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, who financed a Facebook disinfo operation that framed Russia for meddling in US elections.

On Tuesday, billionaires Reid Hoffman and George Soros launched Good Information Inc., a “public benefit corporation” to serve as a conduit of funds to newsrooms that “cut through the echo chambers with fact-based information.” On its website, Good Information further describes itself as a “civic incubator” aimed at fostering and financially backing projects that “counter disinformation where it spreads by increasing the flow of good information online.”

But more than merely providing an alternative to bad information through their own reporting, the company suggests that censorship is also on the menu: “We believe there is an urgent need for regulation of social media platforms,” their website states.

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ABC News Takes the Prize — for Dishonest Journalism

Given all we know now, a program informed by basic journalistic ethics should have exposed the mix of partisan politics and Trump derangement syndrome that led many in the highest reaches of media and government to countenance Steele’s absurd claims. What we need is a postmortem. Instead, we get a resurrection.

The first 50 minutes of the 68-minute program are a love letter to this former MI6 agent turned gun for hire. As ominous music plays in the background, it portrays Steele as a suave and tireless truth seeker – we even get a James Bond clip to make the point. Following a treacly account of his beloved first wife, who died young, a parade of associates assure us that Steele was the best of the best while spying in Russia for the British government and then as a private intelligence contractor after he left the service in 2009.

One of those clients was the FBI. With blazing dishonesty, ABC News suggests his work was pivotal in exposing Russia’s corrupt scheme to host the soccer World Cup in 2018. In fact, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported in 2019 that “Steele did not have any role in the [FIFA] investigation itself, he did not provide court testimony, and his information did not appear in any indictments, search warrants, or other court filings.”  

Having falsely established Steele’s bona fides, George Stephanopoulos allows him to repeat his anti-Trump smears while merely noting here and there that not everyone agrees with his view.

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The Media’s Lies About Colin Powell’s Lies

Former Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell received virtually wall-to-wall adulation in corporate media coverage of his death last week.

In the New York Times (10/19/21), Bret Stephens called Powell “an exemplary military leader and presidential adviser.” Stephens’ Times colleague Maureen Dowd (10/23/21) said Powell was “the best America had to offer” and a “great man.” Theodore R. Johnson wrote in the same paper (10/21/21) that “we should take inspiration from Mr. Powell’s accomplishments.”

Powell led, as David Ignatius tells it in the Washington Post (10/18/21), an “extraordinary life of service,” characterized by “a sterling career of public service.” Like Ignatius, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal (10/21/21) lacked a thesaurus, describing Powell as “a great man” and one of “the great ones.” In another Journal piece, Paula Dobriansky (10/20/21) called him “a true inspiration and a model not only for military leaders and diplomats but all Americans,” a “hero of our time.”

This gratuitous fawning deflects readers from reckoning with Powell’s record. Consider the heinous acts the “great man” admitted to carrying out in Vietnam.  (See Consortium News, 7/8/96.) In his memoir, My American Journey, Powell said of his unit in Vietnam: “We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters.” The “hero of our time” wrote:

Why were we torching houses and destroying crops?  Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam…. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?

Similarly, Powell’s “sterling career of public service” involved obstructing the truth of US war crimes in Vietnam. After the My Lai Massacre, when Powell was an Army major posted in Saigon, he was tasked with investigating a soldier’s letter describing US barbarism against the Vietnamese (Columbia Journalism Review, 4/3/09). Powell denied the charges, writing, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

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Biden jokes to school children his job is to ‘avoid’ answering the media’s questions

President Biden jokingly told a group of elementary school students on Monday that one of his jobs as president is to “avoid” answering reporters’ questions.

As he finished remarks in a classroom in New Jersey’s East End Elementary, Biden stopped to point at the press in the back of the room and say, “As president, see all these people here? They’re with you all the time.”

“They get to ask you all kinds of questions, and you try to figure out how you’re gonna avoid answering them sometimes,” Biden added, laughing.

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Facebook leaks reveal employees pushed for censorship of conservative news outlets

More reports based on leaked internal Facebook documents are getting published, this time to show that suppression of conservative and alternative media outlets is not happening on the giant platform by accident, but also that this type of bias is creating divisions within the company itself.

The Wall Street Journal reported, based on internal message board discussions that it has seen, that many lower-ranked employees put pressure on their managers to effectively deplatform news organizations like Breitbart, which is considered right-wing.

The message board logs appear to have from the same cache of documents provided earlier by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, that the WSJ is now reporting about in a series of articles called “Facebook Files.”

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