Tag: media

Shaming Private Ryan

NPR, man. It used to be good, though liberal, until it was taken over by woke fanatics. Now NPR’s TV critic, Eric Deggans, is attacking Tom Hanks for not being woke enough. Deggans, who is black, praised Hanks for his recent op-ed about the Tulsa race massacre, and calling on Hollywood to tell more stories like it. But now Deggans wants Hanks to do penance for having made movies about white people. I kid you not. From Deggans’s essay:

[I]t’s wonderful that Hanks stepped forward to advocate for teaching about a race-based massacre – indirectly pushing back against all the hyperventilating about critical race theory that’s too often more about silencing such lessons on America’s darkest chapters.

But it is not enough.

After many years of speaking out about race and media in America, I know the toughest thing for some white Americans — especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism — is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures.

But in Hanks’ case, he is no average American. Or average Hollywood star, for that matter.

Over the years, he has starred in a lot of big movies about historical events, including Saving Private Ryan, Greyhound, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Bridge of Spies and News of the World. He has served as a producer or executive producer on even more films and TV shows based on American history, including Band of Brothers, The Pacific, John Adams and From the Earth to the Moon. He was an executive producer of documentaries such as The Assassination of President Kennedy and The Sixties on CNN.

In other words, he is a baby boomer star who has built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men “doing the right thing.” He even played a former Confederate soldier in one of his latest films, News of the World, standing up for a blond, white girl who had been kidnapped and raised by a Native American tribe.

He’s not alone. Superstar director Steven Spielberg has a similar pedigree (notwithstanding occasional projects such as The Color Purple and Amistad). And fellow director Ron Howard. These stories of white Americans smashing the Nazi war machine or riding rockets into space are important. But they often leave out how Black soldiers returned home from fighting in World War II to find they weren’t allowed to use the GI Bill to secure home loans in certain neighborhoods or were cheated out of claiming benefits at all.

They don’t describe how Black people were excluded from participating in space missions as astronauts early in America’s space program. As the book and film Hidden Figures notes, even brilliant Black and female mathematicians faced discrimination in the space program during the 1950s and 1960s. If given better opportunities, perhaps they could have helped us get to the moon sooner, by putting our best minds on the problem, regardless of race.

Deggans is angry because these artists didn’t make the films he thought they should have made.

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Wikipedia’s Quiet, Big-Tech-Funded Grip On Internet Knowledge Gives It Too Much Power

Wikipedia’s quiet dominance over internet knowledge and close ties to authoritarian big tech companies is giving the online encyclopedia site too much unchecked power.

In one recent example, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is under federal and state investigation for mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic and growing list of scandals, is described on his Wikipedia page in a positive light while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential GOP frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election, is painted as a partisan hack who ignored the science.

Anyone who searches for information about both of these governors’ pandemic responses will be given this information that isn’t necessarily true, and Wikipedia doesn’t seem to do anything about it. As a matter of fact, any user who wanted to manipulate a page to fit his agenda could as long as it slipped through Wikipedia’s editing process. That happened seven years ago when a Wikipedia user overlooked The Federalist’s long list of “featured-in” publications and important interviews to try to delete our publication’s entry because, according to the user, it “does not pass the threshold for notability.”

Wikipedia’s move to the left, especially when echoing narratives found in corporate media, is not a sudden one. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is just one of the many people who recently called attention to Wikipedia slowly but surely kissing its neutrality goodbye. In an interview in February, Sanger said the 20-year-old website’s shift towards the left is “disheartening” and “troubling.”

“Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work,” Sanger said.

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The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda

On the fifth anniversary of the PULSE nightclub massacre in Orlando, numerous senators, politicians and activist groups commemorated that tragic event by propagating an absolute falsehood: namely, that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was motivated by anti-LGBT animus. The evidence is definitive and conclusive that this is false — Mateen, like so many others who committed similar acts of violence, was motivated by rage over President Obama’s bombing campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and chose PULSE at random without even knowing it was a gay club — yet this media-consecrated lie continues to fester.

On Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) falsely described the massacre as an “unspeakable act of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went even further, claiming “the LGBTQ+ community was targeted and killed—all because they dared to live their lives.” Her fellow Illinois Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, claimed forty-nine lives were lost due to “anti-LGBTQ hate” (he forgot the +). These false claims were compiled by the gay socialist activist Matt Thomas, who correctly objected: “the shooter literally picked PULSE at random from Google after security was too tight at the mall he went to first,” adding that while LGBT groups “are hopeless of course,” too much money and power is at stake for them to give up this self-serving fiction. But he asked, “Shouldn’t the bar be a little higher for senators?”

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More media lies about Donald Trump and Bill Barr debunked

Insisting that President Donald Trump had politicized the Department of Justice was a regular part of the media assault on him, yet a host of recent developments proves it was all in the press’ fevered, hyperpartisan imagination.

The big one, of course, is the Interior Department inspector general report on the Lafayette Park incident: The IG thoroughly vindicated Trump and then-Attorney General Bill Barr, saying the federal Park Police had decided all on their own last June to clear protesters out of the area to install fencing after several nights of violence and vandalism. It was indeed sheer coincidence that Trump went to the area later that day for a photo op.

Then and since, outlets from CNN and MSNBC to The New York Times and Washington Post repeatedly reported as fact the claim that Trump had demanded the protesters be cleared out of his way.

Some headline samples: “Officers fire tear gas on peaceful protesters to clear the way for Trump’s photo op” (Vox); “Analysis: How the clearing of Lafayette Square made the White House look a bit more like the Kremlin” (Washington Post); “The day police charged a peaceful protest for Trump’s photo-op” (CNN). Heck, a Washington Post “fact checker” is still trying to insist the IG’s report doesn’t really debunk the months of misreporting.

But that’s not the only Trump vindication. President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is standing with the Trump DOJ on a couple of high-profile controversies. It’s gone to court to continue blocking access to internal government documents relating to the Trump International Hotel in DC and to keep secret most of a memo sent to then-AG Barr arguing that Trump should be cleared of obstruction-of-justice charges after the Mueller report refused to take a position on the issue.

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Who are all the bad sources and why is the media still protecting them?

The past few years are riddled with examples of major media outlets relying on anonymous sources for “blockbuster” stories— only to have the information be proven wrong. 

Yet there’s been little to no accountability.

Most recently it’s the cacophony of admissions by media, including The Washington Post, that falsely declared (early and often) the Covid-19 lab origin theory was “debunked.” They received ample support in for the misinformation from Facebook, Twitter, Google and public health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Before that, there were notable corrections by NBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post on another major story. The news outlets had to correct their false reporting about Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. The articles all claimed that prior to 2019 political scandals involving the U.S., Russia and Ukraine, Giuliani and/or the conservative news channel One America News had received a “former warning from the FBI about Russian disinformation.” However, story revisions in May later stated that Giuliani and One America News did not receive such so-called “defensive briefings,” after all.

Looking at the news organizations and bylines responsible for the errors, we can see repeat offenders. Some of the same players have made the same sorts of egregious reporting mistakes over and over again, yet go on to make more as if no lessons were learned from the previous. And as I’ve documented, when the media gets caught having publicized the worst kind of false information, instead of issuing a mea culpa and apologies, the offenders often double down and revise the original terms of the story to make it seem as if the false information didn’t matter at all.

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Media Flipping 180° On UFOs At Pentagon’s Directive Says More About Media Than UFOs

After the January 6 riot at the US Capitol Building, the mass media immediately seized the opportunity to call for more internet censorship to prevent the spread of crazy conspiracy theories. Now the mass media are saying the US military has been lying about UFOs for decades and hey, maybe space aliens are flying around above your house.

Half of the UFO articles coming out of the mass media these days are basically just stalwart propagandists for the western empire explaining to each other that it’s okay to talk about UFOs now and they should all feel perfectly fine and normal about that.

These unprincipled propagandists are falling all over themselves to dismantle taboos which they’ve been unquestioningly upholding and enforcing for decades, really for no other reason than because they were told to by the US military.

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