Tag: media

Rachel Maddow Says She Will Have to “Rewire” Her Brain to Not View Maskless as a “Threat”

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reacted to the CDC’s announcement on face coverings by saying she would have to “rewire” her brain in order to not perceive those who don’t wear masks as a “threat.”

The CDC said yesterday that those who had been vaccinated could remove their masks in indoor settings (aside from a bunch of exemptions, including airports, public transport, hospitals and care homes).

This prompted Maddow’s brain to short circuit as she expressed the difficulty she would have in dispensing with the idea of treating those who don’t wear masks as dangerous lepers.

“I’m going to have to rewire my self so that when I see somebody out in the world who’s not wearing a mask, I don’t instantly think ‘you are a threat’ or you are selfish or you are a COVID denier and you definitely haven’t been vaccinated,” said Maddow.

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The Intercept Attacks Conservative Journalists For Reporting On Violent Black Lives Matter Riots

The Intercept released a video report touting lies about the violent riots that broke out over the summer of 2020 and targeting the conservative journalists who reported on them.

“By focusing on sensational, graphic images of violence on the margins of protests and entirely ignoring peaceful demonstrators, even members of the Riot Squad who are not as far right as Schaffer have contributed to a political project: the right-wing media’s campaign to portray racial justice protests as anarchic and dangerous,” Intercept claimed.

In the media outlet’s video, a narrator details how conservative reporters made up an informal “Riot Squad” that followed the violence, destruction, vandalism, and arson that occurred in cities all over the U.S. last year. While the riots, 95 percent of which are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, caused more than $2 billion in damages from May 26 to June 8, corporate media organizations, including The Intercept, hold fast to the idea that these “protests” were “mostly peaceful.”

“…the broader picture is that Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful,” the Intercept claimed without evidence.

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The Israel Narrative Is Crumbling Because Of Phone Cameras And The Internet

The mass media are working furiously to spin this in a way that rivals my satire piece from the other day. The New York Times has been cartoonishly re-writing its own reporting in a desperate attempt to make Israel look like an innocent victim of unprovoked attacks instead of the obvious aggressor against people protesting a brutal apartheid regime backed by an entire empire. The New York Post falsely reported that the deaths on Monday were caused by “Airstrikes from Hamas militants” (when did Hamas get an air force?) when sharing an article which falsely implied that those fatalities were inflicted by both sides. DW News framed its headline in a way that suggested the nine children killed had been involved in “fighting” against Israeli forces, and the word “clashes” is being thrown about willy nilly to describe a very one-sided assault.

But it isn’t working.

Social media is teeming with viral video footage of police assaulting peaceful worshippers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, of Israelis cheering and chanting “Yimach shemam (may their names be erased)” at the sight of a fire near the mosque, of Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian protesters using the signature knee-on-neck maneuver made famous by the murder of George Floyd, many of which have millions of views. Mainstream politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are putting out statements explicitly condemning Israel as the aggressor in these attacks, and the White House is facing some actual adversarial journalism for once regarding its refusal to denounce the killing of Palestinian children and its absurd position that Palestinians have no right to defend themselves.

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WaPo now says covid “accidentally” escaped Chinese lab after year of claiming “misinformation”

After a full year of denial, The Washington Post is now claiming that the “lab accident covid-19 origin theory” might have some merit after all.

WaPo columnist Josh Rogin wrote an opinion piece saying that, while the origin of the Chinese Virus “remains a mystery,” several members of Congress are exploring “the theory” that it might have originated from an “accident at a Wuhan lab.”

For the first few months of the plandemic, the mainstream media claimed that Chinese Germs started to spread at a Wuhan wet market where people buy bats and other “exotic” animals to eat as food. Not long after that, the words Wuhan and China completely disappeared from all reporting on the Chinese Virus.

Today, we are no longer allowed to even talk about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) in relation to Wuhan – which is now completely back to normal, by the way, while the West remains locked down and masked.

Rogin would seem to take issue with the fact that there has thus far been no credible investigation into the true origins of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19). He even calls out Beijing for spending the past year covering up any evidence.

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Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It

After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and “domestic extremists” stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to “smoke ‘em out of their holes.” The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication, which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online network “that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves.”

Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical “hidey holes.” We’ve seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts, ProPublica arguing that Apple’s lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Verge and Vice and The New York Times listening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech about imploring the “authorities” to use the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” argument to shut down Fox News.

Multiple outlets announced plans to track “extremists” in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica, and Berkley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program used “high-precision digital forensics” to uncover “evidence” about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the “sedition hunters” at the Twitter activist group “Deep State Dogs” to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to “sleuthing communities”:

The FBI wants photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral, and has published images of more than 200 suspects. But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by without any signs of action…? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video, hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence… the FBI’s bureaucracy isn’t necessarily designed to keep organized.

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