Tag: media

Corporate Media Parrot FBI Talking Points as More Americans Turn to Encrypted Communication Online

Before he became a household name as the accused spoiler of the 2016 election, James Comey, FBI director under President Barack Obama, was already well-known in tech circles as a crusader against strong encryption. Still smarting from Edward Snowden’s exposure of the US government’s massive and illegal domestic spying operations, Comey grabbed any microphone he could during the waning years of Obama’s tenure to warn Americans that encryption technology was putting us all at grave risk by causing law enforcement to “go dark.”

Cryptography is the art of encoding text or other data such that only those who have the secret key can read it. This data can include anything from messages and records to digital currency—but these days encryption most commonly protects account passwords and other sensitive information as it traverses the internet.

Encryption has been around for millennia and, in modern times, it is used on a daily basis by nearly every person living in a technologized society. But like any technology, it can frighten those in power when wielded by the relatively powerless. In the summer of 2015, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that encryption had suddenly inspired the FBI “to consider how criminals and terrorists might use advances in technology to their advantage.”

Sensitive to the public’s lingering outrage at the Snowden revelations, Comey turned to the usual parade of horribles in his attempts to convince Congress that encryption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: “Malicious actors can take advantage of the internet to covertly plot violent robberies, murders and kidnappings,” he warned. “Sex offenders can establish virtual communities to buy, sell and encourage the creation of new depictions of horrific sexual abuse of children.”

Comey preferred to use “horrific sexual abuse of children” and the specter of terrorism to disparage encryption technology—recall the showdown between the FBI and Apple after the perpetrators of a late-2015 massacre in San Bernardino left behind an encrypted iPhone. But the ACLU (4/1/16) quickly exposed his fraud: Researchers uncovered 63 court orders for access to encrypted devices and reported, “To the extent we know about the underlying facts, these cases predominantly arise out of investigations into drug crimes”—rather than terrorists and pedophiles.

In the wake of the January 6 mob attack on the US Capitol Building, this pattern is repeating itself again…only now corporate media are taking up the FBI’s mantle on their own behalf.

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Biden Admin Wants to Charge Reporters $170 Every Time They Go to a Briefing

The mainstream media goons who shrieked and moaned about a “free press” during the Trump administration are pretty mum after the Biden admin announced that they will be charging reporters for their COVID tests every time they enter the building.

Without taking the $170 test, reporters will not be allowed to enter the building to go to press briefings.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the White House is seeking to put the new charges in place on Monday.

Charges this high would make it much harder for smaller and independent outlets to get into the briefings, which would make corporate media shills dominate the room even harder than they already do.

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Possible Biden Pick for NEC Scrubs Twitter Feed

A New York Times contributing writer who is reportedly the Biden administration’s top candidate for a seat on the National Economic Council recently purged his Twitter feed of thousands of Twitter posts, many of which mocked conservatives and Republican leaders.

Tim Wu, who is also a Columbia Law School professor, recently deleted nearly 11,000 tweets that he sent prior to Dec. 2, 2020, Fox News reported on Thursday.

Wu also appeared to scrub several highly charged partisan messages he posted on Twitter after Dec. 2, 2020, according to archived copies reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. In one dating from Dec. 12, Wu wrote that a Wall Street Journal op-ed that criticized Jill Biden was “a reminder that the old-fashioned pre-Trump conservatives were pretty wretched too.”

The news comes as President Joe Biden’s nominee for Office of Management and Budget director, Neera Tanden, faces bipartisan opposition in the Senate for her own tweets attacking conservatives and Bernie Sanders supporters.

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US Bombs Syria And Ridiculously Claims Self Defense

On orders of President Biden, the United States has launched an airstrike on a facility in Syria. As of this writing the exact number of killed and injured is unknown, with early reports claiming “a handful” of people were killed.

Rather than doing anything remotely resembling journalism, the western mass media have opted instead to uncritically repeat what they’ve been told about the airstrike by US officials, which is the same as just publishing Pentagon press releases.

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Fact-Checkers Hammering Biden and Cuomo? No.

CNN host Brian Stelter asked a big question on his Sunday show. “What’s the future of fact-checking now that Trump is out of office?” He proclaimed it was “fraught with complexity, and allegations of bias and shouts of false equivalence.”

This is not complex. In 2016, a Rasmussen poll found that only 29 percent of the public trusted the media’s “fact-checking” of presidential candidates. There’s not just “allegations” of bias but easy and daily confirmation of bias.

Stelter tried to insist — on behalf of his network — that the fact-checking focus is now on President Joe Biden. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale explained, “(I)t’s basically more like a smattering of falsehood than the daily avalanche we got from Trump, but he’s not perfect.” Dale has tried to demonstrate that he’s checking Biden, issuing an online report on 40 of Biden’s statements from his first month in office.

But there’s a catch. Dale’s becoming less visible. Mediaite noted on Feb. 20 that this CNN fact-checker was featured on air or mentioned by name on average more than once every other day since June 2019. But exposure dipped noticeably after the election, and “since President Joe Biden’s inauguration … Dale has only appeared on the network once. And that appearance, last Friday, was to fact-check Donald Trump’s lawyers.” Dale showed up with Stelter just three days after the Mediaite piece was published.

Stelter also interviewed PolitiFact editor-in-chief Angie Drobnic Holan. Is PolitiFact obsessed with fact-checking Biden? No.

In the first four weeks after Biden took the oath, PolitiFact issued two Biden fact-checks — two! Last week, it fact-checked three of Biden’s statements from the CNN town hall, since that was apparently a little too prominent to ignore. It added one more on Feb. 22. That’s six fact-checks of the president so far.

Let’s compare that to fact-checks defending Biden. In the same time frame, PolitiFact issued 19 fact-checks of Biden’s critics, and all but one of them were proclaimed “Mostly False,” “False” or “Pants on Fire.” (There was one “Half True”). There’s apparently no such thing as a “True” Biden critique.

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‘Anti-Racist’ Washingtonian Mag Editor Mocked Blacks And Hispanics.

Daniella Byck, a so-called “anti-racist” journalist and editor at the influential Washingtonian magazine has repeatedly authored tweets mocking and deriding black people and black culture, The National Pulse can reveal.

Byck, who joined the outlet in 2018, made comments regarding “Africa and the size of a black man’s lips.”

The recent graduate has listed her “dream job” as “crisis communications,” though it is unclear who would hire her for such a role given her own communication history.

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Editor’s note: Anti-racist people are like male feminists. Beware. They are always creepers.