Tag: media

A Family Business of Perpetual War

Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have a great mom-and-pop business going. From the State Department, she generates wars and from op-ed pages he demands Congress buy more weapons. There’s a pay-off, too, as grateful military contractors kick in money to think tanks where other Kagans work, writes Robert Parry.

Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.

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Think Tank Funded by U.S. And Foreign Governments Calls for Suppression of Breitbart, Fox, Conservative Media

The German Marshall Fund (GMF), an influential globalist think tank founded by the state of Germany to promote deeper ties between America and Europe — and funded in part by the U.S. government — has branded Breitbart News, Fox News, the Blaze, and the Federalist as “deceptive” news outlets, urging social media platforms to suppress their engagement.

The GMF, which claims to be a “non-partisan” organization, relies on the opinions of NewsGuard, an unaccountable Microsoft-linked establishment project that purports to “rate” the validity of news sites.

The report divides so-called “deceptive” news outlets into two tiers. “Manipulators,” that the GMF accuses of manipulating facts, and “false content producers,” which publish outright false articles.

Both descriptions are used by the GMF to smear conservative news outlets. The “manipulators” listed by the think-tank include Breitbart News, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Blaze, and Western Journal. The “false content producers” include the Federalist, World Net Daily, and black conservative radio host Wayne Dupree.

The think tank complains that too many of these sites enjoy high levels of engagement on Facebook, and argues that “de-amplifying—or adding friction to—the content from a handful of the most dangerous sites could dramatically decrease disinformation online.”

The globalist outfit also calls for a “new PBS of the Internet, funded by a fee on online ad revenue.”

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The Wokest News Stories of 2020

The year 2020 will be remembered in the real world for a terrifying pandemic, mass unemployment, a nationwide protest movement, and a historically uninspiring presidential race. The year in media, meanwhile, was marked by grotesque factual scandals, journalist-cheered censorship, and an accelerating newsroom mania for political groupthink that was equal parts frightening and ridiculous.

The tiniest violations of perceived orthodoxies cost jobs. Reporters and editors were whacked en masse in uprisings at the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, the Miami Herald, and countless other places.

Some of the purges were themselves amazing news stories. A contractor named Sue Schafer was fired after the Washington Post published a 3,000-word expose about a two-year-old incident in which she attended a Halloween party dressed as Megyn Kelly, who herself had been fired from NBC for defending blackface costumes. Schafer, in other words, was fired for dressing in blackface as a satire of blackface costumes, in an incident no one heard of until the Post decided to make an issue of it. This was one example of what the New Yorker recently exulted as the “expensive and laborious” process of investigative journalism, as practiced in 2020.

Raymond Chandler once said that when he ran out of ideas, he just had a character burst into a room with a gun. 2020 op-ed writers in the same predicament could insert random nouns into a MadLibs template: “Is _____ Racist?” Everything from knitting to Jesus to women to botanical gardens to dieting to mermaids to  Scrabble and perhaps a hundred other things made the cut, to the point where it became a bottomless running gag for inevitable cancel targets like the satirical Twitter personality, “Titania McGrath.”

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The CDC’s Rules Let Teachers, Lawyers, Media Jump to the Front of the COVID Vaccine Line

Education sector “support staff members,” corporate tax lawyers, and magazine fashion editors will all jump to the front of the coronavirus vaccination line ahead of the general population, under recommendations issued in late December by the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Self-interest dictates I should probably wait until after I get my immunity-producing doses before raising any questions about the prioritization. The government’s allocation strategy is such an inviting target, though, that it’s hard to resist taking, er, a shot.

How did we get here? On December 20, a government committee of highly educated, mostly academic experts known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted about who should get the vaccine first. The committee has 15 voting members. Twelve of them are medical doctors. One is a lawyer. Nine—a majority—are affiliated with universities, including Stanford, Vanderbilt, Baylor, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Naturally, the committee of doctors decided that the first vaccines should go to healthcare workers. That might seem like common sense—emergency room or intensive care doctors treating Covid-19 patients deserve to be protected against the risk of catching the disease in the workplace. Healthcare workers, though, is a big, catchall category. It includes everyone from Beverly Hills plastic surgeons conducting elective cosmetic surgery to “administrative staff,” which might be the billing clerk in the plastic surgery practice, or some hospital accounts-receivable bookkeeper or fundraiser with no patient contact.

“Healthcare personnel” are in the CDC’s phase 1a. Educational sector support staff are next in phase 1b. That could include people who are currently working from home and who ordinarily have little or no direct contact with students—say, the employees who answer telephone questions about retired professors’ pension benefits.

The next phase, 1c, encompasses the “media” and “law” categories. Like healthcare personnel, these groups are so broad that they include essential frontline workers but also some others whose prioritization is difficult to justify.

Journalists covering the pandemic by doing on-the-scene reporting from nursing homes or hospital intensive care units probably do have a strong case to be vaccinated relatively early. So do criminal defense lawyers meeting clients in prisons or jails, or making frequent in-person courtroom appearances.

The “media” and “law” categories, though, also include the copyeditors at Vogue and the big-firm lawyers who rarely show up in court but spend their time instead writing memos and helping companies minimize their taxes. Their Covid-19 risk seems pretty small, or at least small enough that it’s hard to see the rationale for those workers leapfrogging ahead of the general population.

A cynic might suspect the vaccine committee put lawyers and journalists early in the queue as a way to avoid getting sued or attracting negative press coverage.

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STUNNING: All Major Western Media Outlets Take ‘Private Dinners’, ‘Sponsored Trips’ From Chinese Communist Propaganda Front

A host of corporate media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC have participated in private dinners and sponsored trips with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a Chinese Communist Party-funded group seeking to garner “favorable coverage” and “disseminate positive messages” regarding China, The National Pulse can reveal.

Other outlets involved in the propaganda operation include Forbes, the Financial Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC News, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, AFP, TIME magazine, LA Times, The Hill, BBC, and The Atlantic.

The relationship is revealed in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings, which reveal a relationship spanning over a decade between establishment media outlets and the China–United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

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