Tag: media

How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).

That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.

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Congressional Testimony: The Leading Activists for Online Censorship Are Corporate Journalists

What is most striking is that while Silicon Valley censorship of online speech and interference in political discourse is recognized as a grave menace to a healthy democracy around the democratic world, it is often dismissed in the U.S. — especially by journalists — as some sort of trivial “culture war” question when they are not actively cheering and even demanding more of it. Even more bizarre is that opposition to oligarchical censorship and monopoly power is often depicted by the liberal-left as a right-wing cause, largely because they perceive (inaccurately) that such oligarchical discourse policing will operate in their favor.

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Congress Wants to Give the Establishment Media a Massive Handout

If there is one force in society worse than Big Tech, it’s Big Media – mainstream, establishment, and corporate media.

Yet a bill currently making its way through Congress would give a massive handout to the latter, ostensibly justified by criticism of the former.

The bill, introduced by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), is titled the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2019,” and it is a particularly troublesome piece of legislation, even by Democrat standards.

The title of a bill is quite deceptive. Far from promoting “competition,” the current version would instead cement the advantage of the establishment and corporate media at the expense of its competitors.

It would give Big Media companies a special exemption from antitrust law, allowing them to form a cartel that would, under normal circumstances, be illegal to create. But why should these establishment news companies be given a special exemption from antitrust law to negotiate on their own behalf something that applies only to their select few and not to all news companies and journalists? Of course, they should not.

Furthermore, there is nothing in the bill that would prevent the bigger media companies from excluding smaller companies from the cartel. If passed, there would be nothing to stop the formation of a cartel that includes CNN, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other big companies, while excluding smaller competitors in the independent media — not to mention local newspapers. Such a cartel would secure favorable rates for the former while leaving the latter in the dust.

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Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist.

A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office. A major media theme was that she was being brutally assaulted by Sanders supporters who were using snake emojis to express dissatisfaction with what they believed was her less-than-scrupulous campaign, such as relying on millions of dollars in dark money from an anonymous Silicon Valley billionaire to stay in the race long after the immense failure of her campaign was manifest, and attempting to depict Sanders as a woman-hating cretin. When Warren finally withdrew from the race after having placed no better than third in any state including her own, Rachel Maddow devoted a good chunk of her interview with the Senator and best-selling author to exploring the deep trauma she experienced from the snake emojis.

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The #BlueAnon Dossier, File #3 – Still More Conspiracies Fed By the Conspiracy-Hating Press

The press opposition to wild theories is belied by their obsession with them.

(See the prior installments with BlueAnon File #1 and Blue Anon File #2.)

In this third installment of the collection of crackpot theories cooked up by the media who decry the very practice, it is a mixture of the new and some older conspiracies. One thing to bear in mind in this lengthy list is that all of these are contemporary fever dreams. Every one of these dozens of examples has played out and been promoted during the Trump administration.

Some of the choices unearthed were either forgotten or so easily bypassed as hackneyed reporting they barely registered in the memory. But this has been an educational exercise; knowing the press is dysfunctional is one thing, but having them surpass even lowly regard is a head-shaking result. So to kick off this latest batch of bat-crap craziness in the press we’ll open with the newest.

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