Category: media and media people

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Accountability government transparency insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Major Media’s Major Corruption

MSM, mainstream media, CIA, Surveillance, propaganda, PSYOP

The revolving door between regulated big business and regulatory agencies is a known problem. “Regulatory capture” is one of the concepts economists have used to explain it.

We got used to this sort of corruption in finance: under the Bush and Obama administrations, with Goldman Sachs serving as the Executive Branch’s talent pool. The Pentagon and its major contractors have long had a cushy, cross-​pollinating relationship. And we are just beginning to learn about Fauci’s close ties to Big Pharma.

But the most dangerous employment overlap? Between the Deep State and major media news services.

Glenn Greenwald, in a Substack column on Sunday, calls our attention to an MSNBC opinion article titled “Julian Assange extradition could mean even more legal trouble for Donald Trump.” It was written, explains Greenwald, “by former FBI Assistant Director and current NBC News employee Frank Figliuzzi, who played a central role during the Obama years in the FBI’s attempt to investigate and criminalize Assange: a rather relevant fact concealed by NBC when publishing this.”

We in America tend to think of the news media’s role as that of a watchdog — against government corruption. Instead, we see, that this direct seeding of media roles with Deep State agents “is how U.S. security state agents now directly control corporate news outlets.”

In the Sixties, there was a program called Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA used a variety of techniques to control the media. Now “the CIA is the media.”

This is not a “free press.” It is a controlled press, with the mechanisms of the control right out in the open — simply look at the “journalists’” resumes.

Is this big business capturing regulators, or regulators capturing business?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism social media

Tom Paine Sues Facebook

Thomas Paine, truth, offense, censorship

The ghost of Thomas Paine is suing Instagram and Facebook.

Mr. Paine, the eloquent champion of the American Revolution who penned such zeitgeist-​capturing volumes as Common Sense, The American Crisis, and The Rights of Man, is going to court to protest the indignity that these social-​media forums recently inflicted upon his spirit by censoring his statement that “He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

The statement comes from an op-​ed Paine published in the April 24, 1776 issue of the Pennsylvania Journal: “Cato’s partizans may call me furious; I regard it not. There are men too, who, have not virtue enough to be angry, and that crime perhaps is Cato’s. He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

Mr. Paine seems to be saying that persons of craven mettle often eschew the challenge of being standard-​bearers of truth, especially when controversial matters are involved. Articulating such views forthrightly tends to offend — somebody.

The particular mentalities of censorious Facebook flunkies and algorithms are new to Mr. Paine, of course. But he is ready to fight.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” he declares when asked to assess his prospects, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. . . . [I]t would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

If that be hate speech, Mr. Paine seems to suggest, make the most of it.

This is Common Sense. Happy New Year! I’m Paul Jacob.

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Black & White & NPR

three white men, racism

The NPR headline mentioned race: “3 white men are found guilty of murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery.”

Before the verdict, I had mentioned the case on my This Week in Common Sense podcast, expecting and supportive of that ultimate outcome. So I left it at that.

But Sean Malone, the brilliant videographer, had something to say about that headline: “Dear NPR: You don’t need to put race in every headline. Please stop. Alternatively, if you’re hell-​bent on doing this, then do it consistently.”

Legacy news media outfits seem committed to a racial double standard, which Mr. Malone calls our attention to: “I notice that you didn’t put ‘black suspect’ in this article,” linking to “The Waukesha death toll rises to 6, and the suspect faces homicide charges.” The suspect in this horrific crime is African-​American, but NPR doesn’t give that fact banner billing in this or a separate headline on the same horrific incident.

Yet, on November 4, the title was “A nearly all-​white jury will hear evidence in the Ahmaud Arbery case.”

Selective race identification is journalistic practice. 

The pattern used to be that newspapers went out of their way to identify black criminals and white victims, but not vice-​versa. Now it seems to be the reverse.

Are NPR and other outfits deliberately fanning the flames of racism, with a constant stream of implied and sometimes explicit ‘Hate Whitey’ themes? 

Relentlessly focusing on race as the ultimate driver of our society is not likely to reduce racism but to encourage it. 

To the detriment of individuals of all races.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Lynch Mob at Eleven

lynch mob, MSM, news, establishment

The facts in the Kyle Rittenhouse case were never the focus of the bulk of news reporting. What was? Constructing a rationale for progressive Democrats to ceaselessly wax eloquent on the strawman of their choice. Or worse.

Trapped in legend, the conclusion of the trial could only appear to them as something utterly alien and malign.

“The Rittenhouse Verdict is Only Shocking,” Matt Taibbi headlined his Substack media takedown, “if You Followed the Last Year of Terrible Reporting.”

The jury’s decision “was hardly a surprise to many of us who watched the trial rather than the media coverage,” wrote Jonathan Turley at USA Today.

“Two Americas are hearing two entirely different stories about this case,” GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson noted on Meet the Press, “and neither of them is the full view that that jury got over the days and weeks of that trial.”

We were repeatedly told that young Rittenhouse “crossed state lines” (still perfectly legal*) looking for trouble (any evidence of that?) and had “no business being there.”

The truth? Kyle Rittenhouse had a constitutional right to be in Kenosha. 

Notice I did not say “showed good judgement,” however, neither did Rittenhouse fit the legacy-left-media’s or Joe Biden’s “white supremacist” vigilante stereotype.

Thank goodness, the Kenosha jury got it right. The media nearly universally got it wrong — largely on purpose — as well as missing the biggest issue of all, identified concisely by former Democratic Party presidential candidate and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard: “This tragedy never would have happened if the government had simply carried out its responsibilities to protect the safety, lives and property of innocent people.”

Government failed to do its job, and a lynch mob press corps failed to report it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Sadly, even the ACLU joined the chorus harping on Rittenhouse having “traveled across state lines.” The group also rightfully ripped the Kenosha Police Department and the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office for “an outrageous failure to protect protesters.”

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The Pushers

Brazil, disinformation, propaganda, media

They’re skulking around, speaking in furtive tones, lurking in dark places … hiding from oversight so they can do their dirty deeds unimpeded.

Who?

The disinformation pushers.

They grab hold of one or more incorrect propositions and, indifferent to how wrong it is to be less than infallible in their utterances, willfully communicate their blunderful asseverations to others.

Some pushers use encrypted services to peddle their verbal wares and evade beneficent censors who want only to help.

Public policy is one of the topics the pushers brazenly yap about. 

Result? Political discourse is a mess, with not everybody agreeing about everything, as they simply must. 

In Brazil, for example, where “Far-​Right Disinformation Pushers Find a Safe Place on Telegram,” experts worry that the Telegram messaging app “could become a powerful vector for lies and vitriol before next year’s presidential elections,” explains The New York Times. And that would be regrettable, making for “a tense political moment in the country.”

Thank goodness for the Times, eh? 

Now we finally know that people disagree in Brazil, sometimes indelicately. Even during elections!

Note the unmentioned presuppositions.

First, that there’s no far-left disinformation in Brazil, as anyone who peruses all the inaccessible encrypted messages on Telegram would know.

Second, making do by relying upon better speech as the only way to counter erroneous or dishonest speech is out of the question. 

At least according to the Times. 

Which, being in the Better Speech/​Better Press business, does seem a bit odd.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Brazil

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Mount Maddow Blows

Rachel Maddow, Russia

Blemishes on journalists for leaping to conclusions, rather than doing actual reporting and investigation, are now erupting like terrestrial super-​zits of stratovolcano proportions.

I could be talking about the Kyle Rittenhouse case, or any number of other issues where corporate media has spectacularly failed us, but the Trump years left us with one humungoid blot on the landscape, Russia-​Russia-​Russia.

“Russiagate is already a sizable boil on the face of American journalism,” wrote Matt Taibbi last week, “but the indictment of Danchenko has the potential to grow the profession’s embarrassment to fantastic dimensions.”

That’s Igor Danchenko, key player in the Democratic conspiracy to take Trump down. But the “professional” about to be disgraced to “fantastic dimensions” is none other than MSNBC’s star pusher of the Steele Dossier, Rachel Maddow. 

Taibbi calls her response to Danchenko’s prosecution “a thing beyond.”

The case for the Steele Dossier, upon which Trump and his cronies were accused of massive corruption and even treason, is now in complete tatters. Danchenko has been caught in lies, and Hillary Clinton campaign insiders have been caught pushing, paying for, and plotting to promote those lies.

But Rachel Maddow? She’s in sneaky defense mode.

Dr. Steve Turley, in video con brio, quotes Erik Wemple’s Washington Post characterization of Maddow’s one-​sided coverage: “there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”

Now Maddow’s engaged in pointing out that Danchenko’s prosecutors, instead of making the case for Danchenko’s fabrications, concentrate on linking a trail of political connections with the Clinton campaign. Not true: the prosecution makes much of Danchenko’s lies. 

Yet, making “collusion” connections is precisely what Maddow did (relentlessly) against the Trump campaign and various Russian figures.

That’s a symmetry!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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