Tag: media

Lynch Mob at Eleven

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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Tags establishment media, Kyle Rittenhouse, media, MSM, propaganda, self defense

media and media people

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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insider corruption media and media people

Mount Maddow Blows

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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Tags media, media bias, Rachel Maddow, Russia

national politics & policies social media

Low Fares. Something to Hide.

Post author By Redactor
Post date October 13, 2021
2 Comments on Low Fares. Something to Hide.

Southwest Airlines, Covid, vaccination, labor

“Southwest Airlines crews are walking out and so are FAA air traffic controllers,” Buzz Patterson tweeted on Sunday. “This is just the beginning.”

Buzz’s running for a House seat in California’s Seventh District. But I saw the tweet as quoted on Facebook by Erin Leigh, who wrote “Exactly what needs to happen. Over 1800 Southwest flights have been canceled in the last 48 hrs … employees from other airlines are joining as well as Amtrak.” And she concluded with “Mandates have consequences!!”

But what really caught my attention was Facebook’s warning: “Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.”

Really? None?

You see, much of what was tweeted and Facebooked was definitely true: Southwest Airline pilots and other workers have walked out. And though the airline and the union provide the silliest rationales for the mass cancellations as cover — including blaming non-existent bad weather — it seems pretty obvious this is tied to the vaccine mandates. Tucker Carlson is nearly alone in covering this angle of the story — bemoans The Guardian — while the rest of corporate media relays the “nothing to see here” official spin (or “media blackout”).

Meanwhile, Facebook promotes its guardian of truth, “Lead Stories” — but its “fact-check” was entirely about the Amtrak shutdowns!!

Candidate Patterson didn’t mention Amtrak. And Ms. Leigh noted Amtrak almost as an afterthought.

And then, up on my screen, came Facebook’s altered image of the initial tweet, with “Regular Delay” super-imposed.

The Facebook post was mostly about airline business.

And while Amtrak officials and mouthpieces for the Transport Workers Union of America assure us that it’s all very regular . . . the jab mandate is in place, and labor . . . dislocations . . . are one consequence.

Our regularly scheduled re-scheduling will be re-explained by history.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, covid, labor unions, media

ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Lightfoot’s Dark Turn

The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.

The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.

There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.

Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.

Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.

This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Chicago, journalism, Lori Lightfoot, media, race

media and media people

Media Corrections

“Our focus was to get Trump out of office,” explains CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester in video surreptitiously recorded and recently released by the gotcha video journalists of Project Veritas.

The group had reached higher at the cable network, last December, unveiling comments made by CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker and Political Director David Chalian during an internal conference call to spike coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story … with plenty of obvious political prejudice.

Last summer, as the presidential campaign settled into a two-man race pitting Republican Donald Trump against Democrat Joe Biden, The New York Times reported that, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says,” adding, “The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.”

“There may not have been Russian bounties on US troops in Afghanistan after all,” reads the Military Times’ headline, after the Biden Administration acknowledged “low to moderate confidence” in the intel that previously seemed gospel-true.

Calling it “one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020,” Glenn Greenwald notes, “It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless.”

Yet another big narrative has unraveled with the Washington, D.C., medical examiner concluding that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick “suffered two strokes and died of natural causes.”

“So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died,” Greenwald summarizes at Substack, “and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible.”

That’s “the news”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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