Do you identify with anyone in the media?

 Tell us what you think.

Ron De Santis

FLORIDA MAN STORMS DC https://t.co/5Zo4Cbo79U

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 27, 2021

Protesters assaulted Breitbart reporter Matthew Perdie

This is an ACTUAL attack on the free press, and you lazy pukes in the MSM cry yourselves to sleep over mean tweets. https://t.co/LIMOPDxRpT

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) May 30, 2020

American media is now like the Middle Eastern media, simply propaganda outlets fighting for one faction or another, and usually paid by Middle Eastern potentates too.

How the American press is being used by Middle East potentates and lying to the American people ... big time.

Reality ceased to be very important in inbred Washington elite circles long before the cosmic war of Trump and anti-Trump. Yet the October murder of Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi gave the jaded nerves of Washingtonians a jolt, because it wasn’t part of anyone’s playbook. The free-for-all that followed was a chance to see how well the players could improvise off-script.

The play, as it developed, was like a page from a comic book: The narrative held that since the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia himself, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), had directly ordered the grisly assassination of a dissident journalist who wrote for an American publication, the Washington Post, and was a green-card holder, the Trump administration must hold Riyadh accountable.

Thus, the Khashoggi affair became a platform for Turkish intelligence, Qatari agents, Democratic political operatives, and the media to tilt Trump policies against Saudi Arabia. Should the American president not heed their alarums, he himself would be guilty of murder—in addition of course to treason.

The specific goals were easy to spot: Ending U.S. support for the Saudis’ war against the Iranian proxy Houthi forces in Yemen; curtailing U.S. arms sales to Riyadh; and compelling Riyadh to push aside the crown prince, presumably in favor of someone who was less enamored of Trump, or otherwise less of an impediment to turning the U.S. foreign policy ship back towards the course set by Obama, which in truth was endorsed by both Democratic and Republican D.C. elites.

The lies fly thick and fast. We were treated to weapons grade FAKE NEWS by the Washington Post and the NY Times and their paymasters in the Middle East..

Yet holes had already appeared in the story. Jamal Khashoggi was not, as the press had insistently reported, a U.S. person, meaning a permanent U.S. resident, a green-card holder, or an American citizen. Rather, he was a foreign national who owned an apartment in northern Virginia, and was in the country on an O-1 visa, granted to individuals with “extraordinary ability.”

The media patched that hole by inventing a new category for Khashoggi. Rather than a U.S. person, he was a U.S., or American, resident—a phony designation that could just as easily apply to an exchange student or an undocumented alien.

Then, in the wake of the operation’s success, a week after the Senate vote, the Washington Post dropped a story in the middle of the holiday lull that sought to launder the paper’s role in the operation. Buried halfway through an article describing Khashoggi’s difficult and lonely American exile was evidence that he was neither a dissident nor a journalist. He was something else, evidence of the new direction the press has taken in the Trump era, a sign of something troubling that no one really wants to explore in prime time.

Khashoggi had requested $2 million from the Saudi government for a think tank in Washington, which, according to the article, would “work on behalf of Riyadh ‘to regain its positive role and image.’” In other words, he was brokering his services to influence U.S. policy and public opinion on behalf of MBS, until he was pulled in the other direction—by Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Cooperation Council rival, Qatar.

The background of this bidding war was that, in June 2017, Saudi and its allies, particularly the United Arab Emirates, had launched their own campaign against Qatar. The reason, according to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, was Doha’s support for Sunni extremism, its flirtation with Iran, and efforts to interfere in the domestic affairs of other GCC states. A major battleground in this inter-Arab conflict is Washington.

It is no secret that much of Washington is now getting paid directly by one side or the other, or otherwise drawing on the deep pockets of oil-rich Arab states who are engaged in a vicious propaganda war against each other, with the aim of influencing U.S. Middle East policy. The New York Times, for instance, sourced a story about Trump donor Elliott Broidy to emails that Broidy alleges were stolen by Qatari hackers—the Times euphemistically described the source as “an anonymous group critical of Mr. Broidy’s advocacy of American foreign policies in the Middle East.”

Did you know that Khashoggi didn't write English?

Yet the entire story about Khashoggi—that he was a U.S. person, a dissident, a journalist—was false. He was a Saudi national whose murder was used to launch a successful intelligence operation targeting his home country and U.S. policy. The news was fake, but the information campaign set off by his murder was real....
Which is it? Those lamenting the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the deaths of thousands of Yemeni children appear to have few qualms about sticking American boys and girls in the middle of the Syrian desert as a tripwire, and with no coherent policy to confront Iranian aggression.

This glaring contradiction exists in plain sight because much of the Republican establishment is still sucking on the fumes of George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda, a Middle East strategy that privileged the ostensible aspirations of foreigners at the expense of American lives and resources.

That strategy failed in nearly every way possible. Moreover, it’s not at all clear what political or philosophical principles America is now supposed to be exporting to a region that Obama torched after Bush smashed it. If America is an exceptional nation, what’s the logic in squandering American power in the effort to remake foreigners in our own image?

While we were engaged in this Alice-in-Wonderland adventure, it seems likely that we imported the wrong things from the countries that we decided we could somehow Americanize.

Narratives like the Khashoggi operation are not part of any rational debate about American foreign policy. Nor are they attempts to explore any kind of human truth. Nor are they politics as usual. They are a new kind of weapon, like an improvised explosive device, stuffed with rat poison, loose screws, broken glass, whatever is at hand and seems likely to kill or maim. No one cares what they’re made of.

And it’s not Trump who’s being targeted anymore, either. It’s us.

When the press acts like the enemy of the people

Well, it is the enemy of the people.  This is the equivalent of the Germans who defended the "good Germans" who loved Hitler as long as he was winning.

For starters, we journalists should stop attacking the people we are supposed to be informing.

“If you put everyone's mouths together in this video, you'd get a full set of teeth,” one Politico reporter wrote of a Trump rally in Florida. The reporter apologized for the comment, but it already served to confirm the suspicion among working-class Republicans that the prestige press hates them.

There was Katy Tur of MSNBC, who went around a Trump event asking “gotcha” questions of ordinary Americans excited to get $1,000 bonus and a lower tax rate. The clear message was that these people were too dumb to realize the tax cut and any concomitant bonuses were peanuts.

We also note CNN’s crusades to punish, threaten, and deny platforms to those whose speech goes beyond the CNN-drawn boundaries of permissible dissent. In recent days, some CNN reporters have decided their job is to lobby social media platforms to kick off conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. They’ve succeeded with the largest platforms, and bragged about it.

Such lobbying was odd behavior for a media outlet, and it reminded of us the time CNN sicced its investigative resources on the creator an idiotic GIF of Trump "body slamming CNN." When CNN reporters found the anonymous troll who posted the image, they threatened in print that they would “publish his identity should” he repeat such “ugly behavior.”

Alex Jones and anonymous Twitter trolls are hardly sympathetic figures, but that doesn’t turn CNN’s campaigns to "dox" or de-platform them into journalism. We worry about the slippery slope here. Much of the media believe there’s no valid reason to oppose gay marriage. Buzzfeed recently ran an attack on the Christian views of TV hosts, having explained that on gay marriage “there are no two sides.”

We all remember the reporters who scoured Indiana until they found a pizzamaker who was uninterested in catering a gay wedding, and was then made a national whipping boy of the pizza shop.

So the average religious conservative who has seen this media behavior is justified if she's wondering when a CNN, BuzzFeed, or MSNBC reporter might show up to ruin her life for holding the “wrong” opinions, whether on guns, immigration, marriage, or even tax cuts.

Then there are the times the mainstream media outright lies about conservative or working-class people. Katie Couric produced a documentary that dishonestly edited out the arguments of gun-rights supporters to make it look like she had stumped them and left them speechless. Vox.com ran a poll about voters’ immigration views and hid the fact that “taking away jobs” was voters’ No. 1 concern. Why? Probably because Vox wanted to push the idea that racism rather than “economic anxiety” drove immigration worries.

Finally, when you see the New York Times hire a writer who regularly and publicly professes her hatred of white men, it seems the Times thinks such hatred is fine.

So the media — from the perspective of a working-class white person, a Trump supporter, or a conservative — really can look like an adversary, and a dangerous one, with the power to destroy your life, silence you, or cost you your job. This isn’t the media holding the powerful to account. It’s the media lazily abusing those with unpopular views.

Trump the negotiator

What has the media done while Trump is MAGA?

He is a tough and smart negotiator. He sizes up his opponent, and he knows that the approach that works best for one is not the same as for another. It does not matter what he says publicly about his negotiating opponent. What matters is what results months later. In his first eighteen months in Washington, this man has turned around the American economy, brought us near full employment, reduced the welfare and food stamp lines, wiped out ISIS in Raqqa, moved America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem, successfully has launched massive deregulation of the economy, has opened oil exploration in ANWR, is rebuilding the military massively, has walked out of the useless Paris Climate Accords that were negotiated by America’s amateurs who always get snookered, canned the disastrous Iran Deal, exited the bogus United Nations Human Rights Council. He has Canada and Mexico convinced he will walk out of NAFTA if they do not pony up, and he has the Europeans convinced he will walk out of NATO if they don’t stop being the cheap and lazy parasitic penny-pinchers they are. He has slashed income taxes, expanded legal protections for college students falsely accused of crimes, has taken real steps to protect religious freedoms and liberties promised in the First Amendment, boldly has taken on the lyme-disease-quality of a legislative mess that he inherited from Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama on immigration, and has appointed a steady line of remarkably brilliant conservative federal judges to sit on the district courts, the circuit appellate courts, and the Supreme Court.

What has Anderson Cooper achieved during that period? Jim Acosta or the editorial staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post? They have not even found the courage and strength to stand up to the coworkers and celebrities within their orbits who abuse sexually or psychologically or emotionally. They have no accomplishments to compare to his. Just their effete opinions, all echoing each other, all echoing, echoing, echoing. They gave us eight years of Nobel Peace Laureate Obama negotiating with the ISIS JV team, calming the rise of the oceans, and healing the planet.

We will take Trump negotiating with Putin any day.

WHY SPECULATE? A talk by Michael Crichton

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can. —Mark Twain

My topic for today is the prevalence of speculation in media. What does it mean? Why has it become so ubiquitous? Should we do something about it? If so, what? And why? Should we care at all? Isn’t speculation valuable? Isn’t it natural? And so on.

I will join this speculative trend and speculate about why there is so much speculation. In keeping with the trend, I will try to express my views without any factual support, simply providing you with a series of bald assertions.

This is not my natural style, and it’s going to be a challenge for me, but I will do my best. Some of you may see that I have written out my talk, which is already a contradiction of principle. To keep within the spirit of our time, it should really be off the top of my head.

Before we begin, I’d like to clarify a definition. By the media I mean movies, television, Internet, books, newspapers and magazines. Again, in keeping with the general trend of speculation, let’s not make too many fine distinctions.

First we might begin by asking, to what degree has the media turned to pure speculation? Someone could do a study of this and present facts, but nobody has. I certainly won’t. There’s no reason to bother. The requirement that you demonstrate a factual basis for your claim vanished long ago. It went out with the universal praise for Susan Faludi’s book Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1991, and which presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false.

But that’s old news. I merely refer to it now to set standards.

Rebekah Mercer Fights Back

This is the kind of thinking that the Democrats and the Press, - but I repeat myself - hates.

“I oppose politicized science,” she writes, “in which researchers cannot study certain subjects -- or even ask certain questions -- for fear of a career-ending backlash and persecution.” Noting that America “was founded on the principle of open discourse” and that “[i]ntellectual diversity and vigorous, reasoned debate have been fundamental to America’s success, making us the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative society in human history,” Rebekah Mercer warns that “we have lost our way” and that “America is now a society that threatens, pillories, and harms those who dare to question the status quo.”

The anti-science Nazis in the media march on.

CIA Argues The Public Can’t See Classified Information It Has Already Given To Favored Reporters

This is a good time to quote The Onion on another "...massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States."

Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.

Scare-tistics

 It's clickbait.

“Just one sunburn increases your chances of getting cancer by 100%!”

“People who don’t eat [food] have a 20% greater risk of colon cancer!”

“You have all the risk factors for skin cancer.”

“People with a family history of [malady] have a 40% greater chance of getting [malady] than the rest of the population does.”

Sigh. Just what my nerves need to hear. But what is my risk? What are the odds of my having [malady]? You notice that the news articles never really give you that information?

Scare-tistics. That’s what I’m starting to call the numbers tossed around by media outlets, often concerning health topics but also environment, health insurance, and the like. The goal is to get you to stop and watch/listen/read. Scare-tistics are not really helpful.

For example, and I’ll pull numbers out of the air, because the news piece came out a few years ago, but there was breathless reportage that “breast cancer diagnoses are up over thirty percent from forty years ago!” and implied that some dreadful thing in the environment was causing breast cancer. To which the person in my family who works in a related medical field snorted and said something that rhymes with “pulpit.” What has happened is that 1) mammography has become cheap and common, and 2) because of that and better technology and imaging, more and more tumors are found that would not have been caught before because of their tiny size. Many of those are very slow-growing, most are not malignant at the time of discovery and are tracked but not removed.

Of those diagnosed with cancer, back before mammograms, sometimes the woman would have died of something else first without anyone guessing that they had breast cancer, like my great-grandparent. She/He died of heart failure and his/her autopsy revealed un-diagnosed [organ]* cancer. Her/His heart got him/her, not the cancer. She/He was in his/her 80s. Today, there are women in their 90s who are diagnosed with breast cancer, but who are suffering from other maladies that will do them in long before the cancer would.

NFL Playoffs Ratings Plunge by 23 Million

It's like the Press. When you go out of your way to insult your customers, call them deplorable, racist, homophobic assholes you're still shocked that they don't continue to buy your stupid shit.

Prediction FAIL: Watch a parade of media tax bill self-beclowning in 120 hilarious seconds

Pew: US media bias ranks worst in the world

More than in any other country, Americans on both sides of the political aisle believe the media does does a poor job covering political issues fairly, according to a blockbuster new survey of media consumption in 38 nations.

The U.S. media is working overtime to destroy it's own reputation.

MUELLER PROBE'S FIRST ACT: LEAK TO CNN

The Russia investigation into President Trump's alleged collusion with Russia is being conducted by former FBI director Robert Mueller, who today saw the grand jury he impaneled recommend charges.

At least one person could face arrest as soon as this Monday.

But while the charges remain sealed until Monday, one news organization had the scoop Friday night.

CNN exclusively reported the news Friday, citing anonymous sources connected to the probe.

The news channel reports:

A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.

The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.

A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment.

Mueller has recently come under criticism for his role conducting the Russian probe. As the FBI director who oversaw his agency's investigation into Uranium One and Russian racketeering, some have argued he's not a disinterested observer on matters related to the FBI's reputation investigating Russia. There are calls for his recusal.

As of publication, every other media outlet reporting the story is sourcing it back to CNN.

CNN itself reported tonight that typically the subjects of grand jury charges are notified immediately, but in this case neither any subjects, nor their attorneys, have been notified.

CNN, meanwhile, did not disclose who affiliated with the Muller probe offered these updates. The network's report began with a reference to "sources briefed on the matter" but never shed any light on who the sources are.

White Suspect Arrested in Louisiana Killings of Black Men Police Say Likely ‘Racially Motivated’

Press jubilant.  The narrative vindicated.

Who could have predicted this?

Trump does what people want. Outrage ensues.

Trump made a deal with Democrats to fund hurricane disaster relief and raise the debt ceiling. “Never Trumpers” of every Party and label are shocked. He is being called names by his enemies and his supporters are accused of being duped by a Democrat in disguise.

But step back for a moment and ignore, if you can, all the rabid voices. Ask yourself what so many people who are not particularly partisan have asked of politicians in Washington. They want to see politicians get along and do things for the common good.

So here we have it. Money has been appropriated for disaster relief. The debt ceiling has been raised. It’s a two-fer. Who, except for partisans, want to see Congress tied up in gridlock, fail to pass disaster aid and wrangle until the very last moment in that perennial fight over raising the debt ceiling?

You know the debt ceiling will be raised; it always is. The only question is whether the Republicans will be accused of shutting down the government. The news stories were already written about the “horror” of the Government defaulting on the national debt. Now the Democrats and the Press – but I repeat myself – will have to put their stories and faux outrage back in the pending file for the next time this issue comes up. The best thing that could happen with the debt ceiling is to remove it. Get rid of an issue that only allows politicians to pretend to care, to posture and preen in a Kabuki theater that has gotten so old it’s grown a beard. 

Stop it already. We know you’re lying. Clear the decks for issues that matter. Grow up.

ProPublica is a fraud. If the people who work there are “journalists,” I’m an NBA first-round draft pick.

ProPublica is a fraud. If the people who work there are “journalists,” I’m an NBA first-round draft pick. ProPublica is run by a charlatan who exemplifies everything that’s bad about his supposed profession. It’s a foul enterprise run by foul people.

A “journalistic institution” funded by Democrat billionaires tried to shutter a publishing house (one that even some of its harshest critics agree is beneficial). This would be big news if the world of American journalism were populated by actual investigative reporters, rather than sock puppets dancing at the end of the strings that accompany their big fat welfare checks.

The attack by Silicon Valley on anyone who disagrees is getting into high gear.

Liberal Media Continues To Turn Against 'AntiFa': "This Is Food For The Adversary"

They ignored the core of the Democrat Party and it's violence for as long as they could.

The Totalitarianism of the Now

Mark Steyn:

I had thought the floodwaters of Texas had at least momentarily submerged the left's war on history. But I see a Hillary Clinton staffer called Logan Anderson has been triggered by a white man with a Confederate flag on his boat rescuing black people in Houston....

Totalitarianism is a young man's game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all "old white men" who'll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth. And it's true that the surviving German Nazis are all getting a bit long in the tooth. But they were young once, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And to be young was very heaven: in the early Thirties the Nazis were the smooth-visaged lads gleefully torching books in the streets. They were the future, and these elderly monarchists and middle-aged democrats, queasy about the torching of the non-ideologically-compliant past, would all be dead soon enough. As the blond Aryan boy sings in Bob Fosse's film of Cabaret:

Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign

Your children have waited to see

The morning will come when the world is mine

Tomorrow Belongs to Me!

I am reminded that the average age of the ISIS barbarian is somewhere in the teens, and the Antifa Fascists rioting and beating its "enemies" to a pulp are mere youths.

And let's not forget this memorable quote:

"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes sneered in a New York Times profile. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”