When news broke yesterday that Israel had bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing patients, children, and staff, every “anti-Zionist,” “critic of Israel,” and most big American journalism outfits ran with the horrible story. The tale incited worldwide condemnation and recrimination. But it wasn’t true. Israel did not hit the hospital. The Islamic Jihad did. Hundreds of people did not die. The missile landed in a parking lot. It was Hamas disinformation.

The media’s disastrous failure on the Gaza hospital bombing story is one of the most vivid and instructive examples of the structural and inherent problems plaguing contemporary journalism. It mirrors many other fiascos of the past decade.

It is clear at this point that journalism schools are producing closed-minded, credulous ideologues who will believe anything that comports with their worldview. It’s either that, or we have a bunch of closed-minded ideologues who are willing accomplices in spreading propaganda. Functionally speaking, it doesn’t really matter. //

Of course, any person who’s spent more than ten minutes on the Israeli-Palestinian situation — to say nothing of those who are paid to cover the conflict — knows full well that both Hamas and the PLO are constantly lying about alleged Israeli atrocities and casualties. Anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of this situation knows that 30-40 percent of rockets that emanate from Gaza land in Gaza. And they know that Hamas not only operates among civilians to use them as human shields — often in hospitals — but that it is keen on seeing Arab civilian deaths to gin up sympathy and sacrifice martyrs.

If you’re gullible enough to believe Hamas’s “Health Ministry,” you need to be reassigned to a job that better aligns with your skill set. Something far away from reporting. Maybe become a journalism professor. //

Many of these same people are the would-be censors who lament the nefarious misinformation that festers and spreads on social media. There have always been conspiratorial people and rumors and disinformation. The real problem today is that we can no longer trust establishment media to debunk rumors and offer facts.

Actually, considering their reach and role, establishment media are often the biggest disseminators of disinformation.

Media outlets around the globe were quick to run Hamas’ headlines—without fact checking.

We now know that an Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israel misfired and hit the hospital in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/DzJgsbxS4i

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 17, 2023 //

Israel Defense Forces Spokesman Jonathan Conricus was interviewed by the BBC, and he used it as an opportunity to let them have it for their reporting and to eviscerate the media in general for their failure to confirm the facts before running with the story.

It's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn, writes the BBC's World Affairs editor. //

Government ministers, newspaper columnists, ordinary people - they're all asking why the BBC doesn't say the Hamas gunmen who carried out appalling atrocities in southern Israel are terrorists.

The answer goes right back to the BBC's founding principles.

Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn - who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

We regularly point out that the British and other governments have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation, but that's their business. We also run interviews with guests and quote contributors who describe Hamas as terrorists.

The key point is that we don't say it in our voice. Our business is to present our audiences with the facts, and let them make up their own minds.

As it happens, of course, many of the people who've attacked us for not using the word terrorist have seen our pictures, heard our audio or read our stories, and made up their minds on the basis of our reporting, so it's not as though we're hiding the truth in any way - far from it.

Any reasonable person would be appalled by the kind of thing we've seen. It's perfectly reasonable to call the incidents that have occurred "atrocities", because that's exactly what they are. //

But this doesn't mean that we should start saying that the organisation whose supporters have carried them out is a terrorist organisation, because that would mean we were abandoning our duty to stay objective.

And it's always been like this in the BBC. During World War Two, BBC broadcasters were expressly told not to call the Nazis evil or wicked, even though we could and did call them "the enemy".

"Above all," said a BBC document about all this, "there must be no room for ranting". Our tone had to be calm and collected. //

We don't take sides. We don't use loaded words like "evil" or "cowardly". We don't talk about "terrorists". And we're not the only ones to follow this line. Some of the world's most respected news organisations have exactly the same policy.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Replying to @krassenstein
You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.
10:14 PM · May 15, 2023 //

Elon Musk may not be a conservative. He has his issues, like all of us. But he’s a considered thinker, who seems to be learning fast about the dangers of the left. He’s spoken about the threat to civilization in the past posed by the “woke mind virus.”

Musk showed again that he does have some understanding of the left during an interview he gave to CNBC on Tuesday. //

Musk was asked about why he made his comment about Soros during the interview and he laughed at the interviewer, David Faber. “I think that’s true, that’s my opinion,” Musk responded. //

But why share it if people might not agree with you? Faber asked. What if advertisers on Twitter or Tesla buyers might not agree?

Boy, isn’t that a liberal in a nutshell? Why not share it if it’s his opinion? Is he supposed to go easy on what he thinks about Soros because it will upset the left? Maybe it’s more important to point out that Soros is doing harm to society. The look on Musk’s face in response was priceless — like, are you nuts?

He paraphrases Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride”: “Offer me power, offer me money, I don’t care.” To drive the point home, Musk declared: “I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”

James O'Keefe @JamesOKeefeIII
·
OMG EXCLUSIVE FOX INSIDER TELL ALL; Says Tucker Termination was Part of Dominion Settlement

Discusses "shady" work of "friend," former Biden operative Mike LaRosa now working for Dominion

“When it’s corporate media you’re beholden to advertisers... we take money from Pfizer"

10:06 PM · May 15, 2023

But wait, there’s more! Langille then goes on to claim that former “Press Secretary to First Lady and Special Assistant to the President” Michael LaRosa left the administration to work for a PR company whose main client is… Dominion Voting Systems. //

…he’s the one who’s crafting Dominion’s message to the public… But no one’s picking up on the fact that here’s someone who… worked in the administration… working with a voting company to take down Fox News…

That’s a whole story in and of itself. //

etba_ss Stormzeye
2 hours ago edited
Most people watching cable news want to be affirmed, not informed. The channels are designed to ramp up their viewers about senseless nonsense - OMG, You Will Not Believe What AOC Just Said! - while ignoring the serious issues that have our republic on the precipice. The lack of trust (and rightfully so) in our federal agencies and election integrity is the stuff that ends republics. If people believe elections are secure and legitimate, even if they lose, they will simply realize they need better messaging or a better message. If they don't believe they are secure and legitimate, then even if they really lost, they will not accept that because there is no trust in the system.

The bureaucracy is broken. I can't think of a single agency that I don't scoff at whatever they say. They have to prove they aren't lying as opposed to having the benefit of the doubt. I can't think of any of them that have the benefit of the doubt any more in my mind. Maybe most people aren't quite there yet, where I am. I was calling b.s. from the beginning of covid on all their proclamations and "science" and I got to experience the deceit, lies and incompetence in real time on a massive scale. (And not because I understand the science and medical terms, but because I can critically think and understand and interpret data, and I found good reliable, honest sources who weren't afraid to tell the truth and have now all been proven true.)

Fox News, just like MSNBC and CNN and all the rest, were lapping up whatever these corrupt bureaucracies and Big Pharma were dishing out and distributing it to the people as truth and fact. Maybe there people are just idiots, but if not, then they are either cowards or liars and part of the corrupt system. //

jumper
an hour ago
So, exactly what many of us assumed.

Cable news is a semi-scripted entertainment product. It's not "news." You can't sell favorable coverage to corporations for ad bucks and be anything but propagandists when you peel away the veneer of "journalism." The entire model is roadkill. Fox News might have looked unassailable, but just one guy leaving as cratered their ratings over a long enough period that even the dullest programming exec will get the hint.

Fox News actively suppressing critical stories as this producer described should be the wake up call for the remaining viewers to look elsewhere.

The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year. If you’re a connoisseur of unrestrained self-praise, may I recommend the citations when the Times awards itself the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

While the Pulitzer Prizes have always been little more than self-dealing masquerading as journalistic beauty pageant, it was a lot easier to believe in this manufactured prestige back when journalism was at least slightly more competent and concerned with the appearance of objectivity. In fact, a spin through the last five years of Pulitzer recipients reveals some interesting choices that add up to a clear pattern. //

Every one of these major stories was badly handled by the media writ large, served activist political narratives, frequently involved credulously regurgitating actual misinformation, or some combination thereof. While there is always reason to be suspicious of Pulitzers, historically most of the objections to the awards handed out never rose beyond the level of newsroom gossip. //

While plenty of criticisms could be leveled at Trump for his statements about the 2020 election, the reporting on that phone call led to a media feeding frenzy that caused the unfair dismissal of very real and legitimate problems Georgia had with its elections.

More importantly, it bears mentioning the same Post reporter, Amy Gardner, who wrote the Pulitzer-cited story above, would file a follow-up story on Jan. 9 about yet another Trump conversation with the Georgia secretary of state. This time Trump told allegedly Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find the fraud,” which was generally understood to mean that Trump was telling Raffensperger to abuse his power and make up reasons to disenfranchise people.

Not only did the Post have to run a correction on that story three months later — you can read the pretty astounding details here — when the dust settled, Gardner and The Washington Post conceded that they had “anonymously printed fabricated quotes they knew were from a second-hand source in the office of a political enemy, couldn’t confirm the quotes with additional sourcing, still attributed them to the sitting president of the United States, used those quotes as a basis to speculate the president committed a crime, and the Democratic party would later repeatedly cite the bogus article when attempting to impeach Trump for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’”

So the Washington Post reported complete misinformation that was cited as criminal evidence in the impeachment trial of Trump that resulted from Jan. 6, and still won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the event. Unsurprisingly, this story was also not included in the bundle of stories the Post sent to the Pulitzer committee. //

It seems that on every big news story, you now have a choice to make: Who are you going to believe, your lying eyes or the Pulitzer committee?

The top-rated program was 2022’s overall leader in cable news, “The Five.” That panel show logged 3,469,000 viewers, in line with its average figures. What is the standout statistic is this: That audience figure for the one-hour broadcast surpasses all of CNN’s primetime lineup! Beginning at 5 p.m., with “The Lead,” all the way through the 11pm hour with “CNN Tonight,” the combined audience of those shows did not total as much as Fox drew – for just the 5 p.m. hour. //

That is the viewership of seven CNN programs failing to draw as much as the lone show for Fox. It is rather tough to even process that disparity between what are supposed to be broadcast rivals.

An ABC producer used her credentials to create fake hit pieces on local politicians in Florida while pocketing thousands from a political lobbying firm, a report said.

Freelance producer Kristen Hentschel — who mostly worked for “Good Morning America” — was paid at least $14,350 by Alabama-based political consulting firm Matrix LLC to sandbag the environmentally friendly politicians with bogus questions, according to a report released Wednesday by NPR and Floodlight, an “environmental news collaborative.”

A few weeks after Iran’s “president,” Ebrahim Raisi, promised stricter enforcement of his nation’s misogynistic dress code, a woman named Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurd, was likely beaten to death by “morality police” for failing to wear her hijab properly. The apparent murder was nothing new for the theocratic “guidance patrols” that have been patrolling cities since the 1979 Islamic revolution, one of the most disastrous events of the late 20th century.

This week, Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” interviewed this same theocratic crackpot responsible for Amini’s death wearing a hijab. And it immediately reminded me of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci’s 1979 interview with Ayatollah Khomeini. The juxtaposition reminds us just how much journalistic integrity has eroded.

Rarely mentioned these days, Fallaci, who died in 2006, was somewhat of a celebrity due to her pugilistic interviews with world leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. A war correspondent for most of her career, Fallaci was shot three times and left for dead during student demonstrations in Mexico City in 1968 in what became known as the Tlatelolco massacre. Striking and sophisticated, uninterested in the ideology or political affiliation of her victims, Fallaci had no patience for moral equivalency. In truth, she was a liberal of the old school, and her infinite skepticism regarding power made her the most formidable interviewer of her time. “Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon,” she is quoted in her book “Interviews with History” (which should be required reading in journalism school). “I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.” //

Fallaci, barefoot and covered in Islamic garb from head to toe, proceeds to challenge every Khomeini lie, confronting him on his fascistic tactics and murders. You really need to read the transcript to comprehend just how masterfully she handles the interview. Here is a snippet of her challenging the Iranian regime’s insistence that she wear religious garb – a “stupid, medieval rag.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/07/archives/an-interview-with-khomeini.html

One day, we will look back at social media companies like ByteDance (Tiktok) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and compare them to tobacco companies like Philip Morris (Marlboro) and R.J. Reynolds (Camel). For a time, Big Tobacco enjoyed immense profits and popularity. But eventually, Big Tobacco’s culpability in causing immense physical harm to Americans — and in trying to obscure the science regarding that harm — became known. They were eventually held accountable for their deceptive advertising to children using “Joe Camel.” We are living at a moment when we are just learning of the social and psychological harms of social media, and of Big Tech’s efforts to obscure those harms from the public. //

Morell and her fellow policy experts list five actions that states can take now while they wait for Congress to enact more rigorous requirements for online companies. They include: mandating robust age-verification measures for social media platforms by requiring a driver’s license, credit card numbers, or another form of identification to create an account; requiring parental consent for minors under 18 to open a social media account; mandating full parental access to minors’ social media accounts; requiring social media companies to shut down access to their platforms for all 13- to 17-year-olds’ accounts during bedtime hours (generally 10:30 p.m. – 6:30 a.m.); and including a private cause of action to enable parents to bring lawsuits on behalf of their children against tech companies for any violation of the law.

Morell foresees internet companies’ dislike of “patchwork state laws” as working to the benefit of parents and children, since altering how they do business in one state would likely spur them to make their policies identical across the country.

Morell adds that the private cause of action clause is key, because, “If individual parents are empowered to bring a private lawsuit against these tech companies for violating the law, that could be very costly to their business, and they would take that seriously. [Private cause of action suits] are one of the most effective means of enforcing laws.”

Taxpayer | August 28, 2022 at 9:43 pm

Journalism is about covering important stories.. with a pillow, until they stop moving

amwick in reply to Taxpayer. | August 29, 2022 at 7:19 am

The guy whose pic is to the right (@RonColeman) has a twitter hashtag… he just says #journalism. I call it #carpetjournalism because they cover things up, and they lie…

The journalists “were ordered not to report on Gazans killed by misfired Palestinian rockets or the military capabilities of Palestinian terror groups, and were told to blame Israel for the recent escalation” //

The Hamas’s media guidelines, issued under thinly veiled threats, were “aimed at imposing the Islamic militant group’s narrative on media coverage of the conflict by implicitly threatening Palestinian reporters and translators who live under its heavy-handed rule,” The Associated Press reported Tuesday.

Hamas later “retracted” the guidelines after its details were leaked to the media. Still, the terrorist group has sent a clear message to foreign media outlets that wish to operate within the territory under its control. “Even if the rules are officially withdrawn, Hamas has still signaled its expectations, which could have a chilling effect on critical coverage,” the AP noted. //

Out of more than 1,100 rockets fired by PIJ and other terrorist groups last week, a large number of them landed inside Gaza itself — accounting for most of the civilian deaths during the conflict. “Approximately 20% of all Islamic Jihad rocket launches landed within the Gaza Strip, resulting in many injuries and fatalities of Gazan residents,” the IDF said in a statement obtained by the Legal Insurrection on Sunday.

The famous monkey meme is, in order, “see, hear, speak,” but my monkeys aren’t holding back on “evil” — they’re suppressing the truth because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

Phineas Fahrquar
@irishspy
·
Follow
Shorter Times: "Democrats believe in approved speech, Republicans believe in free speech."

The New York Times @nytimes
Several states run by Democrats are pushing for stiffer rules on the spread of false information, while Republican-run states are pushing for fewer rules. In this deeply polarized era, even the fight for truth breaks along partisan lines. https://nyti.ms/3Row0N9
4:43 PM · Jul 11, 2022

Taking a step back, you can see the mentality of the leftist journos that currently dominate mainstream media. That which is “apolitical” is actually “conservative.” If it doesn’t carry the message, then it must be right-leaning by default. Naturally, all that is conservative is bad which means not engaging in political pandering of any kind is bad. It satiates the white male patriarchy //

Does the movie skew conservative? No, but when you’ve drifted so far to the left that everything is viewed through the lens of identity and class struggle, anything that doesn’t compliment your worldview becomes “conservative.” I truly believe the author of this piece doesn’t understand just how far he’s sunk into his own ideology. He sees “monsters” where there are none and is now charging at them through his writing.

It’s just a windmill, dude. //

The fight is over whether or not the film is “anti-woke.” It’s not anti-woke, because it doesn’t engage in politics. It doesn’t bother with political concepts. It’s just good storytelling that anyone can enjoy if they would take off their political blinders and enjoy the movie for what it is.

And what it is, is a well though-out sequel that took time and effort to be a solid piece of cinema. Its continuity from the first film makes sense; the characters and their motivations make sense, the problems and the solutions both make sense, and the stakes make sense.

If anything counts against the left, it’s that the film is a loud message to Hollywood that apolitical movies with solid screenwriting, acting, and apolitical marketing are a winning formula. Don’t preach, just do the best job you can to make a solid film that entertains. That’s it. It’s not a message the activist left wants Hollywood to hear, but Maverick’s box office returns are saying it pretty loudly.

I recommend you go help it get louder by seeing it yourself.

Sometimes a newspaper story is just a story about someone. And sometimes the story inadvertently reveals far more about the newspaper itself.

That’s the case of The New York Times’ Thursday piece on Hunter Biden. What the discerning reader learns about the Times is far more important than anything disclosed about the president’s scheming son. //

The one bit of actual news is that Hunter Biden took out a loan to pay the federal government as much as $1 million in back taxes as part of a continuing criminal probe about his business ventures with foreign corporations and individuals.

But that fact, which comes in the very first paragraph, is dwarfed by the Times’ bombshell acknowledgment later on. Much later on.

It’s not until the 24th paragraph that the story mentions e-mails involving Hunter Biden and his associates in those deals, followed by these two sentences: “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Heart be still. It took the Gray Lady nearly 17 months to grudgingly concede even a fraction of what New York Post readers learned in October 2020. Of course, Times readers would have learned all that too if their paper was still in the news business instead of being a running dog for Democrats. //

The reason for that coverup was simple: Many of the e-mails to and from Hunter Biden implicated Joe Biden in the international influence-peddling business run by Hunter and Joe’s brother, Jim Biden.

If the whole country knew then that Joe Biden was corruptly using his office to help his family cash in, we would now be in the second year of Donald Trump’s second term. That’s a fact because 8% of Biden voters told pollsters they would have supported Trump had they known about the bombshell contents of the laptop. //

And now the Times has the gall to act as if it did heroic digging by claiming Thursday the e-mails “were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” Oh, please.

Unlike the Times, The Post didn’t rely on anonymous sources, saying openly that Rudy Giuliani gave the paper a copy of the laptop’s hard drive. Giuliani said it came from a repairman in Delaware, whom The Post also interviewed. He said a man who signed his name as Hunter Biden dropped the laptop off for fixes and never retrieved it. //

As I have written, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping know everything about these deals, including how many millions were wired from oligarchs and Communist-tied companies to bank accounts controlled by the Bidens. They also know what the Bidens did for the money.

The only people who don’t know all the facts are Americans. And for that, you can thank The New York Times and its corrupt ­co-conspirators.

Unlike other companies that are taking a moral stand against Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, CNN’s reason for no longer broadcasting Russia is, well … kind of hilarious. According to a report from Reuters, CNN decided to pull out of Russia after a new law was passed there, threatening jail for anyone who intentionally spreads “fake” news. //

This is probably as close as we’ll get to CNN admitting that they are fake news.

Contrarians can be useful! Yes, we’re very rude people, but sometimes we can help you avoid making a mistake. There’s a reason why the Catholic Church, when considering whether somebody should be made a saint, used to bring in a Devil’s Advocate.

The Catholic Church of liberal wisdom is The New York Times. But if you work at the Times, you probably exist in an epistemological safe space into which no adverse information ever flows. You may never even hear about certain true things; the information doesn’t penetrate the media outlets you read, the dinner parties you attend or the podcasts you listen to at the gym. //

Bennet lives in a world where everyone “knew” Palin’s team had a “clear” link to the shooting. He had probably read so many left-wing columns and blogs blaming Palin that he simply internalized the information and didn’t bother to check it. The fact-checker glossed over the false assertion also, because she was too overworked to do her job. (“I was checking things fast on deadline … my reading of it led me not to have looked at that specifically . . . I did the best of my ability in the time that I had.”) //

Funnily enough, when I worked at People magazine, where a team of hatchet-faced fact-checkers who made IRS auditors look like friendly Labradoodles would spend my Monday nights haranguing me over every adjective and preposition [.... ] anything that had previously been reported in the New York Times was considered a “red check,” i.e., unassailable truth.

At the Times itself? You can call one of the most prominent political figures an accessory to attempted murder, and the only sound you’ll hear is people shrugging.

For all The Times stories bemoaning that Americans increasingly live in “bubbles” of “misinformation,” it never seemed to look at the bubble inside its own newspaper. //

Hey, I just thought of someone who’d be perfect for the job: experienced in daily journalism, familiar with Times protocols, yet disinclined to automatically believe every vicious assertion about anyone on the Right: Her name is Bari Weiss. Maybe give her a call.

Legacy media is trying to memory hole the attack on the Freedom Convoy because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

The content advisory is on the wrong people — not the people who need to be questioned even more.

But the funny thing about those “content advisories.” When they originally started putting that stuff on music, it made people more interested in looking at it. If the powers that be don’t want you to see it, it tends to make you want to see it all the more. The controversy has made even more people look at Joe Rogan, then wonder what the heck the controversy is and doubt the media even more. So basically the left shot themselves in the foot with this effort and just made their effort to control the narrative more obvious.

Matthew Rosenberg
@AllMattNYT
Joe Rogan is what he is. We in the media might want to spend more time thinking about why so many people trust him instead of us.
3:36 PM · Jan 30, 2022