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Worthless Media
WELCOME TO WORTHLESS MEDIA WHERE THE FAILURE OF REAL JOURNALISM IS
EXPOSED
the white-wing media
DEC 2022
“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
–Chomsky
Media lo-lites
(source: crooks & liars, raw story, alternet, newshounds)
Fox Host: Folks Probably Feel That Trump Deserves A 'Do-Over' Election
Yeah, no. It doesn't work like that.
Millionaire Newsmax Host To Railway Worker: Stop Being Greedy, You Peasant
This isn't even surprising.
There, I fixed it.
NanceGreggs @ du
With all of the negative news stories about Biden and the Democrats, I'm thinking maybe you MSM types are just out of ideas as to how to fill your broadcast time.
So let me help you out. If you're looking for something to run your mouths about 24/7, here are some news stories you might want to cover:
Joe Biden is not personally enriching himself on the taxpayers' dime.
Joe Biden is not spending 25% of his time in office on the golf course.
Joe Biden is not appointing incompetent cronies to positions of power.
Joe Biden is not getting his Covid information from 'doctors' who think the vaccine contains alien DNA.
Joe Biden is not taking political advice from idiots like Ivanka and Jared, nor from traitors like Mike Flynn, or convicted criminals like Steve Bannon.
Joe Biden is not under investigation for possible tax evasion, bank fraud, or interfering with the election process.
The Democrats are not trying to pass legislation that curtails people's right to vote.
The Democrats are trying to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and assist middle-class citizens with increased tax breaks.
The Democrats are focused on better and more affordable education, rebuilding our infrastructure, and raising the quality of life for all Americans.
Well, maybe you don't want to just talk about Biden & the Dems, so here's a headline you can really sink your fangs into:
Trump incited the January 6th insurrection in an attempt to overthrow our democracy, an event organized and funded by his Republican ass-kissing enablers, and he's still the leader of a party full of dumbass whack-jobs who continue to spew divisive conspiracy bullshit while encouraging their constituents to take up arms against their fellow citizens and resort to violence - actions which are, of course, greatly enabled by their stance on zero gun control.
So if you're truly at a loss as to what to discuss on your so-called "newscasts", you might want to present the aforementioned facts, and follow up with the fact that Trump's closest advisors are either (a) refusing to respond to the subpoenas issued by the January 6 Select Committee, or are (b) pleading the 5th on the grounds of self-incrimination.
You might want to delve into the fact that people who have nothing to hide don't refuse to testify, nor do people innocent of any wrongdoing invoke their right not to incriminate themselves.
I am not a 'journalist' - nor, like some of you, do I pretend to be one on TV. But it seems to me that the news story of the century is blatantly obvious - and why you're not on top of it 24/7 is beyond anyone's guess.
Nothin' says "trust us" like a mainstream media that thinks Biden's approval ratings are more important than a once-pResident of the United States having orchestrated the downfall of the government he swore to protect and serve.
Well done, MSM. Trump once declared you "the fake news". Thanks for proving that he wasn't that far off the mark.
Media: Quit coddling the toxic GOP
Uh, Politico? Biden didn't make Marjorie Taylor Greene "the face of the GOP" — Republicans did
Between blaming Democrats for MAGA Republicans and celebrating Trump's babysitter, media keeps coddling GOP
By AMANDA MARCOTTE - SALON
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2, 2022 6:00AM (EST)
"The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics." This is famously known as "Murc's Law," named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn't do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even Donald Trump's election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012.
Republicans are about to take power in the House of Representatives once again, and so, with exhausting predictability, we return to a Beltway narrative where none of the choices they will make with that power are their fault: It is somehow all because Democrats have failed to manage Republicans properly. Unsurprisingly, the latest example comes from Politico, which pins the blame for the rise of right-wing superstar Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene not on the voters who sent her to Congress or the GOP leaders who indulge her or the conservative media that celebrates her. Instead, Greene's popularity with Republicans is laid at the feet of Joe Biden and the Democrats.
"Biden world once ignored Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now it's making her the face of the GOP," announces a Thursday headline in Politico. Underneath it, Eugene Daniels and Jonathan Lemire write that the Biden White House has tried to turn Greene "into the poster child of the incoming House GOP majority."
But of course Biden had nothing to do with that, because Republicans had already done it. Republicans in her district enthusiastically voted her into office. Republicans gave Greene a standing ovation in response to her remarks claiming that school shootings like Parkland and Sandy Hook were "false flags." Republicans made her one of the top fundraisers in the House. Republican leadership is currently indulging Greene's demands to treat the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as "political prisoners."
As Heather Digby Parton wrote previously at Salon, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is nominally the top Republican in the House, has basically allowed Greene to become a "shadow speaker" who keeps him "on a short leash." To Politico reporters, evidently, this makes McCarthy a victim. They write that he has "no choice but to offer the hardcore members prominent posts in exchange for their support."
More nonsense, of course. There's always a choice, even if that choice is just to go home and live a life of lobbyist luxury. Kevin McCarthy goes along with the open fascists of his party because he wants to. Remember that he voted to nullify the 2020 election, even after Trump sent a mob to the Capitol to physically threaten members of Congress. He may play-act moderation for the gullible Beltway press corps, but McCarthy has been a cheerleader for the Trumpist agenda all along.
All of this is far too familiar: The D.C. press corps covers Republicans as if they were not actual adults who should be held responsible for their own decisions, but as lost and confused children who are the pawns of other people's machinations. When McCarthy kisses Trump's ring and elevates the far-right members of his party, he's portrayed as a hapless stooge. But the Trumpists who manipulate McCarthy and force him to grovel are not held to account either. As with the Politico report, blame for their behavior is often assigned to Democrats for failing to do more to control them. But, as Daniels and Lemire tacitly admit, Biden tried the "ignore them and they'll go away" tactic for more than a year and it didn't work. So now he's being blamed for amplifying Greene's popularity by belatedly acknowledging her existence.
This tendency to excuse all Republican misbehavior by treating them like purely reactive animals hit its zenith this week, in response to reports that Trump had loudmouthed antisemite Ye (formerly Kanye West), along with his Holocaust-denying buddy Nick Fuentes, over to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Obviously, the reason Trump keeps finding himself in the company of white supremacists is that he agrees with their views, something he hasn't exactly been subtle about. Still, in the face of considerable blowback, Trump used his standard go-to excuse: He simply doesn't know these white supremacists who keep showing up next to him! Absolutely no idea who they are, darn it all!
Trump coughs up this obvious lie because it creates a tiny envelope of not-very-plausible deniability while allowing him to avoid denounce people like Ye and Fuentes. He's used this tactic for years, but the press still falls for it every time. Witness this credulous story from NBC News that paints Trump not as a racist who enjoys the company of other racists, but as a hapless goofball starved for attention who "was essentially tricked by the rapper and his guests" into breaking bread with a big fan whose views on race relations are just louder versions of Trump's own.
NBC's source for the claim was an innocent victim in the dinner-date fiasco was Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing troll who works for Ye (and recently worked for Greene) and who has a long and storied history of having zero respect for the truth. This could perhaps be a rare example of Yiannopoulos telling the truth, but it's far likelier that he knows the mainstream media is always ready to excuse Republican politicians who say or do execrable things as victims of circumstance, not actual autonomous grownups making their own choices. It's no skin off Yiannopoulos' back to take the fall for Trump's dinner with neo-Nazis. If anything, it helps bolster his image as a "dirty trickster" — while also creating at least faint excuses for Trump and his supporters.
Indeed, the Trump campaign followed up this report by claiming they've assigned Trump a 24/7 babysitter, to make sure he has no more "accidental" meetings with white nationalists. (OK, Trump's people did not literally say "babysitter.") It really ought to be an embarrassment that a 76-year-old former president and third-time presidential candidate requires a full-time minder. But this also feeds into the larger Beltway narrative which holds that Republicans are never to blame for whatever they do, even when it's something gobsmackingly awful, such as having dinner with a notorious fascist and a downward-spiraling rapper who has declared "death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE."
And somehow — this is the deeply obvious but really important part — this perceived inability of Republicans to be responsible for their own choices never counts against them (at least in the mainstream media narrative) when they make the risible argument that they deserve to run the country.
Trump is running for president again and Republicans take control of the House next month. That can only mean we're about to see a dramatic escalation in nutty right-wing antics. Trump will continue to associate with scumbags. Republicans will threaten to torpedo the global economy to demand cuts to Social Security. House committees will be hijacked for GOP showboating about stupid conspiracy theories involving Hunter Biden's laptop and other irrelevant or imaginary pseudo-scandals. Trump will make any number of racist and sexist remarks and Republicans will claim they haven't heard about it and, gosh, doesn't he say the darndest things?
There are two ways for the press to deal with these depressing inevitabilities. Option No. 1 is to say straight out that the GOP is run by a bunch of shameless liars who are waging war on truth and democracy. But doing that, of course, means giving up the pretense that "both sides" are the same. The other option is to stubbornly refuse to see the abundant evidence that Republicans are deliberately sinister actors and to go on depicting them as wayward children who honestly can't be expected to know any better. The former frame fulfills the purported mission of journalism, which is to tell the truth. But alas, we're probably in for at least two years of elaborate apologies and roundabout justifications and Murc's Law proving out once again across the media universe.
Republicans are about to take power in the House of Representatives once again, and so, with exhausting predictability, we return to a Beltway narrative where none of the choices they will make with that power are their fault: It is somehow all because Democrats have failed to manage Republicans properly. Unsurprisingly, the latest example comes from Politico, which pins the blame for the rise of right-wing superstar Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene not on the voters who sent her to Congress or the GOP leaders who indulge her or the conservative media that celebrates her. Instead, Greene's popularity with Republicans is laid at the feet of Joe Biden and the Democrats.
"Biden world once ignored Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now it's making her the face of the GOP," announces a Thursday headline in Politico. Underneath it, Eugene Daniels and Jonathan Lemire write that the Biden White House has tried to turn Greene "into the poster child of the incoming House GOP majority."
But of course Biden had nothing to do with that, because Republicans had already done it. Republicans in her district enthusiastically voted her into office. Republicans gave Greene a standing ovation in response to her remarks claiming that school shootings like Parkland and Sandy Hook were "false flags." Republicans made her one of the top fundraisers in the House. Republican leadership is currently indulging Greene's demands to treat the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as "political prisoners."
As Heather Digby Parton wrote previously at Salon, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is nominally the top Republican in the House, has basically allowed Greene to become a "shadow speaker" who keeps him "on a short leash." To Politico reporters, evidently, this makes McCarthy a victim. They write that he has "no choice but to offer the hardcore members prominent posts in exchange for their support."
More nonsense, of course. There's always a choice, even if that choice is just to go home and live a life of lobbyist luxury. Kevin McCarthy goes along with the open fascists of his party because he wants to. Remember that he voted to nullify the 2020 election, even after Trump sent a mob to the Capitol to physically threaten members of Congress. He may play-act moderation for the gullible Beltway press corps, but McCarthy has been a cheerleader for the Trumpist agenda all along.
All of this is far too familiar: The D.C. press corps covers Republicans as if they were not actual adults who should be held responsible for their own decisions, but as lost and confused children who are the pawns of other people's machinations. When McCarthy kisses Trump's ring and elevates the far-right members of his party, he's portrayed as a hapless stooge. But the Trumpists who manipulate McCarthy and force him to grovel are not held to account either. As with the Politico report, blame for their behavior is often assigned to Democrats for failing to do more to control them. But, as Daniels and Lemire tacitly admit, Biden tried the "ignore them and they'll go away" tactic for more than a year and it didn't work. So now he's being blamed for amplifying Greene's popularity by belatedly acknowledging her existence.
This tendency to excuse all Republican misbehavior by treating them like purely reactive animals hit its zenith this week, in response to reports that Trump had loudmouthed antisemite Ye (formerly Kanye West), along with his Holocaust-denying buddy Nick Fuentes, over to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Obviously, the reason Trump keeps finding himself in the company of white supremacists is that he agrees with their views, something he hasn't exactly been subtle about. Still, in the face of considerable blowback, Trump used his standard go-to excuse: He simply doesn't know these white supremacists who keep showing up next to him! Absolutely no idea who they are, darn it all!
Trump coughs up this obvious lie because it creates a tiny envelope of not-very-plausible deniability while allowing him to avoid denounce people like Ye and Fuentes. He's used this tactic for years, but the press still falls for it every time. Witness this credulous story from NBC News that paints Trump not as a racist who enjoys the company of other racists, but as a hapless goofball starved for attention who "was essentially tricked by the rapper and his guests" into breaking bread with a big fan whose views on race relations are just louder versions of Trump's own.
NBC's source for the claim was an innocent victim in the dinner-date fiasco was Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing troll who works for Ye (and recently worked for Greene) and who has a long and storied history of having zero respect for the truth. This could perhaps be a rare example of Yiannopoulos telling the truth, but it's far likelier that he knows the mainstream media is always ready to excuse Republican politicians who say or do execrable things as victims of circumstance, not actual autonomous grownups making their own choices. It's no skin off Yiannopoulos' back to take the fall for Trump's dinner with neo-Nazis. If anything, it helps bolster his image as a "dirty trickster" — while also creating at least faint excuses for Trump and his supporters.
Indeed, the Trump campaign followed up this report by claiming they've assigned Trump a 24/7 babysitter, to make sure he has no more "accidental" meetings with white nationalists. (OK, Trump's people did not literally say "babysitter.") It really ought to be an embarrassment that a 76-year-old former president and third-time presidential candidate requires a full-time minder. But this also feeds into the larger Beltway narrative which holds that Republicans are never to blame for whatever they do, even when it's something gobsmackingly awful, such as having dinner with a notorious fascist and a downward-spiraling rapper who has declared "death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE."
And somehow — this is the deeply obvious but really important part — this perceived inability of Republicans to be responsible for their own choices never counts against them (at least in the mainstream media narrative) when they make the risible argument that they deserve to run the country.
Trump is running for president again and Republicans take control of the House next month. That can only mean we're about to see a dramatic escalation in nutty right-wing antics. Trump will continue to associate with scumbags. Republicans will threaten to torpedo the global economy to demand cuts to Social Security. House committees will be hijacked for GOP showboating about stupid conspiracy theories involving Hunter Biden's laptop and other irrelevant or imaginary pseudo-scandals. Trump will make any number of racist and sexist remarks and Republicans will claim they haven't heard about it and, gosh, doesn't he say the darndest things?
There are two ways for the press to deal with these depressing inevitabilities. Option No. 1 is to say straight out that the GOP is run by a bunch of shameless liars who are waging war on truth and democracy. But doing that, of course, means giving up the pretense that "both sides" are the same. The other option is to stubbornly refuse to see the abundant evidence that Republicans are deliberately sinister actors and to go on depicting them as wayward children who honestly can't be expected to know any better. The former frame fulfills the purported mission of journalism, which is to tell the truth. But alas, we're probably in for at least two years of elaborate apologies and roundabout justifications and Murc's Law proving out once again across the media universe.
Major Papers Provide Cover For GOP On Social Security, Medicare
Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post should be ashamed of himself.
Laura Clawson — crooks & liars
September 29, 2022
The major newspapers are at it again, pooh-poohing Democrats’ warnings about what Republicans plan to do when and if they gain the power to do it. Once upon a time, that journalistic sneering was aimed at Democrats warning that Republicans would overturn Roe v. Wade and ban abortion if they got the chance. Now it’s about Social Security and Medicare.
According to Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, it’s a flatly false claim to say that Republicans “plan to end Social Security and Medicare,” because only some Republicans are calling for policies that would end Social Security and Medicare. They claim those policies would strengthen the programs, about which we should definitely take them at their word. According to another Post headline, President Joe Biden “stokes fears” about Republicans and Social Security and Medicare when he … talks about what Republicans say they want to do to the programs. In The New York Times, we learn that Biden “insisted” Republicans want to cut the programs.
Biden quotes Republicans and we’re told he’s stoking fears and insisting they’ll do a thing that it’s strongly implied to outright said that they won’t do. Again, you have only to look at the very recent history of abortion policy in this country to decide how believable the media’s claims that Republicans won’t do this are.
Here’s where Republicans are on this: Sen. Rick Scott wants to require all federal legislation and funding—including Social Security and Medicare—to sunset, or expire, every five years unless Congress affirmatively renews it. Bear in mind here that every time Congress has to pass a bill to continue funding the government, we come right to the brink of a government shutdown. Or go over the brink. Republicans take hostages, they demand cuts, they force essential legislation to expire to try to get their way. Now apply that process to Social Security and Medicare every. Five. Years.
Sen. Ron Johnson takes that approach to the next level: He wants Social Security and Medicare to be part of the annual budget, requiring a vote every year to keep them funded. So every time Congress brought the government to within days of a shutdown, every senior in the country relying on Social Security and Medicare would have to worry that this time their check wouldn’t come or their medical care wouldn’t be covered. Johnson also wants to put Social Security funds in the stock market, subjecting it to the ups and downs of the economy. The Republican Study Committee budget, endorsed by 158 House Republicans, calls for privatizing Social Security and raising the retirement age. The House Republican Twitter account recently retweeted an op-ed by Rep. Jodey Arrington arguing that “we must begin addressing the real debt drivers – mandatory spending programs.” Translation: Social Security and Medicare.
There’s also a longer history here, which Dean Obeidallah recently sketched out at MSNBC. “In 1994, when Republicans, led by Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, took control of the House for the first time in 40 years, one of their top priorities was gutting Medicare. And the next year, with Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, they voted to cut $270 billion in Medicare funding to finance a tax cut that would primarily benefit upper income taxpayers,” he wrote. That’s not all. In 2005, Republicans, led by then-President George W. Bush, made a push to privatize Social Security, a push defeated by a huge public outcry. More than a decade later, as speaker of the House, Paul Ryan proposed privatizing Medicare. Donald Trump’s 2020 budget called for $800 billion in cuts to Medicare over 10 years.
”Fact checkers” like Glenn Kessler want to make Republican talk about gutting Social Security and Medicare into a matter of one or two rogue senators running their mouths, but the reality is that these plans wouldn’t keep coming up if Republicans didn’t really mean it. The 2005 experience convinced many of them that they needed to dress up their plans in gauzy language, sure, but the basic goal hasn’t changed.
According to Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, it’s a flatly false claim to say that Republicans “plan to end Social Security and Medicare,” because only some Republicans are calling for policies that would end Social Security and Medicare. They claim those policies would strengthen the programs, about which we should definitely take them at their word. According to another Post headline, President Joe Biden “stokes fears” about Republicans and Social Security and Medicare when he … talks about what Republicans say they want to do to the programs. In The New York Times, we learn that Biden “insisted” Republicans want to cut the programs.
Biden quotes Republicans and we’re told he’s stoking fears and insisting they’ll do a thing that it’s strongly implied to outright said that they won’t do. Again, you have only to look at the very recent history of abortion policy in this country to decide how believable the media’s claims that Republicans won’t do this are.
Here’s where Republicans are on this: Sen. Rick Scott wants to require all federal legislation and funding—including Social Security and Medicare—to sunset, or expire, every five years unless Congress affirmatively renews it. Bear in mind here that every time Congress has to pass a bill to continue funding the government, we come right to the brink of a government shutdown. Or go over the brink. Republicans take hostages, they demand cuts, they force essential legislation to expire to try to get their way. Now apply that process to Social Security and Medicare every. Five. Years.
Sen. Ron Johnson takes that approach to the next level: He wants Social Security and Medicare to be part of the annual budget, requiring a vote every year to keep them funded. So every time Congress brought the government to within days of a shutdown, every senior in the country relying on Social Security and Medicare would have to worry that this time their check wouldn’t come or their medical care wouldn’t be covered. Johnson also wants to put Social Security funds in the stock market, subjecting it to the ups and downs of the economy. The Republican Study Committee budget, endorsed by 158 House Republicans, calls for privatizing Social Security and raising the retirement age. The House Republican Twitter account recently retweeted an op-ed by Rep. Jodey Arrington arguing that “we must begin addressing the real debt drivers – mandatory spending programs.” Translation: Social Security and Medicare.
There’s also a longer history here, which Dean Obeidallah recently sketched out at MSNBC. “In 1994, when Republicans, led by Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, took control of the House for the first time in 40 years, one of their top priorities was gutting Medicare. And the next year, with Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, they voted to cut $270 billion in Medicare funding to finance a tax cut that would primarily benefit upper income taxpayers,” he wrote. That’s not all. In 2005, Republicans, led by then-President George W. Bush, made a push to privatize Social Security, a push defeated by a huge public outcry. More than a decade later, as speaker of the House, Paul Ryan proposed privatizing Medicare. Donald Trump’s 2020 budget called for $800 billion in cuts to Medicare over 10 years.
”Fact checkers” like Glenn Kessler want to make Republican talk about gutting Social Security and Medicare into a matter of one or two rogue senators running their mouths, but the reality is that these plans wouldn’t keep coming up if Republicans didn’t really mean it. The 2005 experience convinced many of them that they needed to dress up their plans in gauzy language, sure, but the basic goal hasn’t changed.
Lies, falsehoods and "vacuous truths": GOP explores a new realm of absolute emptiness
Why the media — and formal logic, for that matter — has been utterly defeated by the Trump era
By JEREMIAH DAVID - salon
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 4, 2022 12:00PM (EDT)
As the midterm elections bear down on us like a falling piano, I've been reflecting on the current information environment. Republican nominees in about half the country's gubernatorial races continue to dismiss the results of the 2020 election, and in at least four key swing states there's a good chance the next vote count will be overseen by an election denier.
Two years after Trump's unceremonious exit, with his infamous 30,573 lies in the rearview mirror, might seem a little late to sound the alarm on the post-truth era. It can be tempting to assume there's simply nothing new to say about this moment. Politicians always lie and always will. I'll admit that the endless hand-wringing in op-eds like this one about the value of the words "lie" vs. "falsehood" often leave me feeling depleted and apathetic.
It took a logic puzzle on a math test, of all things, to get me thinking about this problem in a different way.
The puzzle first appeared in the 17th annual Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad, and has since become the subject of fierce debate online. Don't worry, I won't bore you by transcribing the whole thing here. What you need to know are two starting propositions:
There's nothing special about the color green in this case, or the fact that the liar is a wooden puppet. He could just as well be, say, the former president of the United States, and he could just as well be wearing a red MAGA hat. The crux of the puzzle is in deciding which of the following statements must be true, given what we know about Pinocchio's track record:
In pure mathematics, the definition of a falsehood is surprisingly narrow, and an important exception exists for what are called "vacuous truths." These are essentially statements about the world which are predicated on false or nonsensical antecedents. Vacuous truths are seen as more absurd than false, since they are often unfalsifiable and may not even make contact with reality. In other words, it is not exactly a lie for Pinocchio to say, "All my hats are green," if he has no hats at all.
Of course, in the real world, we treat both A and B as lies. There is a point at which formal logic and conversational implicature diverge, and a claim such as "all the stolen ballots were for Trump," does not, by some bizarre application of the horseshoe theory, become more true if there were no stolen ballots in the first place.
Yet the distinction between conventional lies and vacuous truths articulates an important problem, even if the logician's answer to it is ill-suited to daily life. Call it the absurdity problem. We tend to think of truth and lies as opposite points on a spectrum, but what if the spectrum kept going well past lying and into some uncharted territory of invention?
If you've been following the Republican primaries lately, you'd be forgiven for thinking there's no more spectrum left to travel. With the ouster of Liz Cheney in Wyoming and the ascendancy of a new species of conspiracy theorist in Congress, it's as if the consensus on the right is that an unequivocal break with the truth actually goes full circle.
In the media, the absurdity problem helps explain the asymmetry that keeps reputable journalists forever playing defense. The slightest error in an otherwise scrupulous article is touted as proof of bias, while a full-fledged disinformation campaign is almost too big of a target to hit.
At a certain distance from reality, our intuitions tend to fall apart. As Jonathan Rauch once put it, "This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation." Laughter, puzzlement, dismissal — our usual reactions to absurdity — are worse than impotent, in that they offer cover for bad actors to push us further and further away from the truth. We need to stop treating the current information crisis as a carnival sideshow and start seeing it for the headliner it has become. Importantly, the mathematical concept of vacuity ignores the way that truly cynical people have always lied: not in separate units but as an accretion, a slow buildup of falsehood on falsehood, so that we bury ourselves looking for the bottom.
Two years after Trump's unceremonious exit, with his infamous 30,573 lies in the rearview mirror, might seem a little late to sound the alarm on the post-truth era. It can be tempting to assume there's simply nothing new to say about this moment. Politicians always lie and always will. I'll admit that the endless hand-wringing in op-eds like this one about the value of the words "lie" vs. "falsehood" often leave me feeling depleted and apathetic.
It took a logic puzzle on a math test, of all things, to get me thinking about this problem in a different way.
The puzzle first appeared in the 17th annual Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad, and has since become the subject of fierce debate online. Don't worry, I won't bore you by transcribing the whole thing here. What you need to know are two starting propositions:
- Pinocchio always lies.
- Pinocchio says, "All my hats are green."
There's nothing special about the color green in this case, or the fact that the liar is a wooden puppet. He could just as well be, say, the former president of the United States, and he could just as well be wearing a red MAGA hat. The crux of the puzzle is in deciding which of the following statements must be true, given what we know about Pinocchio's track record:
- Pinocchio has no hats.
- Pinocchio has at least one hat.
In pure mathematics, the definition of a falsehood is surprisingly narrow, and an important exception exists for what are called "vacuous truths." These are essentially statements about the world which are predicated on false or nonsensical antecedents. Vacuous truths are seen as more absurd than false, since they are often unfalsifiable and may not even make contact with reality. In other words, it is not exactly a lie for Pinocchio to say, "All my hats are green," if he has no hats at all.
Of course, in the real world, we treat both A and B as lies. There is a point at which formal logic and conversational implicature diverge, and a claim such as "all the stolen ballots were for Trump," does not, by some bizarre application of the horseshoe theory, become more true if there were no stolen ballots in the first place.
Yet the distinction between conventional lies and vacuous truths articulates an important problem, even if the logician's answer to it is ill-suited to daily life. Call it the absurdity problem. We tend to think of truth and lies as opposite points on a spectrum, but what if the spectrum kept going well past lying and into some uncharted territory of invention?
If you've been following the Republican primaries lately, you'd be forgiven for thinking there's no more spectrum left to travel. With the ouster of Liz Cheney in Wyoming and the ascendancy of a new species of conspiracy theorist in Congress, it's as if the consensus on the right is that an unequivocal break with the truth actually goes full circle.
In the media, the absurdity problem helps explain the asymmetry that keeps reputable journalists forever playing defense. The slightest error in an otherwise scrupulous article is touted as proof of bias, while a full-fledged disinformation campaign is almost too big of a target to hit.
At a certain distance from reality, our intuitions tend to fall apart. As Jonathan Rauch once put it, "This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation." Laughter, puzzlement, dismissal — our usual reactions to absurdity — are worse than impotent, in that they offer cover for bad actors to push us further and further away from the truth. We need to stop treating the current information crisis as a carnival sideshow and start seeing it for the headliner it has become. Importantly, the mathematical concept of vacuity ignores the way that truly cynical people have always lied: not in separate units but as an accretion, a slow buildup of falsehood on falsehood, so that we bury ourselves looking for the bottom.
Biden Boom hits new heights — press buries the good news
Sticking to the script
Eric Boehlert - pressrun
1/31/2022
Want more proof that the mainstream media remains committed to downplaying good news about the Biden economic boom?
When the Commerce Department on Thursday announced that the economy just grew at the fastest rate in nearly 40 years, posting robust growth numbers not seen since the Reagan era, none of the network newscasts treated the announcement as a big deal. In fact, two of the three newscasts, “ABC World News Tonight” and “CBS Evening News” didn’t even cover the story on Thursday — “NBC Nightly News” gave it one sentence.
The same media that remains in inflation hyperventilation mode, just cannot work up the energy to consistently inform news consumers about the red-hot economy under President Joe Biden. It won’t billboard the fact that it grew so rapidly in the fourth quarter of last year that it pushed the annual gross domestic product rate — the broadest measure of economic activity — to an eye-popping 5.7 percent. (The GDP under Trump never got above 3 percent.) Consumer spending also soared 7.9% last year, the quickest clip in since 1946.
So attached to the idea of using economic news to bash Biden, the press doesn’t know what to do when the data demolish the media’s preferred storyline. That was obvious by the fact that the coverage of the blockbuster GDP news seemed to go out of its way not to mention him.
In its GDP news piece, the New York Times made no reference to Biden or that the soaring economic data were a boost for the administration. But when the Times covers jobs reports and inflation updates it makes sure to emphasize, prominently in the coverage, that that news is bad for Biden. In its reporting on the jump in the December inflation rate, the newspaper mentioned Biden in the very first sentence, referencing, “a troubling development for President Biden and economic policymakers.”
This trend is quite common. The Associated Press in its reporting on high inflation in December also mentioned Biden in the first sentence, while its recent report on GDP figures didn’t mention him until the tenth paragraph, and made no suggestion that the figures represented a win for the White House.
Then there were the news outlets that acknowledged the GDP numbers were good news, but stressed that bad news was likely around the corner. “Economy Caps Strong Year as Worries Lurk,” was the Wall Street Journal page-one print headline. CNN rushed in with similar, glass-half-empty analysis: “The Economy Boomed in Biden's First Year. His Second Will Be Harder.”
The CNN spin was especially remarkable because the network spent the second half of last year burying Biden with doomsday economic coverage, especially regarding inflation, which was deemed a “political nightmare for Biden.” (Remember CNN’s wacky report about gallons of milk?) Then when GDP numbers confirmed that the economy had been on fire last year, CNN begrudgingly acknowledged the fact (“the economy boomed”), then quickly insisted Biden faces economic trouble in 2022.
Heads, Biden loses. Tails, Biden loses.
That media drumbeat of negativity, cheered on by the GOP, has taken its toll. Recently asked in a YouGov poll if they had “heard mostly positive or mostly negative news stories about the economy,” 48 percent of Americans said “mostly negative,” and just 8 percent said “mostly positive.” (28 percent said both negative/positive, and 16 percent said they hadn’t heard much about the economy at all.) Those results came in the wake of a media study that showed Biden was getting worse coverage late last year then Trump did in late 2020.
Note that the same day the GDP announcement was made, a National Public Radio reporter was on Twitter asking listeners to share their stories of economic gloom: “Has your 2021 raise been wiped out by #inflation? Has your 401k taken such a steep dive you're rethinking retirement? The@nprbusiness desk wants to hear from you.” The plea raised the obvious question: Why does NPR only want to hear bad news about the economy?
Another key fact about the coverage: The GDP for 2021 obliterated expectations that had been set by economists during the run-up to the announcement. Yet still the press shrugged. That’s telling because when it comes to reporting on monthly jobs reports, the press bases its coverage entirely around the same type of expectations.
When 199,000 new jobs were added in December, the press treated that as bad news (“faltering,” “a major disappointment”) because the key number failed to beat expectations.
Last year, NPR announced the 210,000-jobs report for November was a “bust” even though the unemployment rate tumbled from 4.6 percent to 4.2 percent in just 30 days. By contrast, back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy under Trump was “revved up” because 225,000 jobs had been created. That jobs report was good news because it beat expectations.
So why wasn’t the estimate-beating GDP news treated as a huge deal? NPR, which has been committed to doomsday economic coverage under Biden, tried to downplay the news, suggesting that “believe it or not” the economy grew last year.
For NPR, good economic news under Biden is treated as a mirage.
When the Commerce Department on Thursday announced that the economy just grew at the fastest rate in nearly 40 years, posting robust growth numbers not seen since the Reagan era, none of the network newscasts treated the announcement as a big deal. In fact, two of the three newscasts, “ABC World News Tonight” and “CBS Evening News” didn’t even cover the story on Thursday — “NBC Nightly News” gave it one sentence.
The same media that remains in inflation hyperventilation mode, just cannot work up the energy to consistently inform news consumers about the red-hot economy under President Joe Biden. It won’t billboard the fact that it grew so rapidly in the fourth quarter of last year that it pushed the annual gross domestic product rate — the broadest measure of economic activity — to an eye-popping 5.7 percent. (The GDP under Trump never got above 3 percent.) Consumer spending also soared 7.9% last year, the quickest clip in since 1946.
So attached to the idea of using economic news to bash Biden, the press doesn’t know what to do when the data demolish the media’s preferred storyline. That was obvious by the fact that the coverage of the blockbuster GDP news seemed to go out of its way not to mention him.
In its GDP news piece, the New York Times made no reference to Biden or that the soaring economic data were a boost for the administration. But when the Times covers jobs reports and inflation updates it makes sure to emphasize, prominently in the coverage, that that news is bad for Biden. In its reporting on the jump in the December inflation rate, the newspaper mentioned Biden in the very first sentence, referencing, “a troubling development for President Biden and economic policymakers.”
This trend is quite common. The Associated Press in its reporting on high inflation in December also mentioned Biden in the first sentence, while its recent report on GDP figures didn’t mention him until the tenth paragraph, and made no suggestion that the figures represented a win for the White House.
Then there were the news outlets that acknowledged the GDP numbers were good news, but stressed that bad news was likely around the corner. “Economy Caps Strong Year as Worries Lurk,” was the Wall Street Journal page-one print headline. CNN rushed in with similar, glass-half-empty analysis: “The Economy Boomed in Biden's First Year. His Second Will Be Harder.”
The CNN spin was especially remarkable because the network spent the second half of last year burying Biden with doomsday economic coverage, especially regarding inflation, which was deemed a “political nightmare for Biden.” (Remember CNN’s wacky report about gallons of milk?) Then when GDP numbers confirmed that the economy had been on fire last year, CNN begrudgingly acknowledged the fact (“the economy boomed”), then quickly insisted Biden faces economic trouble in 2022.
Heads, Biden loses. Tails, Biden loses.
That media drumbeat of negativity, cheered on by the GOP, has taken its toll. Recently asked in a YouGov poll if they had “heard mostly positive or mostly negative news stories about the economy,” 48 percent of Americans said “mostly negative,” and just 8 percent said “mostly positive.” (28 percent said both negative/positive, and 16 percent said they hadn’t heard much about the economy at all.) Those results came in the wake of a media study that showed Biden was getting worse coverage late last year then Trump did in late 2020.
Note that the same day the GDP announcement was made, a National Public Radio reporter was on Twitter asking listeners to share their stories of economic gloom: “Has your 2021 raise been wiped out by #inflation? Has your 401k taken such a steep dive you're rethinking retirement? The@nprbusiness desk wants to hear from you.” The plea raised the obvious question: Why does NPR only want to hear bad news about the economy?
Another key fact about the coverage: The GDP for 2021 obliterated expectations that had been set by economists during the run-up to the announcement. Yet still the press shrugged. That’s telling because when it comes to reporting on monthly jobs reports, the press bases its coverage entirely around the same type of expectations.
When 199,000 new jobs were added in December, the press treated that as bad news (“faltering,” “a major disappointment”) because the key number failed to beat expectations.
Last year, NPR announced the 210,000-jobs report for November was a “bust” even though the unemployment rate tumbled from 4.6 percent to 4.2 percent in just 30 days. By contrast, back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy under Trump was “revved up” because 225,000 jobs had been created. That jobs report was good news because it beat expectations.
So why wasn’t the estimate-beating GDP news treated as a huge deal? NPR, which has been committed to doomsday economic coverage under Biden, tried to downplay the news, suggesting that “believe it or not” the economy grew last year.
For NPR, good economic news under Biden is treated as a mirage.
ratings vs reality!!!
Complete failure — the media's critical race theory debacle gets worse
Regurgitating the GOP
Eric Boehlert
Did you know the entire “country” is now “panicked” about critical race theory? That absurd claim was laundered in a New York Times headline this week, as the newspaper tried to unpack the current, manufactured outrage being fueled by conservatives in their never-ending bid to wage cultural wars.
The ginned-up moral crisis continues to rage because news outlets like the Times are doing a monumentally awful job framing the story and making nonsense claims like the “country” is “panicked” about an obscure, insightful academic pursuit, usually only taught in colleges and graduate schools. (Spoiler: Most of the country has no idea what critical race theory is, let alone “panicked” by it.)
Last month, I noted how the media were helping to fuel the critical race theory hysteria. Since then, the problem has become exacerbated as news outlets defy common sense and simple journalism standards by refusing to be clear about what the controversy is really about. It’s about deep-pocketed players on the right once again hijacking the national debate by pushing manufactured outrages, and watching the mainstream media relentlessly echo their claims. (The conservative Washington Examiner has published more than 40 critical race theory pieces — this month.)
Instead of forcefully debunking, journalists remain overly impressed with how the GOP has been able to turn critical race theory into a big news story — while journalists themselves help turn critical race theory into a big news story. The press has become part of the problem. When the right-wing freaks out over a narrative, the press instinctively asks how high should they jump.
Today the answer is, quite high as the media attention continues unabated. The nonstop reportage and commentary represent a red flag because the American media, and particularly the political press, typically couldn’t care less about what’s being taught in U.S. schools. But with Republicans and the entire right-wing media infrastructure obsessing over the made-up classroom dispute, suddenly the media are laser-focused on the academic issue.
It’s like journalists have entered some sort of Twilight Zone where they agree to relentlessly cover the GOP-fueled controversy, while simultaneously omitting the most important fact that would instantly deflate the hullabaloo — critical race theory isn’t taught in schools.
We’ve seen this play out countless times in recent years. The media-fueled critical race theory insanity is reminiscent of when Fox News and the GOP went berserk in the summer of 2010 condemning the so-called Gound Zero Mosque being built in New York City. Constructed around constant lies, the smear campaign was legitimized by weeks’ worth of intense mainstream media coverage, which often echoed right-wing misinformation.
Today, it’s the same thing all over again with critical race theory, which examines the history of institutional racism in America.
“We’re saying, ‘What is the fuss about?’” said Lynn Daniel, a ninth-grade English teacher in the Phoenix area. “We don’t get it. This objection is being pushed upon us, and it’s not even happening in our classes. I don’t understand it.”
Reminder: When Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis moved to ban critical race theory from classrooms in the Sunshine State, the Miami Herald reported, “Superintendents across the state have said they do not teach critical race theory in their schools. But that did not stop the State Board [of Education] from considering the rule” to ban it. (For the record, it would be perfectly fine if the theory were taught in classrooms.)
It’s the same all across the country — Republicans are taking draconian moves to protect students from the alleged sorcery that is critical race theory, yet Republicans can’t find examples of it actually being taught in schools. For journalists covering the made-up controversy, that’s the story — conservatives are feverishly pushing a concocted claim and the entire Republican Party is playing along, creating unnecessary chaos for educators across the country.
But that’s not how the story is being covered. Instead, most news accounts fail to mention that critical race theory isn’t taught in schools. Incredibly, the news coverage often looks past the gaping hole in this story and instead helps the GOP spread the madness as the media failures pile up:
• The Times’ 1,700-word “panicked” piece on critical race theory made no mention that the topic isn’t taught in schools.
•Yahoo! News this week posted a piece about how “Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is calling on "every governor" in the United States to "ban" the funding of critical race theory instruction in public schools.”
Nowhere in the story was it pointed out critical race theory doesn’t exist in public classrooms.
* The Washington Post published a 3,000-word look at the GOP’s critical race theory campaign, emphasizing how it was shaping up to be a major cultural issue for the 2022 midterm election cycle. The Post made no mention that the race topic isn’t taught in schools.
The simple truth is that if reporters point out the theory isn’t taught in schools, then there’s no GOP-manufactured controversy to cover. So journalists look the other way.
Education writer Alexander Russo recently offered up some timely advice for how to cover the critical race theory story: “Think carefully about how you frame the story, make sure to assess the extent of the problem, and give context to readers. Address the heated emotions without necessarily taking them at face value —or making them your central focus.”
Unfortunately, most of the wise counsel has been ignored as the media dutifully pumps up the hollow GOP smear campaign.
The ginned-up moral crisis continues to rage because news outlets like the Times are doing a monumentally awful job framing the story and making nonsense claims like the “country” is “panicked” about an obscure, insightful academic pursuit, usually only taught in colleges and graduate schools. (Spoiler: Most of the country has no idea what critical race theory is, let alone “panicked” by it.)
Last month, I noted how the media were helping to fuel the critical race theory hysteria. Since then, the problem has become exacerbated as news outlets defy common sense and simple journalism standards by refusing to be clear about what the controversy is really about. It’s about deep-pocketed players on the right once again hijacking the national debate by pushing manufactured outrages, and watching the mainstream media relentlessly echo their claims. (The conservative Washington Examiner has published more than 40 critical race theory pieces — this month.)
Instead of forcefully debunking, journalists remain overly impressed with how the GOP has been able to turn critical race theory into a big news story — while journalists themselves help turn critical race theory into a big news story. The press has become part of the problem. When the right-wing freaks out over a narrative, the press instinctively asks how high should they jump.
Today the answer is, quite high as the media attention continues unabated. The nonstop reportage and commentary represent a red flag because the American media, and particularly the political press, typically couldn’t care less about what’s being taught in U.S. schools. But with Republicans and the entire right-wing media infrastructure obsessing over the made-up classroom dispute, suddenly the media are laser-focused on the academic issue.
It’s like journalists have entered some sort of Twilight Zone where they agree to relentlessly cover the GOP-fueled controversy, while simultaneously omitting the most important fact that would instantly deflate the hullabaloo — critical race theory isn’t taught in schools.
We’ve seen this play out countless times in recent years. The media-fueled critical race theory insanity is reminiscent of when Fox News and the GOP went berserk in the summer of 2010 condemning the so-called Gound Zero Mosque being built in New York City. Constructed around constant lies, the smear campaign was legitimized by weeks’ worth of intense mainstream media coverage, which often echoed right-wing misinformation.
Today, it’s the same thing all over again with critical race theory, which examines the history of institutional racism in America.
“We’re saying, ‘What is the fuss about?’” said Lynn Daniel, a ninth-grade English teacher in the Phoenix area. “We don’t get it. This objection is being pushed upon us, and it’s not even happening in our classes. I don’t understand it.”
Reminder: When Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis moved to ban critical race theory from classrooms in the Sunshine State, the Miami Herald reported, “Superintendents across the state have said they do not teach critical race theory in their schools. But that did not stop the State Board [of Education] from considering the rule” to ban it. (For the record, it would be perfectly fine if the theory were taught in classrooms.)
It’s the same all across the country — Republicans are taking draconian moves to protect students from the alleged sorcery that is critical race theory, yet Republicans can’t find examples of it actually being taught in schools. For journalists covering the made-up controversy, that’s the story — conservatives are feverishly pushing a concocted claim and the entire Republican Party is playing along, creating unnecessary chaos for educators across the country.
But that’s not how the story is being covered. Instead, most news accounts fail to mention that critical race theory isn’t taught in schools. Incredibly, the news coverage often looks past the gaping hole in this story and instead helps the GOP spread the madness as the media failures pile up:
• The Times’ 1,700-word “panicked” piece on critical race theory made no mention that the topic isn’t taught in schools.
•Yahoo! News this week posted a piece about how “Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is calling on "every governor" in the United States to "ban" the funding of critical race theory instruction in public schools.”
Nowhere in the story was it pointed out critical race theory doesn’t exist in public classrooms.
* The Washington Post published a 3,000-word look at the GOP’s critical race theory campaign, emphasizing how it was shaping up to be a major cultural issue for the 2022 midterm election cycle. The Post made no mention that the race topic isn’t taught in schools.
The simple truth is that if reporters point out the theory isn’t taught in schools, then there’s no GOP-manufactured controversy to cover. So journalists look the other way.
Education writer Alexander Russo recently offered up some timely advice for how to cover the critical race theory story: “Think carefully about how you frame the story, make sure to assess the extent of the problem, and give context to readers. Address the heated emotions without necessarily taking them at face value —or making them your central focus.”
Unfortunately, most of the wise counsel has been ignored as the media dutifully pumps up the hollow GOP smear campaign.
NANCEGREGGS@DU
THE TIME HAS COME TO PICK A SIDE
I GREW UP IN THE ERA OF WALTER CRONKITE AND EDWARD R. MURROW, A TIME WHEN TV NEWSCASTERS USED A "JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM" APPROACH TO DELIVERING THE NEWS -WITHOUT EDITORIAL COMMENT, AND WITHOUT REGARD TO THE POLITICAL OPINIONS OF THEIR EMPLOYERS.
BUT THAT WAS BEFORE TV JOURNALISM DEVOLVED INTO NEWSOTAINMENT, BEFORE NEWS OUTLETS RELIED ON FLASHY SETS AND FLASH-CARD CHYRONS TO GARNER AN AUDIENCE. MORE IMPORTANTLY, IT WAS BEFORE BOTH-SIDERISM BECAME THE NORM, AND "FAIR AND BALANCED" CAME TO MEAN NEITHER.
IT WOULD BE NICE IF WE COULD GO BACK TO A TIME WHEN THE POLITICAL EVENTS OF THE DAY WERE RECOUNTED WITHOUT THE PRETENSE THAT THE STATEMENTS AND ACTIONS OF THOSE ON ONE SIDE OF THE POLITICAL AISLE NEED TO BE COUNTERED WITH SOMETHING PRESENTED AS EQUALLY EGREGIOUS FROM THE OTHER SIDE.
IT WOULD BE OF GREAT SERVICE TO OUR NATION IF - BY WAY OF GLARING EXAMPLE - THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION WAS NOT COMPARED TO CITIZENS PROTESTING RACIAL INJUSTICE. THE LATTER WAS A MEANS OF DRAWING ATTENTION TO A JUST CAUSE - THE FORMER WAS AN ATTEMPT TO OVERTHROW OUR DEMOCRACY - AND ANY EFFORT TO EQUATE THE TWO IS, BY DEFAULT, "TAKING A SIDE".
HAVING GROWN UP IN THE DAYS WHEN THE NEWS ACTUALLY WAS PREMISED ON NOT TAKING SIDES, I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD SAY THE FOLLOWING. BUT GIVEN WHERE WE ARE AS A NATION, AND GIVEN THAT THERE ARE NO MEANS BY WHICH WE CAN GO BACK TO TRULY NEUTRAL REPORTAGE, IT ACTUALLY IS A TIME WHEN JOURNALISTS HAVE TO PICK A SIDE AND REPORT ACCORDINGLY.
THIS IS THE TIME WHEN BOTHSIDERISM HAS TO BE STRUCK DOWN, A TIME WHEN THE WORDS AND ACTIONS OF THE PARTY THAT INCITED, SUPPORTED, FUNDED AND CONTINUES TO DEFEND AN ATTACK ON OUR DEMOCRACY ARE RELENTLESSLY DRIVEN HOME, WITHOUT ANY SPINELESS, MEALY-MOUTHED MUTTERINGS ABOUT HOW THEIR BEHAVIOUR HAS TO BE SOMEHOW WEIGHED AND MEASURED AGAINST THE BEHAVIOUR OF THOSE WHO OPPOSE THEM.
THERE IS NO LONGER ANY WIGGLE ROOM LEFT FOR NEWSCASTERS AND/OR JOURNALISTS. THERE ARE NO LONGER ANY SIDELINES ON WHICH TO PARK YOUR ASSES AND COMMENT FROM, AS THOUGH YOU HAVE NO SKIN IN THE GAME. THERE IS NO NEUTRAL TERRITORY TO RUN TO BECAUSE YOU'RE TOO AFRAID TO SPEAK THE TRUTH.
THE REPUBLICANS ARE ANXIOUS FOR CIVIL WAR, AND ARE USING EVERY MEANS POSSIBLE TO INCITE IT.
SO IT'S TIME TO PICK WHICH SIDE YOU'RE ON - BECAUSE THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING, THE DAY MAY COME WHEN YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE A CHOICE AT ALL.
JUST ANOTHER FOOL AT FOX!!!
Varney Blames Bernie Sanders And AOC For Texas Power Outages
Who knew Bernie Sanders and AOC made Texans freeze?
By John Amato - CROOKS & LIARS
2/16/2021
Stuart Varney, a staunch Trump and big oil supporter, unconscionably blamed the massive power outages in Texas on environmentalists, and named Bernie Sanders and AOC as the culprits.
With no proof or evidence (as usual) the FOX Business host belched propaganda for two minutes about "coastal elites depriving you of your heat in the freezing cold."
"Our hearts go out to the people of Texas and all those caught in his deep-freeze. Being without power, water, heating, in frigid conditions is no fun, they can be deadly," he said.
Varney described how wind turbines freezing up caused the massive blackout which decimated Texas communities and left them without power.
Then suddenly, he turned on the greenies.
"Set this on climate policy and you see the problem," he said
Really?
"Nat gas is a fossil fuel and the greens don't like it so they kill pipelines and stop drilling. The flyover folks are now literally playing the price for the coastal elites who are 'saving the planet.'"
Huh?
He yelled that the Greens demand you get power from renewables!
"They don't care if you freeze," he yelled
"They are above it all!"
Varney just hates renewables, loves fossil fuels, and makes a profit from attacking any form of the Green New Deal or sensible climate change policy. Varney will do and say anything to prop up big oil.
Varney continued, "Bernie Sanders and AOC would be apoplectic if the president backed off even a smidgen. Which means you pay, you get blacked out, you have to buy a generator you have to freeze in the dark you lose your jobs that's quite a price to pay for the green dream of the elites."
Interesting, then, that The Houston Chronicle blames local officials for their neglect of the power grid.
Anyone notice who they turned to for help in this crisis? The federal government, ie. the taxpayers of California.
Qonservatives can fearmonger any disaster, whether it's man-made or natural and turn it into an instant attack on climate change policies, government spending, decency to the undocumented worker, or any democratic proposal that helps the nation instead of the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans in Texas holding office are the laughing stock and their communities are suffering for it.
Oh my God, what a jackass.
With no proof or evidence (as usual) the FOX Business host belched propaganda for two minutes about "coastal elites depriving you of your heat in the freezing cold."
"Our hearts go out to the people of Texas and all those caught in his deep-freeze. Being without power, water, heating, in frigid conditions is no fun, they can be deadly," he said.
Varney described how wind turbines freezing up caused the massive blackout which decimated Texas communities and left them without power.
Then suddenly, he turned on the greenies.
"Set this on climate policy and you see the problem," he said
Really?
"Nat gas is a fossil fuel and the greens don't like it so they kill pipelines and stop drilling. The flyover folks are now literally playing the price for the coastal elites who are 'saving the planet.'"
Huh?
He yelled that the Greens demand you get power from renewables!
"They don't care if you freeze," he yelled
"They are above it all!"
Varney just hates renewables, loves fossil fuels, and makes a profit from attacking any form of the Green New Deal or sensible climate change policy. Varney will do and say anything to prop up big oil.
Varney continued, "Bernie Sanders and AOC would be apoplectic if the president backed off even a smidgen. Which means you pay, you get blacked out, you have to buy a generator you have to freeze in the dark you lose your jobs that's quite a price to pay for the green dream of the elites."
Interesting, then, that The Houston Chronicle blames local officials for their neglect of the power grid.
Anyone notice who they turned to for help in this crisis? The federal government, ie. the taxpayers of California.
Qonservatives can fearmonger any disaster, whether it's man-made or natural and turn it into an instant attack on climate change policies, government spending, decency to the undocumented worker, or any democratic proposal that helps the nation instead of the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans in Texas holding office are the laughing stock and their communities are suffering for it.
Oh my God, what a jackass.
"There’s a racial component": Newsmax host complains impeachment is racist against “white folk"
“It’s clear to me there’s a racial component,” said Newsmax host Greg Kelly
By JON SKOLNIK - salon
FEBRUARY 12, 2021 5:46PM (UTC)
Newsmax host Greg Kelly claimed on Thursday that the push to convict Trump has a "racial component" and is ultimately fueled by anti-white sentiment.
"Right now in America, who doesn't have much status?" Kelly asked. "White folk. Especially poor, white folk. Especially poor, white people who stormed the Capitol," the top-rated cable news host asserted, ignoring data that shows most people arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are professionals like business owners and police officers.
"They should not have done it and I think the rioters should be prosecuted," the host added, before qualifying that not all rioters should be held equally responsible. "Some of them were led inside…some of them just happened to be there," explained Kelly, in a strange attempt to remove the rioters of their own agency.
"Did you see the video outside of Nancy Pelosi's office?" Kelly continued, "This is evidence and it should be looked into and –– and those responsible should be punished. But why so selective? Why is this like 9/11?"
Security camera footage presented by impeachment trial managers on the second day of trial showed members of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's, D-NY, staff running into an office that they barricaded as the riot was underway. Rioters managed to breach the outer office door but did not succeed in getting past the inner one.
The Newsmax host then contrasted the media's coverage of insurrection to what he thought was the deferential treatment of the Minneapolis racial. "What about when they took over that police precinct in Minneapolis?" he asked.
"I mean, they took over a police precinct. Guess what?" he continued. "They went inside. They trashed the place. The cops had to evacuate. The cops actually had to evacuate. And this was considered a beautiful thing somehow.
"Now why is that? What's the difference?" he asked, one difference, of course, being that, while one group of demonstrators was protesting against the racism in law enforcement –– a phenomenon widely documented throughout U.S. history –– another other was raging against a non-existent case of election fraud.
"Right now in America, who doesn't have much status?" Kelly asked. "White folk. Especially poor, white folk. Especially poor, white people who stormed the Capitol," the top-rated cable news host asserted, ignoring data that shows most people arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are professionals like business owners and police officers.
"They should not have done it and I think the rioters should be prosecuted," the host added, before qualifying that not all rioters should be held equally responsible. "Some of them were led inside…some of them just happened to be there," explained Kelly, in a strange attempt to remove the rioters of their own agency.
"Did you see the video outside of Nancy Pelosi's office?" Kelly continued, "This is evidence and it should be looked into and –– and those responsible should be punished. But why so selective? Why is this like 9/11?"
Security camera footage presented by impeachment trial managers on the second day of trial showed members of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's, D-NY, staff running into an office that they barricaded as the riot was underway. Rioters managed to breach the outer office door but did not succeed in getting past the inner one.
The Newsmax host then contrasted the media's coverage of insurrection to what he thought was the deferential treatment of the Minneapolis racial. "What about when they took over that police precinct in Minneapolis?" he asked.
"I mean, they took over a police precinct. Guess what?" he continued. "They went inside. They trashed the place. The cops had to evacuate. The cops actually had to evacuate. And this was considered a beautiful thing somehow.
"Now why is that? What's the difference?" he asked, one difference, of course, being that, while one group of demonstrators was protesting against the racism in law enforcement –– a phenomenon widely documented throughout U.S. history –– another other was raging against a non-existent case of election fraud.
After touting Trump as "populist," New York Times paints Biden as elitist
Eric Boehlert - PRESSRUN
1/25/2021
This is why Democrats cannot have nice things.
Reviving a long-running gotcha narrative that portrays wealthy Democrats as hypocrites, the New York Times has been dinging President Joe Biden since Inauguration Day as being out of touch with voters. It's a dishonest pursuit that looks especially absurd following Trump's four years of gaudy, country club excess, which the newspaper ridiculously labeled, “populism.”
At the swearing, the Times reported Biden wore, "a stainless steel Rolex Datejust watch with a blue dial, a model that retails for more than $7,000," and noted the handsome piece "costs the equivalent of dozen or so stimulus checks." The Rolex was "a far cry from the Everyman timepieces that every president not named Trump has worn conspicuously in recent decades," the Times stressed. "Recent presidents have tended to wear Everyman timepieces such as Timex and Shinola."
Note that a Shinola men's watch costs between $400-$1,400, so it's not clear how that brand fits into the "Everyman" mode, unless Times staffers routinely make three and four-figure timepiece purchases. In the same article detailing the price of Biden's Rolex ($7,000), the Times omitted any references to the cost of the gold Rolex Trump wore as president. ($36,000.)
The urgent wristwatch update came three days after the Times delivered a reported piece on Biden's exercise bike of choice, Peloton, noting the high-end workout machine, "does not exactly comport with Mr. Biden’s “regular guy from Scranton” political persona."
Instead of focusing on what's on Biden's wrist or in his exercise room, the better way to determine his "Everyman" agenda is to look at his earliest policy initiatives. To date, they include asking the Education Department to extend the federal student loan payment and interest pause through Sept. 30, pledging to raise corporate income taxes to 28 percent, and firing union-hating officials at the National Labor Relations Board.
The fact that that the Times seems obsessed with Biden's missing "Everyman" bona fides after the paper treated Trump as a man-of-the-people "populist" is unforgivable. Trump’s corrupt brand of pro-corporate, anti-worker politics represented the exact opposite of populism, which stands as a political struggle on behalf of regular people against elite economic forces.
After foolishly labeling the faux billionaire a "populist" for years, the Times focuses on Biden optics, eagerly combing over Inauguration Day photos in hopes of finding expensive items that can be used to raise doubts about Biden's humility. The emphasis is odd, considering the same newspaper over the weekend reported on a behind-the-scenes plot by Trump to fire his attorney general during the waning days of his presidency and appoint a Department of Justice loyalist who would order Georgia election officials to overturn the state's results from November.
Basically, Trump was considering appointing himself king and destroying American democracy, and only stopped when it became clear the entire top leadership of the DOJ would quit if he fired the attorney general, sending the country into an unprecedented Constitutional crisis. Against that backdrop, it's peculiar to be detailing how much Joe Biden's watch and workout bike cost. This coverage seems to come from a gnawing feeling among the D.C. press that Biden isn't who he says he is, that there's a phony lurking in the background.
It's a longtime game the Beltway press has played with Democrats, assuming that wealthy Democrats can't also be champions of the middle class, and that there is built-in hypocrisy if they push an agenda for the working class when left-leaning politicians are no longer part of that economic group themselves. The gotcha formula is strange, because wealthy politicians who advocate for the poor should be celebrated, not questioned. By definition, they're not looking out for themselves, or their one percent tax bracket. Instead, they're using their positions in power to try to advance an agenda of justice and lifting people up.
John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt came from two of the wealthiest families in America at the time of their presidencies, and oversaw stalwart liberal agendas. Still, the press loves pretending wealthy Democrats stand exposed, even Democrats who simply have nice things. The media rule seems to be, rich Republicans are to be admired, rich Democrats are to be doubted.
The Times has been doing this to Biden for years. When he was campaigning as vice president in 2008, the newspaper insisted he was not "the train-riding everyman that the Obama-Biden campaign has deployed to rally middle-class voters." The paper conceded that Biden "can trace his roots to the working-class neighborhoods of Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del., where he was raised." But the newspaper stressed, "these days, his kitchen table can be found in a 6,800-square-foot custom-built colonial-style house on four lakefront acres, a property worth close to $3 million."
Biden grew up a working class kid who lived with his parents and grandparents in a modest Scranton home. Then as an adult he became wealthy and successful. That's the whole story, apparently. (When he served in the U.S. Senate, Biden was consistently among the least wealthy members.)
The Times updated its beloved narrative in 2019 [emphasis added]:
Over his long career in politics, Joseph R. Biden Jr. established his everyman bona fides by citing his status as the poorest member of the Senate and referring to himself as “Middle-Class Joe.” But in the first two years after leaving office, Mr. Biden substantially improved his financial fortunes, earning more than $15 million, according to tax returns his campaign released Tuesday.
Biden has become a wealthy man later in life. The Times should stop spinning that into a character flaw.
Reviving a long-running gotcha narrative that portrays wealthy Democrats as hypocrites, the New York Times has been dinging President Joe Biden since Inauguration Day as being out of touch with voters. It's a dishonest pursuit that looks especially absurd following Trump's four years of gaudy, country club excess, which the newspaper ridiculously labeled, “populism.”
At the swearing, the Times reported Biden wore, "a stainless steel Rolex Datejust watch with a blue dial, a model that retails for more than $7,000," and noted the handsome piece "costs the equivalent of dozen or so stimulus checks." The Rolex was "a far cry from the Everyman timepieces that every president not named Trump has worn conspicuously in recent decades," the Times stressed. "Recent presidents have tended to wear Everyman timepieces such as Timex and Shinola."
Note that a Shinola men's watch costs between $400-$1,400, so it's not clear how that brand fits into the "Everyman" mode, unless Times staffers routinely make three and four-figure timepiece purchases. In the same article detailing the price of Biden's Rolex ($7,000), the Times omitted any references to the cost of the gold Rolex Trump wore as president. ($36,000.)
The urgent wristwatch update came three days after the Times delivered a reported piece on Biden's exercise bike of choice, Peloton, noting the high-end workout machine, "does not exactly comport with Mr. Biden’s “regular guy from Scranton” political persona."
Instead of focusing on what's on Biden's wrist or in his exercise room, the better way to determine his "Everyman" agenda is to look at his earliest policy initiatives. To date, they include asking the Education Department to extend the federal student loan payment and interest pause through Sept. 30, pledging to raise corporate income taxes to 28 percent, and firing union-hating officials at the National Labor Relations Board.
The fact that that the Times seems obsessed with Biden's missing "Everyman" bona fides after the paper treated Trump as a man-of-the-people "populist" is unforgivable. Trump’s corrupt brand of pro-corporate, anti-worker politics represented the exact opposite of populism, which stands as a political struggle on behalf of regular people against elite economic forces.
After foolishly labeling the faux billionaire a "populist" for years, the Times focuses on Biden optics, eagerly combing over Inauguration Day photos in hopes of finding expensive items that can be used to raise doubts about Biden's humility. The emphasis is odd, considering the same newspaper over the weekend reported on a behind-the-scenes plot by Trump to fire his attorney general during the waning days of his presidency and appoint a Department of Justice loyalist who would order Georgia election officials to overturn the state's results from November.
Basically, Trump was considering appointing himself king and destroying American democracy, and only stopped when it became clear the entire top leadership of the DOJ would quit if he fired the attorney general, sending the country into an unprecedented Constitutional crisis. Against that backdrop, it's peculiar to be detailing how much Joe Biden's watch and workout bike cost. This coverage seems to come from a gnawing feeling among the D.C. press that Biden isn't who he says he is, that there's a phony lurking in the background.
It's a longtime game the Beltway press has played with Democrats, assuming that wealthy Democrats can't also be champions of the middle class, and that there is built-in hypocrisy if they push an agenda for the working class when left-leaning politicians are no longer part of that economic group themselves. The gotcha formula is strange, because wealthy politicians who advocate for the poor should be celebrated, not questioned. By definition, they're not looking out for themselves, or their one percent tax bracket. Instead, they're using their positions in power to try to advance an agenda of justice and lifting people up.
John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt came from two of the wealthiest families in America at the time of their presidencies, and oversaw stalwart liberal agendas. Still, the press loves pretending wealthy Democrats stand exposed, even Democrats who simply have nice things. The media rule seems to be, rich Republicans are to be admired, rich Democrats are to be doubted.
The Times has been doing this to Biden for years. When he was campaigning as vice president in 2008, the newspaper insisted he was not "the train-riding everyman that the Obama-Biden campaign has deployed to rally middle-class voters." The paper conceded that Biden "can trace his roots to the working-class neighborhoods of Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del., where he was raised." But the newspaper stressed, "these days, his kitchen table can be found in a 6,800-square-foot custom-built colonial-style house on four lakefront acres, a property worth close to $3 million."
Biden grew up a working class kid who lived with his parents and grandparents in a modest Scranton home. Then as an adult he became wealthy and successful. That's the whole story, apparently. (When he served in the U.S. Senate, Biden was consistently among the least wealthy members.)
The Times updated its beloved narrative in 2019 [emphasis added]:
Over his long career in politics, Joseph R. Biden Jr. established his everyman bona fides by citing his status as the poorest member of the Senate and referring to himself as “Middle-Class Joe.” But in the first two years after leaving office, Mr. Biden substantially improved his financial fortunes, earning more than $15 million, according to tax returns his campaign released Tuesday.
Biden has become a wealthy man later in life. The Times should stop spinning that into a character flaw.
WaPo Publishes Column Calling on Cable Companies to Shut Down Fox News, Newsmax, OAN: ‘Incited Sedition’
By Rudy TakalaJan - MEDIATE
19th, 2021, 11:10 am
Washington Post columnist Max Boot is calling on cable providers to consider dropping networks including Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News.
“Anyone who cherishes our democracy should be grateful to the management of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for their newfound sense of social responsibility,” Boot wrote. “We should expect at least the same level of responsibility from broadcast media — and in particular from Fox News, which has the largest reach on the right.
Boot took particular aim at Fox personalities including Mark Levin, whose hour-long Life, Liberty & Levin airs each Saturday and Sunday, and Lou Dobbs, who hosts the hour-long Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business Network. Both hosts were vocal in urging President Donald Trump and his supporters to try to reverse the results of the 2020 election. He also cited a report that Ashli Babbitt, who was killed during the pro-Trump unrest in the Capitol on Jan. 6, was an “avid viewer” of Fox hosts including Tucker Carlson.
If Fox refuses to direct its hosts to moderate their rhetoric, Boot argued, “large cable companies such as Comcast and Charter Spectrum, which carry Fox News and provide much of its revenue in the form of user fees, need to step in and kick Fox News off. And if smaller competitors such as One America News and Newsmax continue to incite viewers, they, too, should be booted off.”
Voices on the left have increasingly called on cable companies to give conservative networks the boot. Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, echoed the sentiment in a Monday interview on CNN. “It’s really hard, because what’s happening is, people are able to seek out the information that makes them feel good,” Stamos said. “People have so much choice now. They can choose what their news sources are. They can choose what influencers they want to follow.”
“We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences,” he added. “There are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than daytime CNN.”
Those remarks drew wide rebuke from conservatives. “There are homeless people ranting on subway platforms who have a larger audience than daytime CNN,” Ann Coulter wrote on Twitter in a message responding to the interview. “Cable Network for Censorship,” conservative author Kurt Schlichter wrote in another message, referencing the abbreviation for CNN.
“Anyone who cherishes our democracy should be grateful to the management of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for their newfound sense of social responsibility,” Boot wrote. “We should expect at least the same level of responsibility from broadcast media — and in particular from Fox News, which has the largest reach on the right.
Boot took particular aim at Fox personalities including Mark Levin, whose hour-long Life, Liberty & Levin airs each Saturday and Sunday, and Lou Dobbs, who hosts the hour-long Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business Network. Both hosts were vocal in urging President Donald Trump and his supporters to try to reverse the results of the 2020 election. He also cited a report that Ashli Babbitt, who was killed during the pro-Trump unrest in the Capitol on Jan. 6, was an “avid viewer” of Fox hosts including Tucker Carlson.
If Fox refuses to direct its hosts to moderate their rhetoric, Boot argued, “large cable companies such as Comcast and Charter Spectrum, which carry Fox News and provide much of its revenue in the form of user fees, need to step in and kick Fox News off. And if smaller competitors such as One America News and Newsmax continue to incite viewers, they, too, should be booted off.”
Voices on the left have increasingly called on cable companies to give conservative networks the boot. Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, echoed the sentiment in a Monday interview on CNN. “It’s really hard, because what’s happening is, people are able to seek out the information that makes them feel good,” Stamos said. “People have so much choice now. They can choose what their news sources are. They can choose what influencers they want to follow.”
“We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences,” he added. “There are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than daytime CNN.”
Those remarks drew wide rebuke from conservatives. “There are homeless people ranting on subway platforms who have a larger audience than daytime CNN,” Ann Coulter wrote on Twitter in a message responding to the interview. “Cable Network for Censorship,” conservative author Kurt Schlichter wrote in another message, referencing the abbreviation for CNN.
Watching Newsmax, the Fox News challenger: Like home shopping TV for dangerous far-right fantasies
On this TV catalog masquerading as a right-wing news outlet, the dull repetitiveness is stupefying—and intentional
By MELANIE MCFARLAND - salon
DECEMBER 13, 2020 8:30PM (UTC)
Home shopping networks exist beyond the critic's purview. They just sort of do what they do with low production value, living or dying on the charms of their hosts. Plus, it's widely understood that despite announcers' assurances that what they're selling is solid and true, the real deal, much of what they're hawking is of questionable quality.
Absorbing hour after hour of Newsmax made me contemplate the great American appeal of home shopping consumerism and its strong attraction to the emotionally vulnerable, people seeking out that unknown item to fill some gap in their life they cannot name. Newsmax mimics that approach, only instead of dealing in sleeved blankets and cut-rate gemstones, it sells concentrated alarmism and far-right extremist fantasy.
What is it about this TV catalog masquerading as a right-wing news outlet that has hundreds of thousands of shoppers feverishly buying the most recent versions of its product? Simple: its unflagging support of Donald Trump's alternate universe. In Newsmax's America, as in Trump's, the pandemic is a hoax, Trump won the election, the Bidens are liars enabling widespread voter fraud and a second term for the 45th president is but one court case away.
Trump has been plugging Newsmax for some time now, giving the channel his heartiest endorsement after Fox News stopped consistently telling him what he wanted to hear whenever he wanted to hear it.
After Fox became the first network to call Arizona for President-elect Joe Biden on Nov. 3, Newsmax was ready to welcome defectors who refused to believe the result with open arms. According to a recent New York Times story on the channel, Newsmax's prime-time ratings averaged 58,000 before election day, but catapulted to 1.1 million for a recent hour hosted by Greg Kelly, one of the channel's popular voices.
Ever since it has been plying its viewers with the insistent lie that Democrats stole the election, that anyone who isn't for Trump is a corrupt radical. Saucing this departure from the truth has been its hosts' passionate insistence that Trump and Republicans still have a path to overturn election results that have been certified and re-certified for Biden several times over in multiple states.
Some version of this fantasy led the headlines of its primetime opinion shows last week, each with a unique take on the channel's excursions into a wonderland awash in baseless assertions and conspiracy theory.
Hosts Greg Kelly and Grant Stinchfield stoked the dying flames of false hope with various versions of pitch that nearly every other headline about the election's outcome is wrong, that other news outlets and the amorphous nemesis known as the radical liberal left don't want you to know "the truth." They want Donald Trump to prevail, and they believe he will. They can't explain how or why; belief is enough.
Trump and his Republican allies have lost 58 lawsuits attempting to change election results at statewide levels, with the most blistering rejection arriving from the Supreme Court on Friday night. The justices tossed out a bid by Texas' attorney general to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all battleground states Biden won. Newsmax's hosts were very enthusiastic about the Texas suit earlier in the week, making their refusal to admit defeat after the highest court's hammer shattered their dreams completely on brand.
"We have the order issued just a few minutes ago," Kelly told his viewers. "I'll read it for you but I want to emphasize before I do, we have the situation in Pennsylvania that has not been settled, we have Georgia that has not been settled, we have Michigan that has not been settled, independent of this lawsuit from Texas." All of this must be news to people living in those states who have a grasp on reality.
Kelly then read the Supreme Court's order verbatim: "Texas v. Pennsylvania, et al. The State of Texas's motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot."
"It's not over. It's not over," Kelly repeated to his viewers on Friday.
Many legal experts have been saying it — as in, the 2020 presidential election — is very much over. It has been over for many weeks now. Joe Biden is not only the President-elect but, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, he's Time magazine's Person of the Year.
People who would point to these inconvenient facts are not Newsmax shoppers. Newsmax shoppers want broken mirrors that reflect distorted, invalid reasons as to why they're not getting what they want and accuse half the nation of stealing their MAGA paradise out from under them. Fortunately for them the channel provides several models that achieve this.
"The Kelly" reflecting device resembles a serious-minded newsman convinced that the Trump crusade to retake the White House has momentum despite escalating evidence to the contrary. Kelly previously served as a co-host on "Good Day New York" and weathered an allegation of sexual assault; he was never arrested or formally charged.
"The Stinchfield" assumes a more militaristic approach; since the host previously worked for NRATV, that tracks. The host refers to his fanbase as the Stinchfield Army and rallies them to a number of causes — the first being Trump, but he has other hobbies too. [...]
Absorbing hour after hour of Newsmax made me contemplate the great American appeal of home shopping consumerism and its strong attraction to the emotionally vulnerable, people seeking out that unknown item to fill some gap in their life they cannot name. Newsmax mimics that approach, only instead of dealing in sleeved blankets and cut-rate gemstones, it sells concentrated alarmism and far-right extremist fantasy.
What is it about this TV catalog masquerading as a right-wing news outlet that has hundreds of thousands of shoppers feverishly buying the most recent versions of its product? Simple: its unflagging support of Donald Trump's alternate universe. In Newsmax's America, as in Trump's, the pandemic is a hoax, Trump won the election, the Bidens are liars enabling widespread voter fraud and a second term for the 45th president is but one court case away.
Trump has been plugging Newsmax for some time now, giving the channel his heartiest endorsement after Fox News stopped consistently telling him what he wanted to hear whenever he wanted to hear it.
After Fox became the first network to call Arizona for President-elect Joe Biden on Nov. 3, Newsmax was ready to welcome defectors who refused to believe the result with open arms. According to a recent New York Times story on the channel, Newsmax's prime-time ratings averaged 58,000 before election day, but catapulted to 1.1 million for a recent hour hosted by Greg Kelly, one of the channel's popular voices.
Ever since it has been plying its viewers with the insistent lie that Democrats stole the election, that anyone who isn't for Trump is a corrupt radical. Saucing this departure from the truth has been its hosts' passionate insistence that Trump and Republicans still have a path to overturn election results that have been certified and re-certified for Biden several times over in multiple states.
Some version of this fantasy led the headlines of its primetime opinion shows last week, each with a unique take on the channel's excursions into a wonderland awash in baseless assertions and conspiracy theory.
Hosts Greg Kelly and Grant Stinchfield stoked the dying flames of false hope with various versions of pitch that nearly every other headline about the election's outcome is wrong, that other news outlets and the amorphous nemesis known as the radical liberal left don't want you to know "the truth." They want Donald Trump to prevail, and they believe he will. They can't explain how or why; belief is enough.
Trump and his Republican allies have lost 58 lawsuits attempting to change election results at statewide levels, with the most blistering rejection arriving from the Supreme Court on Friday night. The justices tossed out a bid by Texas' attorney general to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all battleground states Biden won. Newsmax's hosts were very enthusiastic about the Texas suit earlier in the week, making their refusal to admit defeat after the highest court's hammer shattered their dreams completely on brand.
"We have the order issued just a few minutes ago," Kelly told his viewers. "I'll read it for you but I want to emphasize before I do, we have the situation in Pennsylvania that has not been settled, we have Georgia that has not been settled, we have Michigan that has not been settled, independent of this lawsuit from Texas." All of this must be news to people living in those states who have a grasp on reality.
Kelly then read the Supreme Court's order verbatim: "Texas v. Pennsylvania, et al. The State of Texas's motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot."
"It's not over. It's not over," Kelly repeated to his viewers on Friday.
Many legal experts have been saying it — as in, the 2020 presidential election — is very much over. It has been over for many weeks now. Joe Biden is not only the President-elect but, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, he's Time magazine's Person of the Year.
People who would point to these inconvenient facts are not Newsmax shoppers. Newsmax shoppers want broken mirrors that reflect distorted, invalid reasons as to why they're not getting what they want and accuse half the nation of stealing their MAGA paradise out from under them. Fortunately for them the channel provides several models that achieve this.
"The Kelly" reflecting device resembles a serious-minded newsman convinced that the Trump crusade to retake the White House has momentum despite escalating evidence to the contrary. Kelly previously served as a co-host on "Good Day New York" and weathered an allegation of sexual assault; he was never arrested or formally charged.
"The Stinchfield" assumes a more militaristic approach; since the host previously worked for NRATV, that tracks. The host refers to his fanbase as the Stinchfield Army and rallies them to a number of causes — the first being Trump, but he has other hobbies too. [...]
Centrists lose again — and mainstream media blames the left again
Mainstream Democrats are eager to blame losses on "socialism" and "defund the police" — but where's the evidence?
By JULIE HOLLAR - salon
NOVEMBER 13, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
Joe Biden hadn't even been declared the victor of the 2020 election before establishment Democrats, in the face of poorer-than-expected results in House and Senate races, began pointing fingers at the left — with corporate media giving them a major assist.
Democrats had been hoping for big wins on election night, with the possibility of winning not only the presidency but also the Senate, and increasing their majority in the House. But while Biden has come out on top, the party's most optimistic outcome in the Senate would be a 50/50 split (if they win both Georgia runoff seats), giving them a majority with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. Rather than gaining in the House, Democrats have lost several seats, perhaps 10 or more.
In the wake of these disappointments, the right wing of the party immediately blamed its left wing for the poor showing, airing their grievances in a private conference call among House Democrats that was leaked to reporters.
In a write-up about the call, the Washington Post's Rachael Bade and Erica Werner (11/5/20) quoted and paraphrased 14 sources blaming those who "endorse far-left positions" for Democrats' losses, counterbalanced by only four sources defending the left. All the progressive sources were named; half of the establishment sources were either quoted anonymously or presented as unspecified "moderates" — or, twice, simply as "Democrats," committing the exasperatingly common journalistic sleight-of-hand that erases progressive Democrats as legitimate members of their party.
In addition to quoting a handful of participants on the call, Bade and Werner interviewed numerous "moderates" for the article ("Several moderate Democrats said in interviews…"), but only managed to interview two progressives: Alexandra Rojas, head of the leftist PAC Justice Democrats, along with Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — who took the side of the centrists.
Huffman's contrary position, while perhaps surprising to some readers, and serving to portray the "centrist" view as even more of a consensus position, would have been less surprising to Bade, who had quoted Huffman just a few days earlier (11/1/20) about his opposition to leftists' efforts to exert more influence within the party. In other words, the reporters appeared to seek out only one source who could have been expected to offer a forceful defense of bold leftist ideas, to balance a whole parade of attackers.
In its piece on the dust-up, in which "Democrats traded excuses, blame and prognostications," the New York Times (11/5/20) quoted South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, who "cautioned against running on 'Medicare for all or defunding police or socialized medicine,' adding that if Democrats pursued such policies, 'we're not going to win.'" What the article didn't mention was that Clyburn has taken more money from the pharmaceutical industry in the past decade than any other member of the House or Senate (Post and Courier, 12/16/18).
The piece then quoted Rep. Marc Veasey, who "warned his fellow members against anti-fracking talk." Veasey ranked fourth among House Democrats in taking oil and gas industry money in the 2020 election cycle, and got 70% of his total campaign contributions from PACs. (To put that into perspective, the two progressives quoted in the Times piece, Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, got 13% and 3% of their campaign contributions from PACs, respectively.) Readers might have found such information useful in analyzing the motivations behind those quotes.
CNN's Chris Cillizza (11/6/20) jumped into the fray as well, praising Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a former CIA official (another piece of relevant context not mentioned by Cillizza) who had some of the harshest words for progressives, for speaking "some hard truth to her party" — like, "We need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again," as if the McCarthy era had never ended (FAIR.org, 10/9/20).
After quoting Spanberger extensively and then printing some of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's rebuttal ("You can't just tell the Black, brown and youth organizers riding in to save us every election to be quiet or not have their reps champion them when they need us"), Cillizza wrote:
What's beyond debate is that Republican strategists took comments made by liberals within the Democratic Party and used them to blast everyone from Spanberger on down.
Though all these pieces offered plenty of suggestions that the left wing's vocal support for things like socialism, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and defunding the police cost the party seats in 2020, they failed to provide any actual data that might have helped readers evaluate the veracity of those statements.
It's an important point, because understanding Democrats' lackluster performance should help guide their platform and messaging moving forward. But these articles aren't shedding light on the data — perhaps because it would thoroughly undermine the anti-progressive framing.
---
The Green New Deal is likewise broadly popular: One poll specifically of swing House districts (YouGov/Data for Progress, 9/19) found that respondents supported the idea by a 13-point margin, 49% to 36% — even when informed that it will cost trillions of dollars.
And with some races still not called, it's safe to say that Medicare for All and the Green New Deal didn't sink the Dems. Ocasio-Cortez pointed out (Twitter, 11/7/20) that every Democratic co-sponsor of Medicare for All in a swing district won re-election. And Gizmodo's Brian Kahn (11/9/20) found that of 93 Democratic incumbents who co-sponsored the Green New Deal — including five in swing districts — only one lost their race.
On the question of calls to "defund the police," it's important to clarify — as did the Intercept (11/6/20), but none of these establishment media reports — that such calls grew out of the Black Lives Matter protests, not the platform of progressive congressmembers, and that that movement led to a massive spike in Democratic voter registration. In other words, without the movement that gave us the slogan "defund the police," the Democrats would almost certainly have witnessed even greater losses — including, quite probably, the White House.[...]
Democrats had been hoping for big wins on election night, with the possibility of winning not only the presidency but also the Senate, and increasing their majority in the House. But while Biden has come out on top, the party's most optimistic outcome in the Senate would be a 50/50 split (if they win both Georgia runoff seats), giving them a majority with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. Rather than gaining in the House, Democrats have lost several seats, perhaps 10 or more.
In the wake of these disappointments, the right wing of the party immediately blamed its left wing for the poor showing, airing their grievances in a private conference call among House Democrats that was leaked to reporters.
In a write-up about the call, the Washington Post's Rachael Bade and Erica Werner (11/5/20) quoted and paraphrased 14 sources blaming those who "endorse far-left positions" for Democrats' losses, counterbalanced by only four sources defending the left. All the progressive sources were named; half of the establishment sources were either quoted anonymously or presented as unspecified "moderates" — or, twice, simply as "Democrats," committing the exasperatingly common journalistic sleight-of-hand that erases progressive Democrats as legitimate members of their party.
In addition to quoting a handful of participants on the call, Bade and Werner interviewed numerous "moderates" for the article ("Several moderate Democrats said in interviews…"), but only managed to interview two progressives: Alexandra Rojas, head of the leftist PAC Justice Democrats, along with Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — who took the side of the centrists.
Huffman's contrary position, while perhaps surprising to some readers, and serving to portray the "centrist" view as even more of a consensus position, would have been less surprising to Bade, who had quoted Huffman just a few days earlier (11/1/20) about his opposition to leftists' efforts to exert more influence within the party. In other words, the reporters appeared to seek out only one source who could have been expected to offer a forceful defense of bold leftist ideas, to balance a whole parade of attackers.
In its piece on the dust-up, in which "Democrats traded excuses, blame and prognostications," the New York Times (11/5/20) quoted South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, who "cautioned against running on 'Medicare for all or defunding police or socialized medicine,' adding that if Democrats pursued such policies, 'we're not going to win.'" What the article didn't mention was that Clyburn has taken more money from the pharmaceutical industry in the past decade than any other member of the House or Senate (Post and Courier, 12/16/18).
The piece then quoted Rep. Marc Veasey, who "warned his fellow members against anti-fracking talk." Veasey ranked fourth among House Democrats in taking oil and gas industry money in the 2020 election cycle, and got 70% of his total campaign contributions from PACs. (To put that into perspective, the two progressives quoted in the Times piece, Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, got 13% and 3% of their campaign contributions from PACs, respectively.) Readers might have found such information useful in analyzing the motivations behind those quotes.
CNN's Chris Cillizza (11/6/20) jumped into the fray as well, praising Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a former CIA official (another piece of relevant context not mentioned by Cillizza) who had some of the harshest words for progressives, for speaking "some hard truth to her party" — like, "We need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again," as if the McCarthy era had never ended (FAIR.org, 10/9/20).
After quoting Spanberger extensively and then printing some of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's rebuttal ("You can't just tell the Black, brown and youth organizers riding in to save us every election to be quiet or not have their reps champion them when they need us"), Cillizza wrote:
What's beyond debate is that Republican strategists took comments made by liberals within the Democratic Party and used them to blast everyone from Spanberger on down.
Though all these pieces offered plenty of suggestions that the left wing's vocal support for things like socialism, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and defunding the police cost the party seats in 2020, they failed to provide any actual data that might have helped readers evaluate the veracity of those statements.
It's an important point, because understanding Democrats' lackluster performance should help guide their platform and messaging moving forward. But these articles aren't shedding light on the data — perhaps because it would thoroughly undermine the anti-progressive framing.
---
The Green New Deal is likewise broadly popular: One poll specifically of swing House districts (YouGov/Data for Progress, 9/19) found that respondents supported the idea by a 13-point margin, 49% to 36% — even when informed that it will cost trillions of dollars.
And with some races still not called, it's safe to say that Medicare for All and the Green New Deal didn't sink the Dems. Ocasio-Cortez pointed out (Twitter, 11/7/20) that every Democratic co-sponsor of Medicare for All in a swing district won re-election. And Gizmodo's Brian Kahn (11/9/20) found that of 93 Democratic incumbents who co-sponsored the Green New Deal — including five in swing districts — only one lost their race.
On the question of calls to "defund the police," it's important to clarify — as did the Intercept (11/6/20), but none of these establishment media reports — that such calls grew out of the Black Lives Matter protests, not the platform of progressive congressmembers, and that that movement led to a massive spike in Democratic voter registration. In other words, without the movement that gave us the slogan "defund the police," the Democrats would almost certainly have witnessed even greater losses — including, quite probably, the White House.[...]
Fox News Pundits Compare BLM Protesters To Serial Killer Ted Bundy
No really. Who knew civil rights protests are equal to Ted Bundy raping and murdering innocent young girls in their dorm rooms?
By John Amato crooks & liars
9/18/2020
During Thursday's segment on Fox News' Outnumbered, two of their right-wing panel agreed that using Ted Bundy as the bellwether for violence in the BLM protests was a great thing.
The Fox News program was discussing a report that 93% of the Black Lives Matter-inspired protests were peaceful
But for Fox News that was fodder to promote Trump's "law and order" message and claim the country is in flames while claiming "Joe Biden's America" means the suburbs will burn down.
Host Melissa Francis commented on the violence and riots that have occurred at BLM protests. "#Oneluckyguy" Juan Williams frustrated her by saying he had no basis to compare anything to that except his own experience of being involved in a peaceful protest.
This enraged the right wingers on the panel.
Kennedy, the "libertarian," went off the rails and used serial killer Ted Bundy, who raped and mass-murdered scores of women, as her barometer against the civil unrest in the country.
Kennedy said, "And the harm that has been done, that's like saying 95% of it was peaceful."
She continued, "That's like saying 95% of the sorority girls that Ted Bundy met he didn't kill."
Melissa Francis was in complete agreement with her and said that was a "great analogy."
So now Fox News is comparing civil unrest, peaceful protesters and the small percentage of them that have gotten out of control, to the most heinous murderer and serial killer of young women in history of our country.
Got it. There is no bar so low they won't go below it.
The Fox News program was discussing a report that 93% of the Black Lives Matter-inspired protests were peaceful
But for Fox News that was fodder to promote Trump's "law and order" message and claim the country is in flames while claiming "Joe Biden's America" means the suburbs will burn down.
Host Melissa Francis commented on the violence and riots that have occurred at BLM protests. "#Oneluckyguy" Juan Williams frustrated her by saying he had no basis to compare anything to that except his own experience of being involved in a peaceful protest.
This enraged the right wingers on the panel.
Kennedy, the "libertarian," went off the rails and used serial killer Ted Bundy, who raped and mass-murdered scores of women, as her barometer against the civil unrest in the country.
Kennedy said, "And the harm that has been done, that's like saying 95% of it was peaceful."
She continued, "That's like saying 95% of the sorority girls that Ted Bundy met he didn't kill."
Melissa Francis was in complete agreement with her and said that was a "great analogy."
So now Fox News is comparing civil unrest, peaceful protesters and the small percentage of them that have gotten out of control, to the most heinous murderer and serial killer of young women in history of our country.
Got it. There is no bar so low they won't go below it.
The Cesspool That Spat Out Trump’s New Conspiracy About Cops
A TREE GROWS IN TRUMPLAND
Here is how Trump got the idea that a 75-year-old protester who was pushed to the ground and bled out of his head may have been antifa. It’s as crazy as you can imagine.
Adam Rawnsley, Will Sommer - daily beast
Updated Jun. 09, 2020 5:04PM ET
Out of all the blogs on the pro-Trump internet, The Conservative Treehouse might be the strangest and most underappreciated in terms of its influence.
Its fans describe the comment section as “branches,” where they hang out to discuss the latest twist in the “Russiagate” saga or speculate feverishly about Donald Trump’s critics. The site’s owner, who has previously been identified as Florida resident Mark Bradman, rose to prominence during the George Zimmerman trial, outing an anonymous witness and declaring that Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager Zimmerman shot, was an “undisciplined punk thug, drug dealing, thief and wannabe gangsta.”
Since then, the site has been Patient Zero for a number of hoaxes that have percolated through right-wing media ecosystem, claiming that Puerto Rican truck drivers were withholding hurricane relief, or that a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was “weaponizing” the coronavirus to hurt Trump. Despite those hoaxes being quickly debunked, however, The Conservative Treehouse now ranks at roughly the 4,000th most-visited website in the United States, according to Alexa analytics.
Its zeal for the conspiratorial is so pronounced that even some of Donald Trump’s staunchest allies in right-wing media find the site’s devoted commenters and its pseudonymous operator, “Sundance,” bizarre. Talk radio host Mark Levin has called it a “kook site.” Former Breitbart reporter Lee Stranahan dubbed the site’s owner an “egocentric lunatic” with “cult-like followers.”
And yet, despite its reputation (or, perhaps, because of it) The Conservative Treehouse has the president’s ear.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory that originated on the site about Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old New York man who bled from his head after he was shoved down by Buffalo police officers while attending a protest. Trump claimed that Gugino, who remains in the hospital in serious but stable condition, wasn’t the peaceful protester he appeared to be but rather a potential “antifa provocateur” trying to “scan police communications in order to black out the equipment.”
“I watched, he fell harder than was pushed,” Trump tweeted. “Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
The tweet was sparked by a segment on the Trump-fawning cable news network OAN, which was based on a blog post from The Conservative Treehouse. And it represented yet another instance of how the president’s penchant for uncritically amplifying those willing to flatter or absolve his views has vaulted the dregs of the Internet’s conspiracy theorists into national prominence.
The OAN segment was reported by Kristian Rouz, a Russian journalist who pulled double duty working for the Russian state propaganda channel Sputnik as well as OAN. In it, Rouz claimed Gugino was using “common antifa tactics” and that the incident was "a false flag provocation by far-left group antifa." He cited The Conservative Treehouse as evidence that Gugino was using a “police tracker” on his phone during the encounter.
The Conservative Treehouse post had, indeed, falsely claimed that Gugino used a sophisticated communications device to “scan the mic” of one policeman. “Once the frequency is captured (ie cloned) you can track the device, duplicate the signal and/or listen to a transmission,” the post reads.
And a Twitter thread preceding the article, The Conservative Treehouse’s Twitter account, @TheLastRefuge2, warned its nearly 180,000 followers that the same technology is used by “trackers” who use it to “electronically rob you without ever going in your house.”
There are plenty of holes in the theory that Gugino was committing high-tech espionage for antifa. For one thing, Gugino is not a member of antifa, but rather a longtime activist with the Catholic Worker movement and other community-based social justice activist groups. And the supposed “scanning” he is accused of conducting is technological gibberish, unsupported by evidence.
That context, naturally, never made it into The Conservative Treehouse post. And Trump’s amplification of their claims only underscored the payoff that can come with the spreading of disinformation aimed at undermining liberals and firing up the right. The website and Bradman, its purported owner, didn’t return requests for comment.
The Conservative Treehouse gained prominence during the Tea Party movement and the Zimmerman trial, with Zimmerman’s father praising its commenters’ research as “astonishing.” During the racially-charged trial, The Conservative Treehouse owner “Sundance” went by “Sundance Cracker,” an alias he later dropped.
During the Zimmerman trial, The Conservative Treehouse’s unusually intense commenting community, which drives much of the narratives eventually featured on the site, began to emerge. The amateur-sleuth commenters had such an outsized influence that Zimmerman’s defense attorney corresponded with one of the commenters, who referred to themselves as a member of the “the treehouse think tank.”
Since the trial, The Conservative Treehouse has embraced a wide variety of right-wing causes, including Republican investigations in the 2012 attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya, and the Bundy family’s Malheur wildlife refuge takeover in Oregon. In the Trump era, The Conservative Treehouse became a hub for the conspiracy theory that the Russia investigation was cooked up to undermine Trump by nefarious members of the deep-state, with Sundance and his commenters weaving elaborate stories about then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller or, later, the Ukraine impeachment.
The Conservative Treehouse has long been a fan of Trump and the president has returned the favor, dating back to Trump’s days as a Republican presidential hopeful in 2015.
As Trump’s campaign moved from sideshow to frontrunner status, The Conservative Treehouse’s Twitter account trumpeted poll after poll showing the former real estate mogul besting the other candidates in the race for the nomination—earning retweets and shoutouts from the candidate himself. Trump took particular pleasure in citing the author’s attacks on his rivals in Florida: former Governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio.
The Conservative Treehouse’s operator and loyal audience have frequently clashed with other conservative personalities. Stranahan has tweeted that Breitbart founder Andrew Breitbart would have hated the site’s pseudonymous operator, “Sundance,” even though the late conservative provocateur’s image tops The Conservative Treehouse’s website banner.
The site has also been slammed by Levin, the conservative talk radio host. After The Conservative Treehouse published stories suggesting the talk radio host was in the tank for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during the 2016 Republican primary, Levin taunted Bradman, a former Publix supermarket employee, calling him a “disgruntled former grocery clerk” in Facebook posts.
“The more we learn about Bradman and his ‘Conservative Treehouse’ site, the more you wonder what this kook is up to,” Levin wrote.
Despite the opposition, though, The Conservative Treehouse has made inroads into more mainstream right-wing media outlets. It’s been praised on-air by Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs, who urged his viewers to check out the site’s blog posts about the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia.
"I want to give a shout-out to TheConservativeTreehouse.com,” Dobbs said. “They have done an amazing job of chronicling, cataloguing the content — just a terrific job."
Its fans describe the comment section as “branches,” where they hang out to discuss the latest twist in the “Russiagate” saga or speculate feverishly about Donald Trump’s critics. The site’s owner, who has previously been identified as Florida resident Mark Bradman, rose to prominence during the George Zimmerman trial, outing an anonymous witness and declaring that Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager Zimmerman shot, was an “undisciplined punk thug, drug dealing, thief and wannabe gangsta.”
Since then, the site has been Patient Zero for a number of hoaxes that have percolated through right-wing media ecosystem, claiming that Puerto Rican truck drivers were withholding hurricane relief, or that a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was “weaponizing” the coronavirus to hurt Trump. Despite those hoaxes being quickly debunked, however, The Conservative Treehouse now ranks at roughly the 4,000th most-visited website in the United States, according to Alexa analytics.
Its zeal for the conspiratorial is so pronounced that even some of Donald Trump’s staunchest allies in right-wing media find the site’s devoted commenters and its pseudonymous operator, “Sundance,” bizarre. Talk radio host Mark Levin has called it a “kook site.” Former Breitbart reporter Lee Stranahan dubbed the site’s owner an “egocentric lunatic” with “cult-like followers.”
And yet, despite its reputation (or, perhaps, because of it) The Conservative Treehouse has the president’s ear.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory that originated on the site about Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old New York man who bled from his head after he was shoved down by Buffalo police officers while attending a protest. Trump claimed that Gugino, who remains in the hospital in serious but stable condition, wasn’t the peaceful protester he appeared to be but rather a potential “antifa provocateur” trying to “scan police communications in order to black out the equipment.”
“I watched, he fell harder than was pushed,” Trump tweeted. “Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
The tweet was sparked by a segment on the Trump-fawning cable news network OAN, which was based on a blog post from The Conservative Treehouse. And it represented yet another instance of how the president’s penchant for uncritically amplifying those willing to flatter or absolve his views has vaulted the dregs of the Internet’s conspiracy theorists into national prominence.
The OAN segment was reported by Kristian Rouz, a Russian journalist who pulled double duty working for the Russian state propaganda channel Sputnik as well as OAN. In it, Rouz claimed Gugino was using “common antifa tactics” and that the incident was "a false flag provocation by far-left group antifa." He cited The Conservative Treehouse as evidence that Gugino was using a “police tracker” on his phone during the encounter.
The Conservative Treehouse post had, indeed, falsely claimed that Gugino used a sophisticated communications device to “scan the mic” of one policeman. “Once the frequency is captured (ie cloned) you can track the device, duplicate the signal and/or listen to a transmission,” the post reads.
And a Twitter thread preceding the article, The Conservative Treehouse’s Twitter account, @TheLastRefuge2, warned its nearly 180,000 followers that the same technology is used by “trackers” who use it to “electronically rob you without ever going in your house.”
There are plenty of holes in the theory that Gugino was committing high-tech espionage for antifa. For one thing, Gugino is not a member of antifa, but rather a longtime activist with the Catholic Worker movement and other community-based social justice activist groups. And the supposed “scanning” he is accused of conducting is technological gibberish, unsupported by evidence.
That context, naturally, never made it into The Conservative Treehouse post. And Trump’s amplification of their claims only underscored the payoff that can come with the spreading of disinformation aimed at undermining liberals and firing up the right. The website and Bradman, its purported owner, didn’t return requests for comment.
The Conservative Treehouse gained prominence during the Tea Party movement and the Zimmerman trial, with Zimmerman’s father praising its commenters’ research as “astonishing.” During the racially-charged trial, The Conservative Treehouse owner “Sundance” went by “Sundance Cracker,” an alias he later dropped.
During the Zimmerman trial, The Conservative Treehouse’s unusually intense commenting community, which drives much of the narratives eventually featured on the site, began to emerge. The amateur-sleuth commenters had such an outsized influence that Zimmerman’s defense attorney corresponded with one of the commenters, who referred to themselves as a member of the “the treehouse think tank.”
Since the trial, The Conservative Treehouse has embraced a wide variety of right-wing causes, including Republican investigations in the 2012 attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya, and the Bundy family’s Malheur wildlife refuge takeover in Oregon. In the Trump era, The Conservative Treehouse became a hub for the conspiracy theory that the Russia investigation was cooked up to undermine Trump by nefarious members of the deep-state, with Sundance and his commenters weaving elaborate stories about then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller or, later, the Ukraine impeachment.
The Conservative Treehouse has long been a fan of Trump and the president has returned the favor, dating back to Trump’s days as a Republican presidential hopeful in 2015.
As Trump’s campaign moved from sideshow to frontrunner status, The Conservative Treehouse’s Twitter account trumpeted poll after poll showing the former real estate mogul besting the other candidates in the race for the nomination—earning retweets and shoutouts from the candidate himself. Trump took particular pleasure in citing the author’s attacks on his rivals in Florida: former Governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio.
The Conservative Treehouse’s operator and loyal audience have frequently clashed with other conservative personalities. Stranahan has tweeted that Breitbart founder Andrew Breitbart would have hated the site’s pseudonymous operator, “Sundance,” even though the late conservative provocateur’s image tops The Conservative Treehouse’s website banner.
The site has also been slammed by Levin, the conservative talk radio host. After The Conservative Treehouse published stories suggesting the talk radio host was in the tank for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during the 2016 Republican primary, Levin taunted Bradman, a former Publix supermarket employee, calling him a “disgruntled former grocery clerk” in Facebook posts.
“The more we learn about Bradman and his ‘Conservative Treehouse’ site, the more you wonder what this kook is up to,” Levin wrote.
Despite the opposition, though, The Conservative Treehouse has made inroads into more mainstream right-wing media outlets. It’s been praised on-air by Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs, who urged his viewers to check out the site’s blog posts about the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia.
"I want to give a shout-out to TheConservativeTreehouse.com,” Dobbs said. “They have done an amazing job of chronicling, cataloguing the content — just a terrific job."
The Empty Piety of the American Press
Chris Hedges - truthdig
3/12/18
The press, giddy with its newfound sense of mission and purpose, is carrying out a moral crusade against Donald Trump. The airwaves and print have shed their traditional claims of “impartiality” and “objectivity.” They fulminate against Trump, charging—falsely—that he was elected because of Russian interference and calling him a liar, ignorant and incompetent. They give airtime to his bitterest critics and bizarre associates, such as Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a onetime star of “The Apprentice” and now a fired White House aide, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who says she had a sexual relationship with Trump. It is great entertainment. It is great for ratings. It is great for profits. But it is not moral, and it is not journalism.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
worthless media funnies
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https://teespring.com/fox-news-toilet-2#pid=369&cid=6513&sid=front
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