Media Corruption
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The Media Undertakers Must be Getting Exhausted
By Clarice FeldmanThe media worked hard to bury the FTX scandal. There a young (but well-connected to leftist politicos and media) tech slob Sam Bankman-Fried “lost” eight billion dollars, shelled out at least $40 million to Democrats, is suspected of laundering a lot of taxpayer money through Ukraine, and cloaked his outrageously criminal conduct in the garb of promoting social justice once he realized he could no longer disguise his Ponzi scheme.
The gravediggers hardly had begun to return their shovels to the cemetery shed when there appeared a new story that needed burying. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi just opened up another crack in the door revealing how outsiders along with the DNC manipulated Twitter in the runup to the election. Not that the shadow banning and actual banning on Twitter of conservative voices wasn’t obvious before, but Musk is inside the belly of the beast and proof of the outrageous behavior at Twitter which preceded his purchase is now being made public, with Musk promising there’s more to come. Twitter staff and executives used barriers designed to combat spam and fraud to manipulate speech that was neither. Even worse, outsiders, including the DNC with connections to these insiders, used these tools to control what people could post and viewers could read, even going so far as to censor items transmitted on the direct message (private person-to-person) feature of the site. In effect, well-connected private parties (almost exclusively Democrat) could and did remove posters. Among the stories Twitter actively blocked was that of the salacious Hunter Biden laptop contents. So shocking was the material on this laptop, so revealing of the perversity of Hunter and the corruption of Joe Biden, that one post-election survey reports that 16% of persons who voted for Biden said they would not have had they known of the contents of this laptop. One major newspaper, the NY Post, did publish a story about it, and several online posters did as well. The most detailed, should you care to see for yourself what was on the laptop, is here.
The laptop reveals not only sexual depravity and illegal drug use, but corruption and influence buying as well. Taibbi reports “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe’.” The only person it was unsafe for was Joe Biden, the Democrat party’s presidential candidate,
FBI, Big Tech, Big Media: Partners in collusion
Moreover, as Intercept reporter Lee Fang has detailed and as a former Twitter official confirmed, the FBI held weekly meetings in Silicon Valley with tech officials about policing disinformation. Of course, their definition of disinformation was so broad as to include virtually anything that made Joe Biden or Democrats look bad.
But knowing all that, it still would be naive to think we know the whole story. For example, we don’t know who in the FBI was running the censoring operation, whether it was a rogue outfit or came from the top. Nor do we know if the operation continues now.
We do know the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop for a year before The Post started to reveal the contents. You don’t have to be a cynic to wonder if the agents waved Facebook and Twitter off the story because they knew it was true.
Time Magazine Admits ‘Election Denier’ Is A Nonsense Phrase Invented To Smear Republicans
In the Friday piece, Time staff writer Jasmine Aguilera admitted, “In tweets, news interviews, and House hearings, Jeffries called to question the legitimacy of Trump’s election.” She even embedded posts from the Republican National Committee with screenshots of Jeffries’ tweets saying Trump and his “buddies in the Kremlin” were “trying to steal the election” and that “history” would “never accept” Trump as a “legitimate president.” In another post, Jeffries said that “the more we learn about 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes. America deserves to know whether we have a FAKE President in the Oval Office.”
Despite including some of the very evidence showing Jeffries’ election skepticism, Aguilera insisted, “Calling Jeffries an ‘election denier’ is misleading and conflates different issues.” Why is it misleading? Because Time wants you to associate “election denialism” — a grammatically ridiculous phrase anyway, since no one is denying that an election happened — only with the right.
As a result, the magazine says, the smear exists to describe Republican Trump voters only.
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The now-debunked Russia collusion hoax sure seems to fit the “false conspiracies” description. Lawsuits? Democrats sued Trump and the GOP in four swing states in 2016 over trumped-up charges of a “coordinated campaign of vigilante voter intimidation.” Even two years later in 2018, the Democratic National Committee sued Trump, his son, his son-in-law, campaign officials, Russia, and WikiLeaks with accusations of “conspiring to disrupt the 2016 presidential election,” as CNBC reported. Democrat operatives such as lawyer Marc Elias (formerly of Perkins Coie, the law firm that hired Fusion GPS to come up with the Steele dossier for the Clinton campaign) file countless election-related lawsuits and get puff pieces in The Washington Post in return.
Pressuring officials to “interfere with election results”? Democrats don’t have to apply much pressure. In 2016, the FBI launched its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the Trump campaign purportedly on the basis of the Steele dossier around the same time FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were discussing how Trump was “not ever going to become president” because “We’ll stop it.” In 2020, Big Tech companies interfered in the election by censoring stories like the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell, as well as throttling journalists and elected officials who dissented from the official narrative on Covid and other issues.
As far as Time is concerned, the real difference between Jeffries’ election skepticism and that of Trump voters in 2020 is the little letter next to the election winner’s name. If “election denier” doesn’t describe what Jeffries and other Democrats did in 2016, then it doesn’t mean anything at all. The phrase is just a nonsense smear invented to chill speech, silence challenges to the regime, and paint Republicans as unelectable. Time Magazine practically just admitted as much.
If A Legitimate Free Press Existed, The Twitter Files Wouldn’t
Had journalists from legacy outlets and especially the supposed standard-bearers of journalism, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, approached the story with the seriousness it deserved, it seems unlikely Twitter would have dared censor the story. Or such censorship, had it occurred, would have been futile because journalists would be falling over themselves to report the latest details in a political scandal that suggested the Democrat candidate for president had participated in a pay-to-play enterprise with his son while vice president.
Real journalists would have tracked down and authenticated the laptop materials, as they did a belated two years later. Real journalists would have questioned Bobulinski and reported his collaborating statements. Real journalists would have demanded answers from Joe, Hunter, and James Biden, the president’s brother who also profited from the many deals; they would have sought answers on every detail suggesting corruption discussed in the emails and other materials recovered from the laptop. And real journalists would have pushed intelligence agencies, and the former members of them who signed on to a letter casting the laptop as Russian disinformation, on the basis for that claim.
Nothing Twitter did or could have done would have buried the Biden family scandal story had journalists just done their jobs. But they didn’t, and a retrospective review of their contemporaneous “reporting” shows they took pride in their non-coverage, as best illustrated by an Oct. 18, 2020, CNN story titled “The Anatomy of the New York Post’s Dubious Hunter Biden Story.”
In reference to the bombshell story, Brian Stelter called it “a classic example of the right-wing media machine.” The story is a “manufactured scandal,” the former host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” said. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor, agreed with Stelter, telling him approvingly, “The media world has largely ignored the Post’s Hunter Biden story.” Trump’s team is “so confident that the story’s just going to be too much fun for serious journalists not to pick up,” Benkler added. “They’re trying to produce it now, but the media at the moment — major professional media — doesn’t seem to be falling for it.”
Imagine Woodward and Bernstein burying the Watergate Story
TIME gives space to ‘malignantly toxic racist clown’ Saira Rao
We don’t get it. Actually, we do get it … we just don’t like it. Saira Rao made a name for herself on Twitter with blatantly racist tweets. But they were racist against whites, particularly white women, so naturally, she brokered that into a book deal with Penguin to write about how racist white women are. The next natural step is for Netflix to adapt her book into a documentary or something.
Ah, Saira Rao. Seeing the American flag makes her want to vomit. “Whiteness is terrorism.” Who was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic? White people. White women are the greatest villains of all time. Twitter needs a “mute all white women” button. Donald Trump murdered all the people on that Ukrainian airliner shot down over Tehran by the Iranians. She talks about the friends who would have done anything for her — except give up their whiteness.
So yeah, she gets a book deal and a column in TIME.
Hey white women:
If this is up your alley, there’s a whole book of it out there.
There is that phrase again... stochastic terrorism.
Elvis Chan, the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Cyber Branch in San Francisco, told lawyers for the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general in a lawsuit over social media censorship that he supervised a "command post" in his home city that helped the nationwide disinformation censorship operation function in fall 2020.
He described a sprawling operation that at time enlisted the help of FBI field offices around the country, federal prosecutors, and FBI and Justice Department lawyers before his unit would make the final request to social media to block content deemed by the operation to be disinformation or in violation of each company’s term of service.
"We would receive some responses from the social media companies," he recalled. "I remember in some cases they would relay that they had taken down the posts. In other cases, they would say that this did not violate their terms of service."
Chan's description, released as part of his deposition this week, was the most detailed to date of how extensive the FBI's censorship activities were during the 2020 election, raising immediate flags among incoming House Republican committee chairmen worried the operation may have violated constitutional prohibitions on government infringing free speech.
justthenews.com
He described a sprawling operation that at time enlisted the help of FBI field offices around the country, federal prosecutors, and FBI and Justice Department lawyers before his unit would make the final request to social media to block content deemed by the operation to be disinformation or in violation of each company’s term of service.
"We would receive some responses from the social media companies," he recalled. "I remember in some cases they would relay that they had taken down the posts. In other cases, they would say that this did not violate their terms of service."
Chan's description, released as part of his deposition this week, was the most detailed to date of how extensive the FBI's censorship activities were during the 2020 election, raising immediate flags among incoming House Republican committee chairmen worried the operation may have violated constitutional prohibitions on government infringing free speech.
FBI agent's testimony implicates headquarters brass in social media censorship
Elvis Chan estimated social media companies took censorship action 50% of the time when FBI asked.
Liberal Outlet Gets Ghoulish About COVID, GOP, and the 2022 Elections.
Did Politico go there, insinuating that the COVID vaccine saved the alleged Democratic voter advantage? The ghoulish undertone is the buried lede here. Smart liberals, who know things, took the vaccine and won, whereas the country bumpkin Republicans didn’t and are dying out. Never mind the slew of healthy people who took the vaccine who are now “dying suddenly.” Or data sets showing that the majority of COVID deaths now are from people who have been vaccinated. That would be inconvenient, right? It also didn’t have to do with the GOP dropping the ball on scores of races, tediously allocating resources to some of the most crucial ones this cycle.
You can debate whether the Trump brand hurt the GOP among yourselves. Frankly, that’s going to be another messy one, but it's necessary if we want to win 2024. I’ll weigh in later, but for now—the Left is enjoying their victory lap as Raphael Warnock won the Georgia runoff.
Twitter Censors Allowed Liberals To Spread Election Conspiracy Theories During 2020, Docs Show
Some Democrats spread unproven conspiracy theories that the Trump administration tampered with Postal Service collection boxes to suppress votes, after then-President Donald Trump had appeared to suggest on Aug. 13, 2020 that he would veto a bill providing U.S. Postal Service funding to stop it from supporting mail-in ballot use, before contradicting that idea hours later and continuing to voice skepticism toward universal mail-in voting.
Similarly, Roth stated in a message that he was “Not seeing the violation here?” when media personality Rick Rosner tweeted on Oct. 27, 2020 that then-President Donald Trump and new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett would “try to #StealOurVotes,” Taibbi revealed from internal documents. Another Twitter executive, Patrick Conlon argued against labelling the tweet, saying he believed it referenced a “Supreme Court decision on processing mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.”
The Supreme Court on Oct. 19, 2020 declined to stop Pennsylvania from counting Election Day-postmarked mail-in ballots that would arrive at their destinations during the subsequent three days, with the votes split at 4-4. The Senate had not yet confirmed Barrett when that vote took place, and Barrett immediately faced a motion to recuse herself from voting on a challenge in the post-Election Day ballot delivery case.
However, Twitter staff were quick to attach labels to tweets by conservatives and Republican officials, Taibbi reported.
We don't have a free press
We don't have a free press.
If we had a free press, 30 reporters would never pose with Nancy Pelosi as if they were her ladies-in-waiting.
If we did, Hillary's 30,000 emails sent to a trucking company in Red China would have stopped her presidential bid.
If we had a free press, Seth Rich's murder would have been bigger than George Floyd's overdose death.
If we had a free press, journalists would not seek the approval of John Podesta (Hillary's henchman) as we learned in the DNC emails leaked by Seth Rich.
If we had a free press, Hillary's fake charity which laundered bribes from foreigners would have landed her in prison.
If we had a free press, the FBI spying on Donald Trump would have landed Barack Obama in prison as well.
If we had a free press, Jim Comey would have been Obama's cellmate.
New York Times strikes while the irony is hot
Already the Gray Lady has turned so far left that she’s barely recognizable to generations of readers, but to the radical staff, the paper is just another racist rag. Black employees as a group reportedly do not score well on managers’ evaluations, and a union leader insisted it was only because of discrimination.
“It turns out that they are weighted against employees of color at The New York Times,” Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, told Fox News. “For example, no black employee at The New York Times has ever received the highest rating possible. Nikole Hannah-Jones is in our unit. Tell me how she is not doing that caliber-type of work.”
DeCarava’s citing of Hannah-Jones is telling, though not in the way she intended. The maven of the ahistorical 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her error-riddled essay, and the Times is pushing its false claims into schools.
A month into the Covid-19 lockdowns, anti-lockdown protests were taking place nationwide. Politico reported: “Facebook is blocking anti-quarantine protesters from using the site to organize in-person gatherings that violate states’ stay-at-home orders.” A Facebook spokesman said the company was removing posts “when gatherings do not follow the health parameters established by the government and are therefore unlawful.” Protest organizers’ Pages were also shut down by Facebook for violating its terms of service by allegedly inciting violence.
But protest organizers knew to encourage participants to wear masks, socially distance, and not carry guns to avoid criticism. How much did Twitter, Facebook, and other tech giants restrict protesters from organizing under the guise of concerns about health risks or incitement to violence?
While there were those calling for revolution and saying menacing things on social media, did groups clearly advocating nonviolent demonstrations get blocked too? What was Twitter’s policy on sharing posts inviting people to demonstrate peacefully?
thefederalist.com
But protest organizers knew to encourage participants to wear masks, socially distance, and not carry guns to avoid criticism. How much did Twitter, Facebook, and other tech giants restrict protesters from organizing under the guise of concerns about health risks or incitement to violence?
While there were those calling for revolution and saying menacing things on social media, did groups clearly advocating nonviolent demonstrations get blocked too? What was Twitter’s policy on sharing posts inviting people to demonstrate peacefully?
Did Twitter Suppress Covid Lockdown Protests?
The public needs to know whether Big Tech companies subverted one of our most basic rights: the right to protest peacefully.
thefederalist.com
Taylor Lorenz Lashes Out at Younger, More Successful Journalist in Cruel Anti-Semitic Tirade
"Notable what gets framed as a ‘buzzy media startup,'" Lorenz seethed. "If u start off rich, have a rich spouse, rich friends, don't follow any journalistic ethical rules, and focus your content solely on serving the interests of extremely powerful rich ppl, you can go far!"
A number of Twitter users observed that Lorenz's rant was rife with projection and petty jealousy. Weiss is younger*, better looking, and more successful as a journalist and as a human being. Why wouldn't Lorenz be jealous? But that was hardly the most scandalous aspect of the so-called reporter's public tantrum. Weiss also happens to be Jewish, and Lorenz's tweet was a textbook example of an anti-Semitic trope about how all Jews are rich and powerful, conniving, and immoral.
"Prebunking" can be an effective form of misinformation
But I ran into a slightly different perspective on the matter while cruising Twitter, and I think it deserves consideration: sometimes, at least, the person throwing out an absurd take isn’t actually hoping to convince you of anything. They are, rather, trying to discredit the source and do nothing more. The ad hominem attack is the only point–to destroy the credibility of their opponent, without actually convincing you of any particular argument.
My new Twitter friend laid the argument first in a series of tweets, and at my request on his Substack blog. I implore you to click the link and read his take because he could use the clicks.
It goes on and is worth reading, although the Substack article lays the whole thing out.
He clearly has a point. Carolyn Orr Bueno creates her own credibility by referencing her credentials, giving a gloss of academic prestige to her idiocy. She claims to be an expert in “disinformation” and even terrorism, although her doctorate is in Social and Behavioral Sciences, whatever that means. Her dissertation is “During Pregnancy: A Theory-Based Meta-Analysis,” which has as much to do with Q-Anon and White Rabbits as trash collecting.
There’s a reason why there is a white rabbit emoji. It’s not to promote Q-Anon, for God’s sake. It’s a reference to the phrase.
But her assertion has emotional impact, if no logic or evidence behind it. “Follow the White Rabbit” is a normal phrase used all the time in English, originating in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and made famous again by the movie The Matrix. It refers not to Q-Anon or terrorism, but going down a rabbit hole and discovering a weird new world. In The Matrix it explicitly refers to discovering a surprising truth.
That being the Twitter Files, obviously. Musk thinks revealing the Twitter Files is a vital insight into how our society is being manipulated. Once you go down the rabbit hole your world will never look the same.
There is zero connection between this and Q-Anon, and our intrepid misinformation purveyor knows that. She is simply “pre-bunking” Musk. Smearing him as a source, just as the New York Times tried to debunk the Balenciaga/pedophilia scandal by linking it to Q-Anon. Anything that contradicts The Narrative is wild conspiracy theory.