Media Corruption

[GURPS]

Media, Suddenly: Say, Did You Know Biden Is Old, Unpopular, and Corrupt?​

To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield: There’s something happening here … what it is ain’t exactly UNclear, however.

Earlier today, Beege beat me to the Axios story based on leaks from current and former White House aides about Biden’s lack of self-awareness about his age. Supposedly these aides feel that Biden’s problem is that he’s trying to do too much, even while claiming that the 81-year-old Dotard in Chief is “extraordinarily energetic for his age.” That falls into the realm of gaslighting, as anyone who’s watched Joe Biden in public can attest.

And this part made me almost drench my computer screen with the coffee I sipped while reading it:

Why it matters: Current and former aides say Biden is extraordinarily energetic for his age. But his repeated insistence that he feels so young can draw eye rolls: Some current and former aides believe Biden doesn’t realize how old he can come across. …

Current and former Biden aides say he often pushes to do more travel and events than they think he should.

Biden pushing up against his limits sometimes creates a cycle in which he wears himself out, then appears fatigued during public events — which can increase concerns about his age, even when he’s taking on a rigorous schedule.

Ahem. What “rigorous schedule” might that be? Biden’s taking more vacation than any other president, spending almost as much time in Delaware as in Washington DC. This comes after a presidential campaign that barely put Biden on the trail at all, followed by almost two years of pandemic restrictions that overshadowed his lack of physical stamina for the job. These days, Biden can barely finish an extemporaneous thought on stage, and frequently looks lost when it comes time to leave it.

If Jill Biden wants Joe to have a less-rigorous schedule as President, he’d have to set up his beach chair at Rehoboth as the new Situation Room.

[clip]

Andy does a good job in summarizing the Post’s reporting, but let’s just recap: the Biden family got six figures in cash from Richard “Dickie” Scruggs in a deal that eventually led to federal corruption charges and a five-year stretch for Dickie. That deal at one point needed action from Congress to waive anti-trust statutes to get a federal settlement with the tobacco companies, which then-Senator Joe Biden opposed … until his brother got $100,000 from Scruggs, at which point Joe became a True Believer® in the arrangement.

The curious part of the Post’s interest in this Biden Inc episode is that it goes back more than 25 years. The tobacco lawsuits took place in the late 1990s, and while Scruggs didn’t get the waiver at the federal level even with Biden’s help, he scored massive payouts with lawsuits in the states. The crimes for which Scruggs got convicted took place a decade later in unrelated litigation, but which also involved Jim Biden. This isn’t Hunter Biden getting millions in cash from China and Ukraine for nothing more than influence peddling; this involved domestic bribery in which Jim and Hunter were implicated, but curiously never charged or even investigated.

 

[GURPS]

Game Journalism Layoffs: Everyone Suffers Without Expert Criticism​

You can say this is a bit inside baseball, and honestly, I wish it was, but the current layoff nightmare is by no means exclusive to folks who write about video games. PCMag covers tech news, so that means we've written about thousands of people losing their jobs at Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter. These massive corporations sucked up so much cash, especially during the height of the pandemic, and yet have "no choice" but to put an unconscionable number of employees out of work as they "get ahead of the recession."




As More Media Layoffs Ring in the New Year, Americans Face Prospect of ‘News Deserts’ | Analysis


In the last month alone, Condé Nast, G/O Media, Vice Media and Vox Media have all cut staff, most of whom already had layoffs earlier this year. (Vice filed for bankruptcy in June.)

[ leftist woke nonsense DOES NOT SELL ]

Broadcast, print and digital outlets collectively saw 2,681 journalism job cuts in 2023, up 48% from 1,808 in 2022 and 77% from 1,511 in 2021, according to a report from employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

With a collapsing advertising-revenue model and more media companies experimenting with artificial intelligence to create content, the outlook for journalism is dimming, media analysts told TheWrap. The decline underscores the need for the public and even governments to fund news gathering if it is to survive in its current form and avoid widespread "news deserts," they said.

"All available evidence suggests that the commercial future for journalism is especially dire," Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, told TheWrap. "We cannot simply let the market drive local journalism into the ground. I expect to see more legislative efforts, especially at state government levels, aimed at shoring up and even expanding local journalism."


How Socialist of them ... we cannot let the market decide - in other words we don't want to produce articles people WANT TO READ, we want be paid to write woke crap nobody wants

 

[GURPS]

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?​

So just who is the anonymous Twitter personality whose message of unfettered, technology-crazed capitalism at all costs has captivated many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful?


Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.


In a wide-ranging interview with Forbes, Verdon confirmed that he is behind the account, and extolled the e/acc philosophy. “Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” he said. Of the Jezos persona, he said: “If you're going to create an ideology in the time of social media, you’ve got to engineer it to be viral.”

 

[GURPS]

Salon Magazine: ‘Dictator’ Trump Has ‘Hitlerian’ Plans, ‘Dangerous’ MAGA Culture ‘Corrupting’ Kids​

The essay, titled “The Trump generation problem: MAGA family values are corrupting children,” was penned by Salon politics staff writer Chauncey DeVega, who warns that “Trumpism and American neofascism” are corrupting societal norms and endangering democracy, thereby constituting a “national emergency.”






Accusing him of following the “dictator’s playbook,” DeVega laments that the former president “has not been significantly punished or restrained by the courts, yet,” while calling “Dictator Trump’s Hitlerian plans” — including the deployment of American troops to secure the border and enforce immigration laws — “how democracies die.”

He also claims Trump continues to “channel” Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “with his promise to cleanse (White) American society of the ‘vermin’ and human ‘blood pollution’ he believes is caused by non-white undocumented immigrants and migrants.”

In those comments, DeVega claims the former president was not “flirting with” Hitlerism and Nazism, but “almost verbatim quoting Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and other Nazi language and ideology.”

“Trump knows exactly what he is saying — and like other autocrats and dictators he means it,” he writes, as he accuses the news media of repeatedly attempting to “downplay and normalize Trump’s increasingly unrestrained evil.”

Citing political writer Jill Lawrence, DeVega warns that Trump presents a “massive challenge today to parents across the ideological spectrum who believe in old-fashioned virtues like respect and civility.”

 

[GURPS]

‘So angry’: Chris Matthews says dealing with rural Americans is like ‘fighting terrorism’​

Matthews highlighted the importance of anger in mobilizing voters during elections as he drew the analogy. He said rural Americans harbor a deep-seated anger toward liberal elites and then seemed to liken it to the sentiments of terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq following the U.S. military presence there.

“This is rural rage. They are so angry at the liberal establishment, the coastal elite, they look at people on television … ‘They don’t have to worry about us,’” Matthews stated. “And the regular guy in the country goes, ‘there they are snarling and making fun of us again’ and every time we make fun of Trump, we’re making fun of them … It’s a weird thing, but in a way, it’s like fighting terrorism.”

 

[GURPS]

The NYT's Laughable Article About Arab Losses in the Gaza War​

We all know that Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip following Hamas’ genocidal October 7 attack would spur the usual reactions from the pro-terrorist crowd. It used to be contained to academia, but the far-left is now taking over newsrooms at a shocking rate. The New York Times, The Associated Press, CNN, and others were always atrocious in their Israel coverage, but the war in Gaza has showcased what happens when you don’t know anything.

The Times recently had a piece about how this Gaza War is the deadliest for Arabs in the past 40 years. Sure, they had to tweak the headline because it was grossly incorrect, but the paper still has the bad habit of peddling Hamas propaganda (via NYT):

The number of Gaza residents reported killed during Israel’s 10-week-old war in the territory has already surpassed the toll for any other Arab conflict with Israel in more than 40 years and perhaps any since Israel’s founding in 1948.

The Gaza Health Ministry said on Thursday that the death toll had exceeded 20,000 for the first time, putting it just above one of the most authoritative estimates of those killed in Lebanon by Israel’s 1982 invasion.

And though Gaza officials have said counting the dead has become increasingly challenging, most experts say the figure is likely an undercount and express shock at the enormity of the loss. Some military experts said more people had been killed more quickly in this war than during the deadliest stages of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Azmi Keshawi, the Gaza analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank, said this war was “more horrifying” than any he had experienced before. He said he and his family had fled his home in northern Gaza and moved six times so far. They now live in a tent near a U.N. shelter in the southern city of Rafah.

No wars were ever fought until Israeli troops invaded Gaza this fall. You have to laugh at this article. First, everything is now a percentage of this or that to make it seem more devastating than it is; second, The Times is still taking Hamas’ death toll as gospel. Wasn’t this paper hurled into the furnace for peddling a fake news story about Israel bombing a hospital in Gaza not so long ago? Yes, it was—and published it’s fake report because it thought terrorist sources were legitimate. You also must wonder if these reporters tacitly supported repeating known falsehoods to place pressure on the Biden administration and Israel to accept a ceasefire. If these publications hire photographers who more or less participated in the October 7 attacks, it’s not hard to see its reporters adopting the same mindset with their articles. As long as it ends with a ceasefire, publishing fake news pieces is justified.

The Associated Press also pulled the same funny business with the death toll, claiming that the experts were saying, “Israel's military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in history.”

 

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David Roberts Upset That We're All Helping Conservatives Smear Black Scholars​

We're especially amused by journalists opposing journalism. NBC News "journalist" Ben Collins sarcastically tweeted that we should put more reporters on the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal: "It is the most important thing in the world," he said. It is important, and reporters should be able to cover more than one story at a time. He was so butthurt that the New York Times reported on it.

Former Vox writer David Roberts, who now runs his own newsletter/podcast, took the same approach, arguing that the plagiarism scandal was ginned up from nothing and was "blotting out all other news stories." Really.

After Gay's resignation, Roberts wrote a lengthy thread against journalists committing journalism. We won't post the whole thing here, but feel free to click on it.

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]

They're So Bad at This: Matt Gaetz Calls Out New Republic Over Right Wing Podcast Story​

In the last decade, the listenership of podcasts has increased significantly. In 2023, at least 42% of people ages 12 and over have listened to at least one podcast in the past month, according to Pew Research. In 2020, several of the Top 200 Apple podcasts were right-leaning, including shows belonging to Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, and Stephen Crowder.

Conservative media has flourished, always, in places outside the mainstream -- AM talk-radio, for example. So it's natural that podcasting would appeal to conservative content creators and listeners, two demographics sorely (and intentionally) underrepresented in traditional mainstream media.

So The New Republic (TNR) is realizing that podcasting is popular on the right because it circumvents the mainstream media.





Duh.

That's the point.

They write:

In recent years, however, politicians have turned to another, newer format: the podcast. After washing out of the presidential race in 2020, Pete Buttigieg launched The Deciding Decade, which focused on issues like gun violence and the minimum wage. (He abandoned it when he got a real job as secretary of transportation.) Podcasting is especially popular among sitting politicians on the right: Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz have reasonably popular podcasts, as does their fellow Republican member of Congress, Dan Crenshaw. Mike Johnson, the newly installed speaker of the House, did as well—until unceremoniously abandoning it after being elevated—though his was far, far less trendy. The rise of political podcasting is a reflection of the ongoing blurring of right-wing media and politics: Sitting congressmen not only take cues from bloviators like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro, they playact as them between votes. The idea is that podcasting rewards authenticity, providing politicians with a direct line to constituents, avoiding pesky filters like the press in the process. In practice, however, these podcasts are dreary and disposable bite-size campaign books.

 

[GURPS]

So he's not bombastic like the late Rush Limbaugh, but instead 'discusses [things] like a congressman'?

The horror. The horror.

Seriously, that's their complaint? Make it make sense.










Exactly. Remember their meltdown when Musk took over Twitter? They were so mad they lost one platform of the many they dominate. They want control and get mad when they lose even an ounce of it.

 

[GURPS]

Who's Buying Up Small Newspapers in Rural Georgia?​

So what's the big deal with the Georgia Trust for Local News? After all, in its press release, it crows about fostering "non-partisan local news." All you have to do is look at the names behind the trust, and you'll see why it's a problem.

For starters, the trust is placing DuBose Porter in charge of all these newspapers. Porter has a proven track record as a newspaper publisher, so on the surface, the choice sounds like a no-brainer. But Porter has also moved in the highest circles among Georgia's Democrats for decades; he served in the Georgia House of Representatives for nearly 30 years, unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2010, and led the party apparatus for several years.

It's one thing to put a Democrat in charge of these local papers, but the organizations behind the trust are even more alarming. The funding for the trust is coming from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. It's easy to think of anything with the word "foundation" in it as left-wing by default, but these organizations have shored up their far-left bona fides.

Influence Watch labels the Knight Foundation as "a left-leaning private foundation" that "has funded non-profit news sites, backed paying the salaries of individual reporters at newspapers, and supported many research projects about how newspapers can remain viable enterprises."

The Woodruff Foundation claims that it "seeks to improve the quality of life in Georgia by investing in health, education, economic opportunity, and community vitality." While it focuses primarily on metro Atlanta, the foundation gets involved in some initiatives in other parts of the state, and this trust is one of those non-metropolitan grants.

If the Marguerite Casey Foundation sounds familiar to you as a PJ Media reader, it's because I've exposed its far-left activities before — particularly its anti-police advocacy and its ties to the domestic terrorists who have plagued Atlanta in recent years. And let's not forget who sits on this foundation's board: Stacey Abrams.

What will the Georgia Trust for Local News do with these newspapers? There may be some temptation to give the benefit of the doubt that these papers will remain unbiased, but the trust is aligned with the National Trust for Local News, which is of the left. In the press release, the word "sustainable" comes up often, and there's other rhetoric that points to what the trust could do with these papers.

“The dismantling of local news disparately impacts marginalized communities," said Marguerite Casey Foundation's Dr. Carmen Rojas in the press release. “We look forward to supporting the Georgia Trust as it uplifts the issues impacting Georgians and builds stronger community newspapers.” Another foundation representative talks about how "mistrust thrives" when local papers go under.

 

[GURPS]

The Washington Post Is in Full-Scale Collapse​

Is The Washington Post in full-scale collapse? A recent look at the numbers provides a fairly convincing answer to that question.

According to the report, not only is the Post losing $100 million a year, but it lost over half of its online engagement by the end of 2023. The signs were already there by mid-year, and the worst has come to pass.












As to the reasons behind this precipitous fall, I think they are fairly obvious. Nothing the Post produces is worthwhile. Their columnists are boring parrots who all say the same thing, levying the same boring attacks they were levying nearly a decade ago. Even a died-in-the-wool liberal can only take so many Jennifer Rubin columns claiming the end is nigh for the nation because Republicans get to vote.

Then there's Taylor Lorenz, who has done more to harm the Post's credibility in the few years she's worked there than any other "journalist" at the outlet. She's been caught committing multiple ethical violations dealing with her "stories," and the response from her employers has been non-existent. Of all the people who should have been given the boot long ago, Lorenz was one of them.

Where does Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, go from here? The path the news outlet is on is not sustainable. Continuing to dump money into a sinking ship is a bad investment, and because the Post's leaders are more beholden to their left-wing radicalism than market forces, there's no reason to think the ship can ever be saved.

 

[glhs837]

Folks we dont like are bloviators, while we (hoists nose in the air and extends pinkie finger) are journalists!!!!!!

 

[Kyle]

Why would anyone pay a fee for online propaganda?

 

[Hijinx]

When I was younger I used to buy the Post for it's comic section.

Today the whole paper is one big comic section, I no longer even buy it on Sunday and I damned sure will not pay to read their tripe on the internet. It would be great for stopping the division in America if the WAPO and the NY Slimes both went broke.