Media

Freedom or the MSM can Survive: Not Both

Mark Noonan21 Comments

It is now clear that almost the entire MSM combined with almost all of Big Tech to censor some opinions and boost others – and it has been going on for a while, but only went into overdrive in 2020 with the effort to oust Trump. But the reason why they did it is far less important than the fact that they did it, at all. It is a huge problem – and the solution of it may determine whether we remain free, or not.

As of at least yesterday, none of the three major network newscasts had even mentioned the Twitter files. This silence could be because they haven’t worked out the talking points but it could well be that the word has come down that the files simply will not be discussed. This shows that the MSM is entirely a State-controlled media. It is a mere propaganda outfit and it is as the command of the DNC.

“Can you prove that, Mark!”

Don’t have to. I’m not stupid. Its a huge story involving one of the world’s richest men and one of the world’s largest social media platforms. This sort of thing is made for the news – and you only don’t mention it on command.

And now we have to think: the First Amendment protection for the press: does it extend to what amounts to a propaganda outfit for one party? It would be one thing if they would just admit that they are Democrat operatives dressing themselves up as news people…but they won’t admit that. They pretend to be reporting news when they clearly don’t report anything that is unfavorable to Democrats…and when it comes to disfavoring Republicans, they’ll repeat the most monstrous and stupid lies.

This is what the guys at Bunker Hill and Yorktown were fighting for?

I have my suspicions that Washington’s constabulary would have a particularly violent response to this. What will ours be? Pretend its all ok? Hope they get an attack of conscience? Pretend that when we protect CBS News we’re defending a principle?

We have to do something. We can’t let this stand. The MSM and Big Tech must be forced to kneel before the people and become, as far as humanly possible, fair and honest platforms for information. I don’t have a roadmap to this – but I think our first effort if we ever get a trifecta is to break up the large media corporations. That no one entity or person can control more than one media outlet. Joe Billionaire or MegaCorp X can own one TV network. Or one newspaper. Or one website. Or one movie studio – and they can’t own even a penny’s worth of any other. This would first and foremost restore real competition. You would get, in the end, more TV networks, more newspapers, more websites…more of everything presenting news and entertainment to the people because, my friends, there are buckets of money to be made doing that and huge amounts of fame to be had. People will still get into it even if they can’t own it all. And they’ll look for their markets and, guess what?, someone will figure out that the Right is a market.

The one thing we can’t do is nothing. We are doomed if we do nothing. Eventually – and probably very soon – you’ll see the MSM simply ceasing to cover reality. Their whole existence will be to praise Democrats and slander Republicans. They won’t even in passing mention anything that is bad news for Democrats. They will, combined with Big Tech, try to suffocate all dissent. We must find a way to breath, or we die.

The Truth is Hard to Desire

Mark Noonan29 Comments

We got Twitter Files Part II tonight – and it was all about shadow banning.

Twitter documents clearly showed that Twitter employees were suppressing the reach of right-of-center accounts. All officially because they were spreading “hate” and “misinformation”, but the reality was because they were telling the truth and that cut against the Democrat Narrative – especially in 2020 when they needed the Covid Narrative to work against Trump. That did work, by the way.

Among the accounts suppressed was that of Dr Jay Bhattacharya who was warning that the lockdowns and masks were doing more harm than good – something that all but the most devoted Covid Cultists now admit. The guy is a professor as Stanford – MD and PhD. His skillset include infectious disease. Now, that set of credentials doesn’t mean he’s automatically right – but he’s clearly someone who should have a seat at the table. If he’s saying something, we should hear it and bounce it against what other people are saying.

But none of that from Twitter – or, indeed, from social media in general. It was all that Covid is a uniquely horrific disease and we need to mask and lockdown.

The mask thing was always bizarre to me. I mean, come on: the reason why a surgeon wears a mask isn’t to protect himself against the patient, but to protect the patient against the doctor. Surgeons actually got very good and slicing and dicing people early on. It is, after all, mostly a matter of mechanics. Once you know where the parts are, you’re good to go. But, of course, in olden days they didn’t know about bacteria and so even the most successful surgeries would fail because of a post-operative infection. Once that was known, doctors started to scrub up and wear gloves and masks – to keep bacteria from the doctor entering the patient’s wound/incision and making all medical efforts moot. Masks are to stop bacteria – which are massively larger than a virus. Comparison? It takes a thousand nanometers to make a micrometer. Most viruses are about 20 nanometers. Bacteria can come in at 2 micrometers. We’re talking hole in the ground vs Grand Canyon, guys. A mask is sufficient to stop most bacteria…but it might as well not even be there when it comes to a virus.

And we all knew this. Or were supposed to know this. I learned the basics of it in High School biology. But I guess most don’t know…or were easily bamboozled by the TV. The call for masking to stop a virus should have been met with contemptuous laughter…but, as it turns out, I lost a friend of 20 years when I pointed out that masks were useless. She was sure they worked! Because the TV said so.

I guess, thinking back on everything, I should have realized we would have this problem when, years ago, I found that people were demanding – and doctors were prescribing – antibiotics for colds and flu. Antibiotics do absolutely zero against a virus. They can’t do anything against a virus. Bacteria and viruses are entirely different species of problem. But there is was – and now Covid hysteria does make some sense.

We’re really stupid as a people.

But we’re also highly propagandized. Huge amounts of what people think they know is actually just an ad campaign which got drilled into the brain by a corporation or a bureaucracy. Solzhenitsyn noted this in the USSR – that history isn’t what happened but what the government chose to hammer into the public mind. It takes an act of will to go beyond the Narrative. first to ask if the Narrative makes any sense and then, if it doesn’t to figure out what might have happened. Example:

The Official Story of WWII had it had it that the Soviets, by a miracle of organization and work, moved most of their heavy industry out of the Donbas in front of the advancing Nazis and set up shop in the Urals where they then produced what was needed to win the war.

Well, sure enough, there were a lot of factories set up in the Urals…but we’re supposed to believe that in the chaos of defeat and retreat, with the limited Soviet transport system giving priority to the armies at the front they yet found the manpower and means to move whole factories a thousand miles to the east. Yeah, sorry: no, that didn’t happen. On their best days the Russians couldn’t pull that off. With the Nazis at the gates, they sure in heck couldn’t.

The reality is that American and British arms, munitions and material keep the Soviets in the war. We sent, for instance, something like 400,000 trucks to the USSR. 13,000 tanks. About 120 tanks made up a Soviet tank corps (roughly equivalent to an armored division for other European military forces). Thirty one tank corps were formed by the USSR during WWII. Do the math: most Soviet tank corps were equipped to one degree or another with American tanks. Sure, they did build T-34’s. Lots of them – in factories in the Urals where US-made machine tools and US-supplied materials made it happen. But the bottom line is that without our help, they simply wouldn’t have enough to fight a war with.

Once you think about how ridiculous it is to move, say, a steel mill a thousand miles then the whole fantasy falls apart…and that makes you look up just what we sent to the USSR during WWII and you find it was a simply staggering amount of everything you could possibly need from boots to to fighter planes.

But we all believe it! The TV said so. Or some such.

The truth, as the catch-phrase goes, is out there. And it is pretty easy to find. But I think that most don’t desire to find it. Most these days prefer that others do their thinking for them. I think people by now are simply afraid of it – afraid that if they seek the truth and find it, they’ll be forced to act.

Destroy the Corporate Media

Mark Noonan40 Comments

I’m sure you’ve heard the story of the mounted Border Patrol people being accused of whipping Haitian illegal immigrants. I’m sure you also know the story is a complete fabrication. It never happened. Nothing even remotely like it happened. But, the MSM created the lie and they are still running with it. Today, Axios ran a story (I won’t link to them) with the headline:

Gov. Greg Abbott to Border Patrol agents who whipped at Haitian migrants from horseback: “I will hire you to help Texas secure our border.”

Can you believe it? Well, of course you can: we’re all used to this. It is, perhaps, just a little more brazen than it used to be, but egregious lying has been par for the course for the MSM since at least Reagan took office. As I said – and as you know – no whipping took place. As far as eyewitness accounts go – including from the photographer who took the picture being held up as proof that a whipping happened – nobody was hit by anything. But what got me going was a comment about the story from Stephen Miller: a good guy and a smart, well informed person.

There are decent journalists at Axios but why the f**k should we even read or listen to them when their employer is pulling this shit?

I had to put a correction on that: no, there are no decent journalists at Axios. Any decent journalist would refuse to be associated with an organization which lies like that. Technically, I guess there could be – but if they don’t quit their jobs within 24 hours, that will be the proof that none of them are decent.

These aren’t mistakes. These are deliberate, malicious lies. The whipping lie also isn’t the first malicious lie out of the MSM. They’ve done it again and again and again. And it isn’t done for ratings. There is no profit motive here. MSM audience figures are a dumpster fire of fail. CNN is paying Anderson Cooper (who is worth $200 million) about a million dollars a month for a show barely a million people bother to watch at any given time. You don’t do that if money is the motivator – but you will do that if your goal is to promote a Narrative and you need a host who looks and sounds good on TV while reading the most monstrous lies off a teleprompter. Don’t think that isn’t a talent! Most of us would look nervous or embarrassed trying to lie like an MSM host. But they pull it off with aplomb: it is what they’re paid to do.

So, what are we going to do about this? What, that is, will be our response to a gigantic Corporate propaganda machine spewing lies against us 24/7?

A few years ago, all of us would say, “nothing”. We were firmly convinced that the First Amendment was sacrosanct and even the most disgusting lies must be endured so that we can at least have the chance to tell the truth. But it isn’t like that any longer, is it?

Over the past 4 years, especially, the corporate media has actively participated in the shutting down of alternate voices. They have lied about and doxxed persons and organizations merely trying to present the news. They have urged action against such people and organizations to dry up their revenue streams and remove them from various platforms: and they have had a lot of success. It started with Yiannopoulos (if you haven’t followed his saga: the latest I’ve heard is that he’s stopped being gay…which may be another advertising gimmick, but who knows?) being banned and pretty much the entire Right went silent about it. He wasn’t the hill to die on! And then hill after hill was passed by. Lots of non-Left voices have been effectively silenced and without any government action: just the corporations obeying the orders of leftwing pressure groups. Some on the right still try to draw a distinction between Corporate and Government action…but I can’t see it. Not any longer. To me, when You Tube bans a non-left account, it is merely the government using Corporations to do things that the government couldn’t get away with. But, however you want to view that particular issue, the bottom line is that Corporations are banning our speech while allowing the most disgusting lies to be broadcast from Corporate sources.

This isn’t, you know, fair.

If we wish to survive – if we wish to be free and fully able to participate in the public square – the corporate media (profit and non-profit) has to go. All they do is lie. All of their lies serve the Democrat party. Their lies are slickly presented and convince millions of Americans to vote not just against their own interests, but against basic common sense. The First Amendment does not apply to Corporations: that is the standard we must adhere to. That no publicly traded corporation has any First Amendment protection. Furthermore, no person or entity has a right to lie – that is, there is no First Amendment protection for ever broadcasting or publishing anything factually untrue. If you lie, you are liable. I know I’ve said this before, but now with this whipping story, I really do believe my assertion has teeth. Pudding Brain has promised to make the border patrol agents pay – for doing nothing. If the President of the United States, urged by lying media, will punish Border Patrol agents for nothing, what can be done to you any time the corporate media decides to target you?

It is time to drop the quiet dogmas of the past. They won’t do. Our opponents dropped them a long time ago. They will oppress us to their maximum ability at any time. Time to start removing the protections they hide behind while trying to club us to death.

Remembering Rush Limbaugh

Mark Noonan8 Comments

I was just coming back to work from lunch and a colleague was eating at his desk and had the radio going. After saying hello to others there and taking a look at what was on tap for the afternoon, I heard the radio host bring up Michael Dukakis, with the background music being The Beatles “I’m a Loser”.

What the heck is that?, I asked.

“Calls himself Rush. Its great. He shreds hypocrites.”

That was my introduction to Rush Limbaugh. It was, I think, very early 1989, though it might have been very late 1988. At all events, Rush had only recently started his national show and I was immediately a fan. I had never heard anyone argue in the media with the Conventional Wisdom. Rush was challenging and funny and he clearly didn’t care what liberals thought about him. I think a lot of us remember those early days with their various “updates” and things like the bake sale. It was energizing and fun. And, I think, it played a huge role in the GOP recapturing the House in 1994, thus starting the breakdown of Democrat power in the United States.

He was, of course, before blogging. Before Fox News. Before everything except National Review in Conservative thought. And he was the very first Conservative activist. Not that he gave his audience orders, but that he galvanized us by showing, via his gigantic audience, that we weren’t alone. That millions upon millions shared our dismay with the course of the country.

Rush’s influence simply cannot be overstated. Never holding any office. Never directly participating in any political campaign. He yet got the ball rolling for the breakdown of the Establishment’s grip on the public mind. That Donald Trump was able to get nearly 75 million votes in 2020 – after a year of pandemic and economic crash and after four years of relentless MSM lies – is testament to the number of minds freed because back in 1988 Rush went on the air with the intent to say whatever he thought was right. That we haven’t won completely is no detraction from Rush. He was, after all, just one man. That we still may be able to save this country is Rush’s crowning glory.

I did see the intense hatred directed Rush’s way after his death was announced. We all knew it was coming, but there was something extra pathetic about it. None of the people celebrating his death have a tenth the influence that Rush had. And, just as certain, none of them ever listened to his show. Rely on that: the only people who hate Rush are those who don’t listen. If they did listen, they’d find that he had arguments to make. I didn’t always agree with everything Rush said. But when I did find myself thinking differently, I could still see the force of Rush’s argument…and though I never met him, I’m sure he’d see the force of mine. Those who hate him never exposed themselves to those arguments – arguments which no liberal could in any case win, because liberalism is wrong, entirely.

And while we on the right knew that liberalism was wrong, we didn’t have a voice to express it. Rush provided that. He was a master of his art. Don’t fool yourself: talking for three hours a day and keeping it interesting and entertaining is no small feat. Hardly anyone can do it and Rush did it superbly. He won’t be replaced: we’ll just get along as best we can with lesser lights…but while they can’t stand in the shoes of the giant, in their numbers they will make up for it. And it is because Rush happened that there will be scores of people out there, on the air, saying what they want.

I pray for the repose of the soul of our departed brother and that God may comfort his family and friends.

Found this:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?284357-3/rush-limbaugh-1951-2021

The Real World vs TV Reality

Mark Noonan37 Comments

The other day Ace wrote a bit about this friend of his who is a SJW nutcase (I can’t remember which article it was: I searched a bit, but he’s been busy lately and so there’s a lot of articles – I couldn’t find the one) who simply didn’t believe that transgender women (ie, former men) were being allowed to compete against women. Until there was finally a small news story about it, and then she grudgingly admitted it happened, but was sure it was being exaggerated by Faux News. Ace pointed out that she didn’t believe it because the news she listens to simply never told her about it. That got me thinking: it explains a lot.

I get into Twitter and other arguments with liberals and one of their common assertions is that I should turn off “Faux News” and find out what is really going on. I never thought too much of it because I don’t watch Fox News. Heck, I don’t hardly watch any news. Anyone who has been around this blog for a while knows I have utter contempt for the MSM, but that contempt is tripled for the television branch of the MSM. I started rolling it around in my head, and I doubt that I spend even 15 minutes a month watching any sort of televised national news. I might check it if there’s a breaking story with interesting video…but, even then, you usually get the raw video faster in social media. The longest stretch of MSM-watching I’ve done over the past 10 years was Election Night 2016, because I had a feeling going in that Trump might pull it off and I wanted to see the nitwits react to that. And even there, it was only for a couple hours. Then it all struck me: they were not so much wanting me to stop watching Fox, but to start watching MSNBC. Because, man, that is where the truth is!

This burst of revelation was solidified today when a Never Trumper on Twitter was going on a rant and one of his rant points was to say that Republicans went nuts over Obama’s tan suit, but they are letting Trump get away with murder. It immediately leaped to my mind that I don’t remember the Tan Suit Scandal. Honestly, I don’t. I couldn’t begin to tell you when it happened or what the particulars were. I only know about it because since Trump took office, I keep seeing boring, poorly done leftist memes claiming that the Tan Suit Scandal was Obama’s only scandal (when I see it I always post a link to Worst President, as a sort of rebuttal). Do you guys know more about this? I asked Matt and he was pretty vague about it, as well. Bottom line, did any actual Republican go anything remotely nuts about Obama’s tan suit? But here was a guy – a guy who is college educated, top of his profession, etc – getting upset that Republicans got upset about Obama’s tan suit. Did it really happen? Meaning, not “did Obama wear a tan suit” but was there a “Tan Suit Scandal” which roiled politics for a period of time? I don’t think there was – I’m pretty sure I would have noticed it at the time. I did a bit of searching the blog, and I don’t think it even rated an Open Thread mention. I’m now quite certain that there is a world different from reality – we’ll call it TV Reality – where quite a lot of people live, and they believe a lot of nonsense simply because the TV said so…and don’t know a huge amount of stuff because TV hasn’t told them to know it.

You know TV Reality – it is where Trump is Hitler and on his last legs and there isn’t even such a thing as an anti-Semitic Democrat Congresswoman. Where Jussie Smollett was National News until the truth came out and he became a Local Crime Story. TV Reality – where racist hate crimes are all over the place, as opposed to Actual Reality where the hate crimes are exposed again and again as hoaxes. We’ve got tens of millions of people in this country who don’t believe anything they don’t see on TV – and who never, even for a moment, question what they see on TV. These people form the base of the Democrat party – but we’re not immune: I’ve seen plenty of righties, and not Never Trumpers, get themselves into a panic again and again because the TV Reality said Trump did something bad, or that Trump is in trouble over something.

The only advice I can give on this is to shut off the TV – if we did that, Trump would get 80% of the vote in 2020. We do have to find some way to battle this – we have tens of millions of people acting in an amazingly stupid manner because they are convinced that the person on TV in makeup who is reading lines off a teleprompter is real. That when one of these dimwits makes a pronouncement it is as if God Himself were speaking…rather than realizing what they see is a person who got the job because he or she looked and sounded good on TV. Can’t emphasize it enough that brains and ability are not requirements for being on TV – all that is required is looking and sounding good. And they’ve got makeup, lighting, computer programs and sound technicians to make you look and sound really good. I remember that time I went on TV and I had to spend 45 minutes in a makeup chair…for a 10 minute spot! I looked fabulous…and if I had said the moon was made of green cheese, at least a portion of the audience would have bought it because I looked good and I was on TV.

Brainless prats on TV mouthing lines that leftwing propagandists fed to them…mindless boobs at home watching it and thinking, “yeah, sure, Putin rigged the election for Trump to win”. Trouble is the mindless boobs get to vote and their vote counts as much as yours. This is a huge problem for us to get around.

Never Trust the MSM. Ever. Nope, Not Even That Guy You Like

Mark Noonan3 Comments

A lot of people are going on and on about the revelation that NBC News hid exculpatory evidence on Kavanaugh. I’m along the lines of: uh, why would you be surprised?

It is 2018, guys: there is no reason to be surprised by this. The Media has never been a vehicle of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It has always had a partisan bias. It is just that, a long while back, all political sides purchased reporters and editors to ensure their views got out there. It really can’t be emphasized enough how much opinion is actually paid for. As Samuel Johnson put it ages ago, none but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Rely on it, even little blogger me has, at the back of his mind, that one day this might all pay off in a big way (though I’m more hopeful for the novel on this front). I hope and pray that I’ll never be tempted to defend what I don’t believe in return for money, but that temptation is massive in any field where you are putting out information for public consumption…and very large numbers of people simply do what their paymasters demand.

The MSM is, as we know, full to the brim with liberals to begin with. But just being liberal isn’t enough. To really endure in the MSM, you have to parrot on demand whatever comes down the pike – and if your liberalism isn’t enough to keep you going, then there’s always your paycheck to keep you in line. As well the worry that if you don’t toe the line, your future prospects could be ruined. But it isn’t just liberals. On the right, if you wonder why, say, some rather big names in Conservatism continue to boost the horrid “free trade” agreements and say that border control isn’t important, look no further than who is funding their work. If it is corporate money, you can rely on it that they’ll either talk the way their told, or they’ll be out of a job. And even in the independent media now rising, you’ve got to keep in mind that these people are trying to make a name for themselves and start getting paid. This often does result in them breaking important stories…but it can also lead them into doing all sorts of weird or stupid things just to get clicks and views.

Trust none of it. Ever.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to be skeptical. To check and re-check. To learn history on your own so you’ll have a good idea about how such things worked in the past. To always think, “does this really make sense?” when reading an assertion. Always, always, always look at what people do as opposed to what they say. I’ve seen the political prognosticators this past week speak loudly about how good it still looks for Democrats…and then I’ve seen them quietly adjust their actual predictions in favor of the GOP. I’ve seen Democrats still talking up their Blue Wave, while pouring money into New Jersey. On and on and on it goes like that. Look. Think. Check. Doubt. And have no favorites – raise no pundit or reporter up on a pedestal. They might go years doing good work, but then suddenly betray your trust. They are human, too.

In an Age of Lies, your defense is Doubt. It is far better if you approach each story with the attitude it isn’t true than to make yourself look a fool by believing lies…and the worst part of that is that once you’ve defended the lie, you’ll be tempted to keep defending it even when facts prove you wrong. If you went into it doubting it, then you’ll feel to no need to defend it when it is proved false…and, after a while, you’ll get so good at spotting nonsense that you’ll see right through it. You’ll be able to see, that is, the truth the liar is trying to hide from you.

But also be of good cheer – I think that ever more people are seeing the scam, and many have actually penetrated it and discovered the truth. We may be on the cusp of some real, radical change in our nation and we might even, just a few years from now, be in a place where more often than not, the truth gets out before the lies do.

When Reading the News, Skepticism is the Way to Go

Mark Noonan19 Comments

A very good and interesting piece from Matthew Continetti:

Events are turning me into a radical skeptic. I no longer believe what I read, unless what I am reading is an empirically verifiable account of the past. I no longer have confidence in polls, because it has become impossible to separate the signal from the noise. What I have heard from the media and political class over the last several years has been so spectacularly proven wrong by events, again and again, that I sometimes wonder why I continue to read two newspapers a day before spending time following journalists on Twitter. Habit, I guess. A sense of professional obligation, I suppose. Maybe boredom…

I’ve been saying that for a while, myself. But I’m rather late to the game. Here’s another view:

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority. –G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

As I’ve said before, even when journalism is trying to get it right, it really can’t. As Chesterton noted, it only concerns itself with the small number of people who do something odd or have something odd done to them. But it’s even a bit worse than that – because of time and space limitations, journalism can’t give us the full story even of these small slices of human life. Even the most intrepid and honest reporter simply won’t be able to give us all the facts. Outside that, the real problem comes in when the journalist is not being intrepid or honest – when he is just mouthing a line designed to serve a particular end and dressing it up as honest journalism. This is where we are today – in a world where hardly anyone is even trying to report it straight. Everyone’s got an agenda.

It must be remembered that you don’t have to push entirely false information to push an agenda. You can have a whole bunch of true things in there, even if you are trying to get across the most monstrous of lies (such as, for instance, the lie that Hillary was even remotely qualified to be President, let alone the allegedly most qualified person, ever). In fact, the more true stuff you can squeeze in there, the better – makes it harder to attack the main lie. But as I’ve also said before, if you add a ounce of lie to a pound of truth, what you’ve got is all lie. The two things just don’t mix. In the end, you are either telling the truth, or you are telling a lie…there is no half-truth, there is no white-lie.

The bottom line, for me, is that I simply do not believe what I’m reading unless I can ascertain a demonstrable fact…and even then I must be able to fit it all into a coherent worldview, informed by my knowledge of history. Skepticism is a requirement these days – you simply can’t take what is said in the media immediately at face value. It has to be checked – and it has to be pondered. Does it make sense? For instance, in that Georgia House race…we were told, endlessly, that the Democrat was a little ahead and that Democrat enthusiasm was at a huge peak…well, in the end, the Democrat lost by 4 percentage points and didn’t get any more votes than the Democrat had in 2016. It was a gigantic nothingburger from start to finish. I was confident all along the GOPer would win – because there was nothing real which would indicate that a GOP-leaning district was going to repudiate the GOP and Donald Trump. I believed this because I didn’t find any facts to dispute it and all my knowledge indicated it would be like that. But there we went, for weeks people salivating over it…and pouring in untold millions of dollars based upon reports which were simply false.

It is rather sad that it has to be this way – and the fix for it would be easy, and quick. All the MSM would have to do is report things straight for just a few weeks and their credibility would be restored. They won’t do it, at least not any time soon, because most of them are committed to the Progressive cause and all of them are fearful of the wrath of the Progressive gate-keepers if they step out of line. So, for now, all we can be is skeptics.

What Media Bias? Part 202

Mark Noonan39 Comments

From Conrad Black:

The two signal facts, or “alternative facts” in the well-chosen parlance of the brilliant and engaging co-counselor and victorious campaign manager of the president, Kellyanne Conway, are that public approval of the national news media now stands at 14%, and the allegations the press are now making against the new administration are of no interest to any serious segment of the public.

After a while, if you lie constantly, no one is going to believe you – even if, for the moment, you are telling the truth.

What happened to the MSM in 2016 was the cumulation of their dishonesty over a many-decade period. This was helped along by the MSM going entirely overboard, even by MSM standards, in their desire to destroy Trump at the behest of their Democrat friends and Trump’s ability to command the center of attention with a willingness to punch back very hard. The MSM is now exposed as a hollow threat – and even mainstream GOP politicians will cease to tremble in fear of offending it. But let’s take a look at how the MSM did this to itself.

G. K. Chesterton – himself a journalist – pointed out very long ago that there was no need of a censorship of the press because we already had a very functional censorship by the press. The press – the MSM as we call it today – takes sides. If they like a person or a particular grouping of people, they will go soft on them. If they don’t like a person or grouping of people, they will be merciless in hounding them. This does have an effect on how some people can be viewed even long after they are dead.

Take, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Roosevelt is lauded in the history books as the strong President who got things done. Taft is derided as a well-meaning man who simply didn’t have the ability of Roosevelt. But, if you dig a bit into the history of things, you’ll find that even on something as signature to Roosevelt as his “trust busting”, Taft actually did far more. Roosevelt did start the Panama Canal, but he did it in a manner which caused grave harm to America’s reputation among Latin American people…Taft actually got the thing properly organized for construction and then kept a close eye on matters until it was nearly done (it was completed about 18 months after he left office…but by then it was all over but the shouting). If you’re liked by the MSM, you’ll have an easy ride – if you’re hated by them, then no level of excellence will be sufficient. When you translate this to the political parties, the MSM likes the Democrats, hates the Republicans – and this goes back quite a long ways: at least to FDR, but a case can be made that the MSM has hated the Republicans ever since Republicans thwarted Wilson, whom they liked, after World War One.

Of course, to take sides means you are simply not going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You can’t – because the truth will some times work against your side. Even you don’t flat-out lie for your side, you’re still going to present things in a manner which gives best advantage to your side, and most disadvantage to the other side. And you can speak quite a lot of truth without giving the whole truth; of course, if you don’t give out the whole truth, you’ve carried out the functional equivalent of a lie…but as you can’t be caught out in a factual inaccuracy, you can pretend that you just speak the truth. And that is what the MSM did for many decades. As long as their good friends, the Democrats, generally ran things – and from 1932 until 1980, they generally did, in spite of a few GOPers managing to get into the White House – there was no need to lie; you could just tell that part of the truth which reflected most ill upon Republicans. After the election of Reagan – and, especially, his re-election – that started to change.

I still date the break with truth-telling to be Ted Kennedy’s speech against Robert Bork in 1986. No matter how you want to slice it up, Kennedy got out there and delivered a pack of lies about Robert Bork and then the MSM refused to just call them lies. This, I think, is where old Rush gets his view that, for the MSM, it isn’t the facts of the case but the seriousness of the charge which matters…we are to discuss the charge, not the facts. Kennedy made serious charges – essentially saying that Bork was a Nazi set to destroy freedom in America. Republicans were then asked to prove that he – and they – weren’t in favor of Nazi tyranny. We still weren’t to outright fabrication by the MSM, but we had stepped away from telling even partial truth. Later, especially after the GOP won Congress in 1994, the MSM went to flat out lies in defense of their side.

They felt they had to. The reason Reagan won – and Gingrich’s GOP won – was that the system created by the Democrats was starting to fall apart. The Welfare State wasn’t working. The military system and alliances created by the Democrats wasn’t working. The economic system of the Democrats wasn’t working. To tell the truth about anything pretty much meant you were going to have to say something bad about Democrats. The MSM could still tell bits of truth about the GOP which were bad for the GOP – so, of course, whenever a GOPer was caught in genuine scandal, it was played up for all it was worth – but that wasn’t enough, because the GOP was proposing alternatives to failed policies and even if the alternatives were untested, it was clear that we couldn’t just go on and on with policies which were failing right in front of everyone’s eyes. It became necessary to just cook up things to say which would either help Democrats, or harm Republicans. And that is where things started to go wrong for the MSM – took a while, but as I noted, when you lie enough, eventually people just stop believing you.

And it did take a while. It took ten thousand accusations of GOP racism, sexism and homophobia. Ten thousand accusations that GOPers want to starve kids and shove granny off a cliff. It took ten thousand stories about how swell Democrat things are while people could see for themselves that they were getting worse. It took, finally, eight years of servile MSM devotion to Obama winding up in lunatic MSM opposition to Trump to finish the job.

I’ve seen some articles by MSMers wondering how they can get their mojo back – in none of them do I see, “we’ll report the truth, no matter what it is”. They still can’t go there for the same reason they could never go there: they still like the Democrats (actually, of course, they are Democrats), and still hate Republicans. How things will work out for the next four to eight years remains to be seen. But we do actually need an MSM which will just tell the truth. The alternative media is great – and played a role in breaking through the MSM lies – but it is also contains many people just as willing to lie for their own side as the MSM has been. As soon as someone figures out that what will really sell is an MSM outfit which will just tell the truth – the verified, honest truth – no matter whom it hurts, that will be the MSM outfit which comes to dominate all others…and leads to a restoration of a genuine free press in the United States.

What Media Bias? Part 201

Mark Noonan12 Comments

Been a while since I did one of these – but this article has some interesting things to say regarding media bias and the 2000 election:

…The northwesternmost part of Florida is the Panhandle, which stretches along the Gulf of Mexico to Alabama. Often called the “Redneck Riviera,” it is the most Republican part of Florida, regularly giving Republicans big margins in state and national elections. The nine Panhandle counties that are farthest west—Bay, Calhoun, Escambia, Holmes, Jackson, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, Walton, and Washington—are in the Central Time Zone, and one additional county, Gulf, is split between Central and Eastern Time. According to the Miami Herald, “It is only a few miles to the Alabama border from anywhere in the western Panhandle, but more than five hundred miles and a cultural light-year to Miami.”

On Election Night, between 6:30 and 7:50 p.m. Eastern, anchors on all the major networks and cable channels reported over and over again that the polls in all of Florida closed at 7 p.m. Eastern. Not once did anyone on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, NBC, or MSNBC inform the audience that Florida has two time zones and two poll closing times. During that hour and 20 minutes, 13 journalists asserted a total of 39 times that there was only one poll-closing time throughout the entire state of Florida…

Why does that matter? Well, after 7pm Eastern, voting dropped off to practically nothing in the Florida Panhandle. It was over, you see? The Networks were already calling Florida for Gore before the polls closed in the Panhandle. The article goes on to note that the drop off probably cost Bush a net of about 11,000 votes – that margin would have still triggered an automatic re-count, but with that large a margin the result would never have been in doubt. Gore would have, at the latest, conceded a day or two after the election…no Bush vs Gore to the Supreme Court, no doubt cast over President Bush’s legitimacy. A lot of things would have been different (as an aside, I still recall very vividly that when the Networks finally did call the State for Bush, it was something like 97% of precincts reporting and Bush had a healthy lead – all of a sudden, a bunch of votes reported from heavily Democrat precincts and, presto!, it was effectively a tied race…I do wish someone had looked into that little, electoral miracle; that sudden surge in Democrat votes in FL is what caused the Networks to re-re-call FL and Gore to suddenly refuse to concede).

In light of this, you might recall the JournoList scandal – where it was discovered that a bunch of journalists had a private chat room, as it were, where they could discuss and coordinate their message…in the service of Democrats, naturally. We don’t know if there was such a thing during the 2000 election, but such things as JournoList and the massive repetition of the “polls close at 7 Eastern” lie over all MSM outfits in 2000 does indicate that the friendliness of journalists for their Democrat pals probably extends beyond mere friendliness. It might well go all the way to Democrats and journalists coordinating their efforts to tear down Republicans and build up Democrats in the public mind.

Remember, it wouldn’t take much – a hint here, a short phone call there and there you have it…messages all in agreement, everyone takes essentially the same line about whatever issue is being pushed at the moment. It’s not like this hasn’t happened – Ben Rhode’s demonstrably coordinated the MSM talking points for Obama’s Iran deal, after all.

We all know that almost all journalists are liberals – Progressives; Democrats with by-lines, as Instapundit puts it. They are not in journalism to serve objective truth – most of them, given their education, probably don’t believe there is such a thing as objective truth. But they do believe in Progressive ideology – they are quite certain that the world will be a better place if Progressive ideology triumphs in every particular. We know they are not on our side – but we only partially accept that they are on the Democrats’ side. In a certain sense, we know this – but in a larger sense, we still reject it…still expect that when facts are on our side, they’ll have to acknowledge it and (however grudgingly) go along with the facts. Drop that – if the facts disprove Progressive ideology, then the facts are wrong: this is how Progressives always have and always will view matters. And if they have to simply make up facts – or work up a scandal to destroy the purveyor of anti-Progressive facts – then that is what they’ll do.

And they do it all the time – right now, they are inventing “facts” to show that Hillary Clinton’s foundation is just this wonderful, life-giving entity out to serve the poor and downtrodden, even though all the actual facts show it to be nothing but a slush fund to keep the Clintons and their minions on the gravy train. What genuine charity would hire a political hatchet-man like Sid Blumenthal at $10,000.00 a month? Don’t get me wrong, almost all major political figures have a hatchet man or woman on the payroll; it’s part of the nature of things in politics…but 10 large per month for a hatchet man at a charity? Come on! That is just a bit of payola to your hatchet man…keeping him well fed until you needed him for political work. But, if you listen to the MSM, they’re going to have you believing that the Clinton Foundation was the next best thing to Mother Theresa…and perhaps better because the Clinton Foundation is pro-abortion (remember, in the topsy-turvey world of the left, being in favor of abortion in saintly).

And, so, don’t believe them. Oh, you can read and listen to their reports – and when an identifiable fact comes across, you can believe it (but check, to be sure – and even if it’s confirmed elsewhere, run it through your “does this really seem likely?” mental filter). But remember that even when the MSM reports something true, it is bound to be mixed with lies – and as I said the other day, add an ounce of lie to a pound of truth, and you get a lie. The stories will be reported, if they relate in any way to politics, in a way which will reflect ill on GOPers/Conservatives and well on Democrats/Progressives.

As it relates to 2016, the real problem is that Trump is giving the Democrats and their MSM lapdogs a lot of ammunition – but, even then, keep in mind that as bad as Trump may be, the MSM will paint him as worse than he is (and they’ll be assisted this year by a section of the right which has decided that hating Trump is vastly more important than stopping Progressives). Don’t fall into conspiracy theory stuff about it – it isn’t a conspiracy, once you understand that the nice, attractive and well-spoken reporter on TV is as dyed in the wool Progressive as Hillary and is convinced that come heck or high water, Hillary simply must be elected President. Even if they wanted to be honest, this simple fact of life will color their perception of what is going on…and if they don’t care about being honest, then it’ll just be worse as far as telling the truth goes.

What Media Bias? Part 200

Mark Noonan4 Comments

The New York Times headline:

1 Israeli and 3 Palestinians Killed in Attacks in West Bank

Sounds like someone is attacking, but the headline doesn’t make clear who attacked – but given that its three to one dead Palestinians, must be those dratted Israelis, right?

So, what happened? Well, three Palestinians launched attacks against Jews in the West Bank. The attackers managed to kill one Jewish woman while the three Palestinian attackers were killed by Israeli soldiers and civilians. A headline for this should properly be, “Jewish Woman Murdered in West Bank” or some such…but the New York Times can’t do that because Narrative. A narrative which has it that Israelis are somehow responsible for all deaths in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.

The most horrific aspect of the story is that the terrorists sent out a 16 year old girl to do some killing – she was rammed by an Israeli car and shot by an Israeli soldier before she could carry out her design. In reality, that is the lede – nicely buried by the Times under a fog of “reporting” which attempts to get the reader’s mind off what is really happening – Jews are being targeted for random attacks and the people orchestrating the attacks don’t care even for the lives of their own children (though the Times manages to quote the father of the girl saying the killing of the would-be 16 year old murderer is a crime against childhood!). What the world needs to know is not the body count (and especially a body count which by noting the higher number of Palestinian deaths tries to make out that the Israelis are acting badly), but a clear understanding of what sort of people the Israelis are dealing with – people who send out children to commit murder.

The truth is what we need, but that is not what we’re going to get from the MSM.