Dan Rather will teach you how to avoid fake news
And who better to do it?
I initially thought that any advice Rather could give on the topic would be utterly ridiculous, given his history.
But actually, his advice isn’t half bad. Is it possible he’s learned something in the meantime?
I’ll believe that when he owns up to his own huge knave/fool role in the Killian memo fiasco.
Here’s some of Rather’s advice:
Number one, understand that trusting a news outlet does not mean they’re perfect. No one is perfect. It means they tell you when they screw up.
Number two, don’t rely on just one news outlet.
Number three: don’t rely on just the news to understand an issue. Read books. Find the experts. Find out how issues are discussed outside of news.
Number four, if you find yourself agreeing with everything your news outlet says, you’re doing it wrong. If your news doesn’t challenge you, challenge your news.
Number five, find a commentator whose politics differ from yours. Intellectually honest, even though their values differ from yours. If you can’t find such a person, maybe the media is not the problem.
Number six: remember that what the news tells you is far less important than what they decide to talk about in the first place. If they focus on personal, salacious and speculative stories, find a new outlet, one that drills in on issues that actually affect real lives, your wallet or pocketbook, health and education, schools, social justice, the environment.
It’s with a subsequent remark of Rather’s that I find myself in disagreement: “The true test of trustworthy journalism isn’t that they never make mistakes. It’s whether they’re willing to challenge the powers that be on behalf of those without power.”
Oh, really? That’s part of what got them into trouble in the first place. Powerful people are not necessarily doing bad, and powerless people are not necessarily out for good. And journalists—who used to be known as reporters—shouldn’t think they are crusaders righting the wrongs of the world. It’s not that they never should expose problems or abuses—of course they should—but their own biases (“powerful=bad; powerless=good”) often get in the way of their judgment.
In fact, journalists are themselves very powerful. At least, they used to be till they lost respect through so much biased, error-laden, and/or purposely misleading reporting. Does being powerful make them bad?
And to Rather: physician heal thyself, and take a look at your own suggestion number one and own up to your own screwup.
A reading from The Book of Obvious.
Does it need to be said?
#1 “It means they tell you when they screw up.”
LOL! Utter BS.
#2 “don’t rely on just one news outlet.”
Ha! Since all but Fox are leftist liars and Fox is “alt-right”… yeah, that works.
#3 “don’t rely on just the news to understand an issue. Read books. Find the ‘experts’. Find out how issues are discussed outside of news.”
But remember, anything contrary to the news is ‘fake’ news. And ALL the ‘experts’ agree with the news OR they’re pawns of the rich.
#4 “If your news doesn’t challenge you, challenge your news.”
When was the last time the news networks responded to a challenge by forthright admission of biased reportage?
#5 “find a commentator whose politics differ from yours. Intellectually honest, even though their values differ from yours. If you can’t find such a person, maybe the media is not the problem.”
When was the last time that any liberal/leftist commentator publicly acknowledged that opposing views can ever be “intellectually honest”? So, since according to them there are no intellectually honest commentators on the right, the problem is YOU. But then, you’re evil so what can they expect?
#6 “remember that what the news tells you is far less important than what they decide to talk about in the first place. If they focus on personal, salacious and speculative stories…”
You mean like the 95% negative coverage of Pres. Trump which either directly or through innuendo focuses “on personal, salacious and speculative stories”?
98% of the MSM’s coverage is that anyone who opposes the narrative is evil.
Yeah, great advice from a duplicitous ‘journalist’ who calls “evil, good and good, evil”.
Back in my Navy days I had reporter tell me he’d lie about me. Because maybe I’d give up information in attempt to clear myself. This made him a good person.
“Since all but Fox are leftist liars and Fox is “alt-right”… yeah, that works.”
Worse than that. Not only are they all leftist liars, they are blatantly colluding with each other, operating as a single socialist propaganda machine to rival the Nazi gleichschaltung.
They constantly use amplification, focused messaging, and progressive stacking techniques, so that no matter which of the supposedly independent media outlets you listen to, you always hear the same thing. We might not have proof that they are all taking orders from a new edition of the now-erased JournoList, but when a professor receives identical responses to an assigned report, right down to identical spelling errors, from every student in his class, he doesn’t need to know where they all copied their reports from to know they were all copied.
This is a bit OT, but why is nobody reporting on the type of gun the PETA nut used? Is this a #6 in that if it wasn’t an AR 15 it doesn’t fit the current gun control push?
#4 “If your news doesn’t challenge you, challenge your news.”
When I wrote a letter to the editor of our local rag, asking why they never printed any information about the case against CAGW, their answer was to print several letters from readers who attacked me. And they refused to publish any of my letters defending myself. That’s how they control the narrative. And nearly all media is now leftist.
Fox news has a few conservative ideologues (Hannity, Laura Ingraham, & Jesse Watters) but also has plenty of RINOs (Dana Perino, Martha McCallum, Harris Faulkner, Neil Cavuto, etc.), one populist (Steve Hilton), and even one hard core lefty (Shep Smith). A far more balanced presentation than the other TV networks.
Dan Rather learned his version of journalism at Uncle Walter Cronkite’s knee. Cronkite learned from his Tet declaration of U.S. defeat that the media had a powerful ability to shape the narrative. He was right. Anyone who doesn’t recognize that fact can be easily fooled.
People love taking lessons in war tactics from the Left.
They constantly use amplification, focused messaging, and progressive stacking techniques, so that no matter which of the supposedly independent media outlets you listen to, you always hear the same thing.
This was easy to figure out the moment anyone looked up what Ap (Associated Press) was and how it worked.
Apparently though, most of America wasn’t that smart. This isn’t anything new since the last few decades, but people talk about it as if suddenly people are waking up to.
If they were smart, they would have woke up to it before 2001 exposed the con gig.
What used to be known as “the Press” was given special Constitutional/legal protection in this country, because our Founders believed it would play a key and essential role in seeing to it that our citizenry was well-informed, so that they could be able to identify and understand the issues of the day, make informed judgments on issues of public policy, and on who to vote for, so that their wishes were carried out.
A well informed citizenry was, the Founders thought, absolutely essential if our great experiment in self-government, our democratic Republic, was to function, succeed, and flourish.
From what I was taught in my naive and innocent high school days, the role of reporters and the Press was to thoroughly and completely investigate and to accurately and fully report what it found out–“without fear or favor,” as the saying went, not to shape or censor the news to promote one world-view, political agenda, or policy choice over another.
In the course of my government career, I had access to an extraordinarily wide range of news and information sources—far more than the average reference librarian–and what I discovered by looking at many different news and information sources—and comparing them one to the other—was that, in many cases, what was “news” and how it was reported, what particular twist might have been put on it—or even if it was reported at all—apparently depended on the political viewpoint of the organization or reporter reporting the supposed “news,” and that the totally objective news source, the ”all the news that’s fit to print” source was a fantasy, just a boastful, empty, and deceptive slogan.
In short, all too often you couldn’t take for granted that any news was “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” that an important story might not have been twisted, ”spiked,” or deliberately ignored.
Or, that some sensational story hadn’t been presented as a “shiny object” for us to focus our attention on, so that we wouldn’t focus our attention on another and a much more important story, or notice that that obviously more important story hadn’t been given anywhere near the coverage or the depth of reporting and detail that it warranted. See, for instance, MSM coverage of the Stormy Daniels “story” vs. that of the Awan brothers.
Increasingly, you really couldn’t trust the news to be accurate or complete and, so, had to look at many different sources, and compare and contrast them, to arrive at what was likely a good approximation of the truth, and in order to be pretty sure that you could be able to discover important news that some MSM sources had attempted to bury.
It was also not only if a story was reported, but how it was reported–what words were used, how things were characterized, what information was included as significant, and what news and details were omitted or not.
I once pasted up the reportage from two different Washington D.C. area newspapers that both covered the same homicide case and trial, as an example of why we needed to look at multiple sources.
It was around 15-20 years ago, but it went something like this:
The Washington Post characterized the defendant who was to go on trial for murder as “a former seminarian,” the Washington Times referred to him as a “defrocked priest,” the Times reported the gruesome details of the murder he was accused of, the Post just did not report any of the details at all, the Times reported that the defendant put on his priestly robes to gain entrance to the victim’s house, while the Post never reported this key fact, the Post reported that the defendant “stoutly maintained his innocence” and their reporting stopped there, the Times kept covering this story, and reported a few days later that “the defendant copped a plea on the day his trial was about to start.”
Or, in the case of a terrorist attack, were the names and images of the attackers immediately released, or were they only released many days later, when attention would not be so focused on the story? Was terrorism immediately ruled out, sometimes within minutes of the conclusion of the attack? What were the history, associations, allegiances, and religion of the attacker or attackers? What was their Web presence like, and what did it focus on and say. Were the details of the attack reported? Did, for instance, the attacker scream anything as he attacked, or was that detail never or only reluctantly reveled very many days later?
I retired more than a decade ago and, from what I have observed, this degradation of the “news” has just gotten exponentially worse.
TO paraphrase Caligula on Rome: “If only all of MSM had only one throat.”
I could read past Number 1: “It means they tell you when they screw up” because I was laughing so hard!
They used to say in the FSU, “There’s no news (Izvestia) in the Truth (Pravda) and no truth (Pravda) in the News (Izvestia).” How did the West get to exactly the same place today?
Dan Rather is totally and completely discredited. And it was Power Line that took him down.
Richard Saunders Says:
April 4th, 2018 at 9:00 pm
They used to say in the FSU, “There’s no news (Izvestia) in the Truth (Pravda) and no truth (Pravda) in the News (Izvestia).” How did the West get to exactly the same place today?
* *
As Ymar noted on another thread, “the barbarians are always at the gates” — and there are always people inside willing to let them in.
We got to the same place as the USSR because good ol’ Tailgunner Joe was thoroughly un-PC but essentially correct: America has been infiltrated by Communists and their leftist cousins since Communism was invented.
Snow on Pine. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “freedom of the press” that appears in the First Amendment at the time meant “free use of the printing press; the right to print and publish anything without submitting it to previous official censorship.” They trace it back to John Milton in 1644.
In other words, it is about the free use of a machine or its modern incarnation. It does not refer to any kind of job, nor does it confer any privilege on any employee of a newspaper or news organization, which in their arrogance they like to assume.
“What used to be known as “the Press” was given special Constitutional/legal protection in this country…”
No.
Rather’s advice, out of context, is good, as Neo said.
Geoffrey reveals the context nicely.
The most unbiased, well-researched news I get is right here.
Corollary to the topic is the brouhaha over Sinclair News’ “scripted” anchor statement that they are being “forced to read” because, um, they work for Sinclair.
Read the full statement here; I found nothing objectionable in it, but I ain’t woke enough, I suppose.
(the publisher is objecting to the statement, so I guess that hits Ratherpoint #5 —
https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-turned-its-news-anc-1824233490
Sinclair’s chairman responds here with a rather common-sense argument.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sinclair-chairman-defends-anti-fake-news-message-every-word-from-network-news-people-is-scripted
“You cant [sic.] be serious!” he wrote in an email to the New York Times. “Do you understand that as a practical matter every word that comes out of the mouths of network news people is scripted and approved by someone?”
* * *
tatterdemalian Says:
April 4th, 2018 at 4:48 pm
“Since all but Fox are leftist liars and Fox is “alt-right”… yeah, that works.”
Worse than that. Not only are they all leftist liars, they are blatantly colluding with each other, operating as a single socialist propaganda machine to rival the Nazi gleichschaltung.
They constantly use amplification, focused messaging, and progressive stacking techniques, so that no matter which of the supposedly independent media outlets you listen to, you always hear the same thing. We might not have proof that they are all taking orders from a new edition of the now-erased JournoList, but when a professor receives identical responses to an assigned report, right down to identical spelling errors, from every student in his class, he doesn’t need to know where they all copied their reports from to know they were all copied.
* * *
I think this furor falls into the category of projection.
Cornhead:
It was Little Green Footballs.
There are little second acts.
More on Sinclair’s effrontery in believing that the First Amendment applies to them.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/sinclair-broadcast-groups-outrageous-assault-on-our-democracy/
Would adding the /sarc tag here be too much of a spoiler?
Neo & Cornhead are both right.
Recalling Rathergate | Power Line
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/08/024384.php
Aug 27, 2009 – Scott and John were prominent among the bloggers who exploded CBS’s story, which was produced by Mary Mapes and presented by Dan Rather. In response to the atrocious work of Mapes and Rather, CBS commissioned an independent panel, headed by former Attorney Richard Thornburgh, to figure …
They are back at work today.
Speaking of fake news | Power Line
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/speaking-of-fake-news.php
2 hours ago – According to Rather, “There is a through-line, a long and slimy filament that connects the ‘murder’ of Vince Foster to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and to the discrediting of the Killian memos.” That “slimy filament” is “a … DanRather’s guide to protecting yourself against fake news.
…
This week Rather presents a video “primer” expounding on “fake news” (below). The Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams comments in “Good news! Dan Rather is here to teach you about fake news.” When it comes to “fake news,” Rather raises the problem of the unreliable narrator to impossible proportions. That way madness lies. Laughter is probably the best medicine, as it frequently is.
…
I take it that Rather’s “primer” was prompted by this week’s freakout – “the freakout over Sinclair,” as David Harsanyi calls it. Harsanyi injects a dose of realism into the freakout.”
My edit didn’t go through.
“They are back at work today.” is me referring to PLB.
I scanned through a number of PLB posts on Rather’s memo problem, and it’s sad to see that nothing much has changed.
(abbreviated URLs to stay out of moderation; add http://www. to the front of each).
This one gives credit where it’s due, and closes with an almost fulfilled, though still optimistic, prophecy.
powerlineblog.com/archives/2004/11/008690.php
“The drama began when CBS posted forged National Guard documents on its Web site and, that same evening, an attentive “Freeper” (a regular at the conservative FreeRepublic.com Internet site) named Buckhead raised suspicions of fraud.
From there, intrepid bloggers Powerlineblog.com and Little Green Footballs, the Woodward and Bernstein of Rathergate, began to document the mounting signs of forgery.
…
But as “The Decline and Fall of Dan Rather” showed, reporters who derive evidence from their political conclusions, instead of the other way around, won’t have free rein anymore. Thanks to blogs and other “new” media, the prejudices of the old media princes will no longer go unquestioned.
It’s about time.”
* * *
This one shows that CBS executives were informed the memo was a forgery, and let Mapes & Rather drive the car into the ditch anyway (I didn’t quote the details). It proved to be a costly surrender of authority.
powerlineblog.com/archives/2005/01/009116.php
“As the 60 Minutes story on President Bush’s Air National Guard service was prepared for broadcast, Rather’s career seemed to be turning full circle. Two days prior to the September 8 broadcast of the story, Rather spoke with CBS News President Andrew Heyward. Rather told Heyward (report page 104) that the story had been thoroughly reviewed; Rather said that he had not “been involved in this much checking on a story since Watergate.”
Little attention has been paid to the Rathergate report’s powerful narrative of the cover-up phase of the scandal. For twelve days, CBS attempted to wait out the storm raised first by the blogs and then by the media regarding the 60 Minutes story. During those twelve days, Dan Rather resembled no one so much as Richard Nixon himself as he stonewalled the issues, playing on his reputation and status to assure his audience that the story derived from an “unimpeachable” source. All that was lacking was Rather’s denial that he is a crook.
The Rathergate report recounts the cover-up phase of the Rathergate scandal at pages 153-210. So far as it goes, the report’s narrative of the cover-up is a bravura performance. It demonstrates that in every public communication, press release, and CBS News story following the September 8 broadcast until its September 20 apology, CBS flatly misrepresented the facts regarding the story and its continuing post-broadcast corroboration of the story.”
* * *
Scott continued to be unhappy about Dan Rather and his minions.
powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/02/rather-full-of-it.php
“Preparing for the lecture, I’m getting angry all over again. The story is worth revisiting, it seems to me, to assess what if anything has changed in the intervening ten years. My conclusion is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The media and academia and the culture are saturated with the same suffocating left-wing bias that facilitated Rathergate. The animus endows Rathergate with an evergreen quality.
And now coming soon, to a theater near you: Truth, based on Mary Mapes’s insane memoir Truth and Duty. The movie stars Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes. Mapes not only gets the story told from her, ah, perspective, she gets a makeover to die for. The movie, by the way, is a production of Mythology Entertainment. “Truth” is in there somewhere!
Reading Dan Rather’s 2012 memoir Rather Outspoken, published in paperback with a new 2013 afterword, I find that Rather still stands by the story. Rather Full Of It would be more like it.
He stands by the fabricated Killian documents. He has no regrets. He offers no apologies. He sees himself as a victim rather than as a perpetrator. He pleads guilty only to “putting a true story on the air” (page 239).
…
In this paragraph Rather doesn’t identify the websites “in the vanguard” of questioning his story, but later in the chapter Rather names the leaders of the attack on the story: “Bloggers on ultraconservative websites with names like Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Power Line were vociferously attacking our report, even before it finished airing, and they were focusing in particular on the Killian documents.” (Peter Wallsten published a more scrupulous account of the chain of events in the Los Angeles Times story “No disputing it: Blogs are major players.”)”
* * *
Indeed, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/120637.php
“We probably should have looked back at Rathergate ten years on this past September. The miscreants are loose. The details are hazy. We are inundated with BS courtesy of the Democrats and their mainstream media adjunct. It is amazing how little has changed. From inside CBS News itself, we now have the testimony of Sharyl Attkisson in Stonewalled and elsewhere.
It’s hard to measure these things. However bad it was in 2004, I would say it’s even more so now. They are getting it down to a science.
…
The CBS memos were not fake but accurate. They were fake and inaccurate.
As Carr correctly recalls, the fake but accurate line was peddled by the New York Times. The Times peddled it in the story “Memos on Bush are fake but accurate, typist says.” Let it be noted that the Times threw two reporters at the story, published on September 15, 2004.
Having broadcast the story on September 8, 2004, CBS did not get around to retracting it until September 20, twelve days later. The “fake but accurate” line proved to be a temporary fallback. It was laughable even at the time, but when CBS retracted the story it cut the limb out from under its friends and fellow Bush haters at the Times.”
* * *
The only thing that has changed is the name of the President that they all hate.
And they definitely are “getting it down to a science” — to the left, all Rather’s (temporary) fall did was demonstrate that they could no longer rely solely on being pompous and lazy about duping the peasants.
Hooray for blogs like PLB and Neo and so many others.
The battle against fake news and propaganda and lies continues forever.
Harsanyi’s is the usual voice of reason.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/03/media-doesnt-care-sinclair-stations-bias-wrong-bias/
“The rhetoric was a less-sanctimonious version of CNN’s “apples and bananas” spot from a few months ago–another finger-wagging aimed at political foes and competitors. It’s clear that the oversized reaction to the Sinclair script is because it flaunted the wrong bias.
Another peculiar complaint about the Sinclair spots is that local anchors were being “forced” – a word widely used by those reporting on the incident – to read opinions they did not share. “I felt like a POW recording a message,” one aggrieved news-reader told CNN. As a writer, I can sympathize with people being asked to say things that undermine their beliefs. In truth, though, no one can force you to say or write anything. If you find the words “fake” and “news” morally and professionally objectionable, quit.
…
CNN’s senior media correspondent Brian Stelter â€went as far as to claim that viewers were being “force fed” the Sinclair viewpoint, which would mean that every time an outlet is “leaning forward” or telling us that “democracy dies in darkness” or lecturing us about “fake news,” they too are force-feeding consumers their partisan talking points.
…
Considering the often sycophantic treatment the previous administration received from major news outlets, it’s difficult to take those acting appalled very seriously. In fact, those who act most disturbed are in part responsible for the rise of openly partisan journalism. That’s because in many ways politically motivated news is as much a market reaction as an ideological one.”
* * *
IIRC, a reporter at Russia Today did quit, on camera, because she objected to the “news” she was given to present. Maybe more reporters should follow her example, if they feel that strongly.
Several blogs and bloggers were involved (and certainly Powerline was a leading one), but it was Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs who exposed and proved the forgery with his superimposition of the memo on a computer-generated text. That was the smoking gun (“the smoking memo”). You can see his work at the top of the page here.
By the way, in retrospect it’s sort of humorous that Rather identifies Little Green Footballs as “ultraconservative.” It was never anything of the sort, even in its early years. Johnson was left of center politically, prior to 9/11. After 9/11 he had a semi-change in terms of politics and what was then called the War on Terror. He supported it. After a few years (around 2009) he became alarmed at the fact that he saw some allies in that War on Terror as hobnobbing with people he considered racists (mostly Europeans) and turned on them for that, streamlining and purging his blog of a lot of older posts and a lot of commenters. But he was never conservative as far as I can recall, much less “ultra.” He was against terrorism, however, and supported the war in Iraq at the time it was launched.
Rathergate was a great sucker bet for liberals. Once I saw the Charles Johnson pixel-to-pixel matchup of the alleged memo and the same text at default MS SWord settings, I knew it was a fake. There was no proportional spaced IBM typewriter which could have done that in the seventies.
I got into an online debate over Rathergate and was amazed at how long many of them clung to the hope the memo was real — even some high-powered Unix programmers who should have known better.
Then after that hope collapsed, then they moved to an even less likely hope that it had been an evil Karl Rove plot all along!
Finally they gave up on that and moved on to attacking me personally.
Standard Operating Procedure.
My wife got a job as a DAC secretary when we were stationed in Munich in the early ’70s. She took one look at the Rather documents and said, “No way!”
Richard Saunders Says:
April 5th, 2018 at 2:39 pm
My wife got a job as a DAC secretary when we were stationed in Munich in the early ’70s. She took one look at the Rather documents and said, “No way!”
* * *
All of the Leftist con jobs depend on fleecing the marks who don’t know any better.
Since they operate in a bubble in which none of their own compatriots know any better (or won’t admit it if they do, per huxley), then (a) they never believe they are wrong; and (b) if they think that they might be wrong (Mapes’ superiors, in the Memo case), then
they don’t believe there are any marks who can rebut them, so it’s safe to go ahead anyway.
Despite the fact that they keep getting smacked down by the people who DO know better, they keep it up, because they are playing the same percentages as the scammers who are tying up your phone lines all the time (same for direct mail solicitations).
Sure, 90% (or so) of the people they call don’t bite, but the 10% who DO make the exercise profitable.
There is a reason the Left is mired in the mud of fake news.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kevin-williamson-national-review-response-atlantic-piece/
At lease Williamson will be spared what seems to be the inevitable trajectory of token-conservatives at leftist-media: moving ever more leftward themselves.
Additional proof (as if we needed it) that the left churns up more mud when the first batch dries up.
It answers the essential question, “… And why did it take nearly 50 years for Chappaquiddick to get its closeup?” although it is no real surprise.
Basically, it’s the same reason Hollywood felt safe going after Weinstein now, at the end of his career and power: the old dog couldn’t bite anymore, so the ones who profited from his perfidy knew they could kick him to the curb without negative consequences.
http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/381872-with-chappaquiddick-the-kennedys-star-finally-falls#.WsajTZq-unM.twitter
“Suffice to say Hollywood feels it’s now safe to address the Kennedys in a more sober fashion. Sure, the family still has current members inside the Beltway but their clout can’t compare to the ’60s Kennedys. They also can’t be blamed for the sins of their predecessors.
This film will damage the Kennedy brand all the same.
Yet Hollywood is wary of bringing the foibles of other Democratic stars to screens of any size. The very same week “Chappaquiddick” hits theaters not one but two TV projects based on President Bill Clinton’s impeachment got shelved.
The Clintons still hold some sway over the Democratic party. Recalling President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, particularly in light of our evolved #MeToo era, would have put the party which protected him then … and now … in an unflattering light.
Did that play a role in the TV projects getting yanked? Hard to say at the moment. It’s equally hard to discount the theory. Industry players are keenly aware how certain stories impact the way we view and frame issues.
Why else would we see movies like “Truth” and “Confirmation,” which aimed to buoy the legacies of Dan Rather and Anita Hill, respectively? Those projects will live for decades on streaming and cable services, all the while influencing how we recall those figures.
What’s more clear? It took nearly 50 years for Hollywood to properly tell Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick nightmare with all the razzle dazzle the industry can muster. We may have to wait some time until Monica Lewinsky gets her closeup.”
Hah. Smoking gun disclosed.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/05/sorry-brian-stelter-wildly-biased-producers-resignation-doesnt-discredit-sinclair/
“The purpose of Stelter’s story was ostensibly to provide further evidence that objective, principled journalists are deeply uncomfortable with Sinclair’s management, but there is a gaping hole in that narrative that CNN ignored entirely: Simmons is neither objective nor principled.
A quick review of Simmons’s Twitter account shows him using the hashtag “#Resist” at a Dulles Airport protest against President Trump’s travel ban, boasting about “When we took over [Paul Ryan’s] podium protesting,” and giving a YouTube interview about his role organizing a Black Lives Matter protest. Simmons was employed by Sinclair while he participated in all of those activities, and these are but a fraction of his social media posts.
The former Sinclair employeewho joined the station nearly four years ago, is heavily involved with a self-described “civil resistance movement” called Democracy Spring.
…
But curiously, despite political behavior from Simmons that would make the average voter blush and offend the professionalism of any self-respecting journalist, Stelter treats him as a righteously neutral whistleblower about Sinclair’s ethical lapses. ”
Make that “alleged lapses” — and this is standard MO for the left; we’ve seen that in all the “neutral” ringers they put online and in print and on the air who turn out to be Dem operatives.
Unlike The Atlantic, apparently Sinclair is fine with employees exercising their First Amendment Rights even if they are contrary to the agenda of the company.
Or maybe they just didn’t know — like Stelter?
“The “critics” his article links to? Media Matters. All of this, of course, comes only two weeks after Stelter seemed to express skepticism about the existence of media bias during a CNN interview with Ben Shapiro.
Perhaps Stelter was simply unaware of Simmons’s biases, but he failed to conduct even the most basic diligence on his source before promoting the story to his 576,000 Twitter followers if that is the case. I uncovered Simmons’s background within five minutes–he was not exactly hiding it.
Furthermore, after I called Stelter’s attention multiple times to the glaring credibility problems in his story, he continued to promote it on Twitter under a “In Case You Missed It” headline. He also omitted any of the relevant context in his nightly newsletter, published several hours after I called his attention to Simmons’ history as a left-wing activist. At least one other outlet picked up CNN’s story, providing the same misleading narrative to its readers.
If the whole purpose of Stelter’s story was to highlight pernicious media bias, wouldn’t it have been sensible to disclose the far-left political activities of the story’s subject? Journalism ethics are not a zero-sum game. One can find Sinclair’s scripted promo creepy (if less of a big deal than CNN and others made it out to be) and still believe Stelter’s actions were ethically lacking. To be blunt, Stelter’s reporting was more Hannity than Cronkite.
A charitable description of Stelter’s actions is willful ignorance. A more cynical assessment may be personal animosity. In either event, if Stelter is truly concerned with media bias, perhaps he should start with the log in his own eye.”
He was against terrorism, however, and supported the war in Iraq at the time it was launched.
So was Hitchinson, Chris, but I don’t remember people claiming he was a religious right winger though.
Snow on Pine Says:
April 4th, 2018 at 6:37 pm
What used to be known as “the Press” was given special Constitutional/legal protection in this country, because our Founders believed it would play a key and essential role in seeing to it that our citizenry was well-informed, so that they could be able to identify and understand the issues of the day, make informed judgments on issues of public policy, and on who to vote for, so that their wishes were carried out.
That is what Americans tell themselves, but that is incorrect.
The “press” is the object that allows someone to publish. Thus the freedom of the press didn’t mean “freedom of the elite classes called journalists” but the freedom of anyone that owned or used a press, to be able to publish what they paid to publish without somebody killing or suppressing them from the pro slave government, the jeffersonian government, the Washington gov, or anybody else.
Later on, Americans bought into the Leftist propaganda that the press were this bunch of elites that would do the job for Americans that Americans can’t do: report on the truth.
Americans and humans just keep falling for Leftist deceptions and cons without even realizing it.
We got to the same place as the USSR because good ol’ Tailgunner Joe was thoroughly un-PC but essentially correct: America has been infiltrated by Communists and their leftist cousins since Communism was invented.
Look up Operation Paperclip if you dare, Aesop, for how much the US got infiltrated. If you get more “woke” than me, you might just wake up from this Matrix entirely, which could be dangerous vs the Veil.
If there is one idea that the Left here in the U.S. has embedded in the public consciousness, it is that Senator Joe McCarthy was a totally unsavory character, a sweaty lunatic, a deluded, modern day Torquemada, unfairly and unscrupulously persecuting people who were innocent.
Well, a lot has happened since the early 1950s, and McCarthy’s list of Communists who had infiltrated the State Department. In a 1950 speech in Wheeling, WV that first brought him to national attention, McCarthy was quoted as giving the number as 205, other times he apparently quoted lower figures.
He started his Hearings on Soviet Subversion and Espionage in 1953 when he became the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and in 1954 the televised Army–McCarthy Hearings started his downfall (“Have you no shame…”,etc.).
According to McCarthy’s very brief bio at the U.S. Senate website, at the time a special subcommittee investigated his charges and called them “a fraud and a hoax.”
In 1957 he was Censured by the Senate, and McCarthy died that same year, apparently a broken man.
Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. a lot of new, formerly secret information has started to slowly leak out of the former U.S.S.R.’s various secret archives.
Then, there was the NSA’s release of the VENONA Papers beginning in 1995, in total 3,000 encrypted messages, diplomatic communications between Russia and its Embassies and Consulates abroad that dealt with matters of espionage, that the U.S. was able to partially or fully decrypt between 1943 and the end of the VENONA program in 1980; there were a lot more that we were unable to decrypt.
A few years later came M. Stanton Evan’s 2007 very revelatory book, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.” and this same author’s 2012 book, “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government.” And there have been other works by other authors on this subject as well.
The bottom line?
Adding up all this new information, it appears that McCarthy’s charge of large scale Communist infiltration of the U.S. government was true and, if this new information is to be believed, McCarthy was low in his estimate of the number of Soviet agents that there were in the U.S. and throughout the U.S. government.
McCarthy was a Senator. The controlled opposition was the House Committee on UnAmerican activities.
Thus Hollywood that blacklisted conservatives, complained that they were being blacklisted by the House Committee, and then they somehow tied it to McCarthy, who wasn’t even in the House as a Senator…
Americans are so stupid they will fall for anything apparently.
People still think similar things about Nixon, exactly as the Left setup.