“The pen is mightier than the sword”?
Hell you say.
Today’s media has pounded its pens into dull rusty swords, and they carve their victims, like sadistic serpent-tongued mediaeval torturers in dark dank dungeons.
Kyle Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist. Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist. Donald Trump won in 2016 only because he colluded with the Kremlin. Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington Catholic High School on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was an entitled white bigot. Mr. Trump said the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “good people.” Last year’s riots were mostly peaceful. Unarmed black men are routinely shot in huge numbers by police officers. The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plot.
Which of these have you heard in the last five years? I doubt there’s an American with even the faintest interest in public events who wasn’t made aware of every one of these stories, didn’t have them repeatedly drummed into his head in the amplifying loop that connects agenda-driving traditional news organizations, culture-shaping digital sites, knowledge-delimiting search engines, and information-controlling social media platforms.
I didn’t pick deliberately obscure fabulations, “nutpicked” items of agitprop peddled by extremists. I didn’t have to scour the nether regions of the Marxist-anarchist web to find them. These were all, for a while, the received versions of major news events promoted by the people who loudly proclaim their credentials as guardians of the truth. They were all conspicuously consensus accounts of the biggest stories “reported” in the past five years by the usual newspapers and TV networks, relayed by the entire news food chain that seeks to emulate them and retailed eagerly by the half-wit entertainers of Hollywood, publicity-hungry professional athletes and the crowd of gender- and media-studies graduates who churn out press releases for S&P 500 companies.
And these are only some of the more obvious ones…
Read the whole thing.
Andrew Sullivan: When All The Media Narratives Collapse: In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.
The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.
But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.
And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case…
Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant…
I haven’t watched the whole trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you’ve been led to believe a media narrative that was way off…
Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong…
Read the whole thing.
As these two writers point out, the media malpractice only goes in one direction. Always. And when they are found in journalistic violation(s) they barely, if ever, quarter-assedly make a sloppy and extremely brief ‘editor notation’ but leaving the original stories in their archives as originally written, as pointed out in the Sullivan piece. Never a retraction, or if a very brief “Oh, BTW” retraction buried in the damn style section … BUT the original false narratives and fake premises the MSM and their slobbering contributors spun and spun and promulgated for weeks/months/years in order to manipulate and program the American news viewer is left standing as factual. For example, the MSM’s lying coverage of the Covington teens and in particular Nick Sandmann was so filthy rotten bad that the kid’s lawsuits that have paid him millions of dollars from WaPo and CNN have not resulted in serious public apologies to Sandmann, not just to loudly clear his name but to try to regain even a sliver of integrity back to their own profession and media companies.
Nicholas Fondacaro: Slandered Sandmann Advises Rittenhouse On Suing Liberal Media for Defamation
Stating the truth, Sandmann began by noting: “The parallels between me and Kyle Rittenhouse are impossible not to draw.” Both were teenagers when the malevolent eyes of the liberal media fell on them and labeled them heinous things.
“Kyle was almost immediately labelled [sic] a ‘white supremacist’ and a ‘domestic terrorist,’” Sandmann wrote. “To many, my red MAGA hat clearly meant that I was a racist.”
Sandmann acknowledged that he wasn’t a lawyer but wanted to offer up advice because “defamation cases are some of the hardest cases to win.” Because of the First Amendment, media types could easily weasel out of accountability because they could say calling him a “racist” and “white supremacist” was their “opinion.”…
Ian Haworth: Nicholas Sandmann Pens Op-Ed About Kyle Rittenhouse: ‘You Don’t Have To Face It Alone’
Hell, even satire media has had its hand in such bullshit spinning turned to fact. So much so that even old Joe Biden offered this just the other day (albeit in characteristic Joe Biden screw-up version) to the American people as such…
NewsMax: Biden Gets ‘SNL’ Quote Wrong When Taking a Shot at Sarah Palin
In his speech at the signing of the infrastructure bill, President Joe Biden took a swipe at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, but got the famous ”Saturday Night Live” quote attributed to Palin wrong.
As he recalled his time working with state governors as vice president during the Obama administration, Biden said that ”I spoke with county executives and every governor, save one. I won’t mention that. Save one. She can see Alaska from her porch.”
Biden was referring to the ”SNL” sketch mocking Palin in which actress Tina Fey, who played Palin, said,”I can see Russia from my house!”
Palin never actually said this, but the quote was widely attributed to her…
Oh, and a couple of days before that gaffe…
Robert Spencer: Biden Refers to Satchel Paige as ‘The Great Negro’ – Where are the media’s howls of moral indignation?
Paul Bedard: Trust in media evaporates, with many believing coverage is too easy on Biden … To be fair, there wasn’t a whole Hell of a lot of ‘trust’ left with the media.
Yeah, there’s that, and the MSM’s and their nut-bag contributors’ deceptive versions of just about everything Pres. Trump said for 4-5 years, like Charlottesville White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis Were “Very Fine People” and “inject bleach” to treat COVID.
For decades now the MSM has felt a very selacious and obscene freedom to do such things, and not bother doing their journalistic job of ‘investigating’ the facts of a story before presenting it to the people. Oh, yes, I forgot. CNN’s own big guy Jeff Zucker informed us a few years back…
Breitbart (March 2019): Jeff Zucker: No Regrets on CNN’s Russia Hoax Coverage, ‘We Are Not Investigators’
Also, I would argue the same media does directly and intentionally spin fake news in their coverage of democrats and the left in order to either dismiss it if it’s negative against a dem/liberal or hype it as ‘great news/accomplishments’ (as they are right now with Biden’s shit-show inflation as being ‘good’ for the Americna people and we are just ungrateful for not seeing it as such) … or that, for example the Hillary Clinton Russia hoax case, a story is either a lie or a rightwing conspiracy theory or even dismissible because, basically, both sides do it and ‘whataboutism’ twisting.
A.J. Kaufman: No Mainstream ‘Journalist’ Is More Racist Than MSNBC’s Joy Reid … There are loads of “close seconds”. Believe me.
It’s ALWAYS the media’s ‘not-so-hidden’ agenda…
NEO: Reflections on the larger anti-self-defense goals of the left in bringing Rittenhouse to trial
Not that we need any more bad signs. But this trial is a reflection of the ways in which the left has gained power lately, despite the fact that there’s been a backlash against it.
The left wants power to be invested in the state and they intend to control the state – and by “state” I obviously don’t just mean an individual state such as Wisconsin, although there’s that too. The preferred repository of power is the federal government and the tentacles with which it grasps the states. That means that the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense must be quashed or at least greatly weakened, and that only certain people will be allowed to have that right…
Exactly!
MORE:
And it is not just the corporate media complex that is censoring. We saw what Twitter, and Facebook, did in 2020 with the now proven Hunter Biden laptop stories. Look what Youtube did yesterday with the Rittenhouse trial…
Victoria Taft: YouTube Cuts Off the Best Real-Time, Legal Coverage of Rittenhouse Trial and Immediately Regrets It
Oh, and I told you yesterday CNN and MSNBC carried the prosecution’s closing arguments but did not carry the defense’s closing arguments.
Outkick: MAINSTREAM MEDIA HATES KYLE RITTENHOUSE SO MUCH
Nicholas Fondacaro: ABC Skips Full Picture of Inflation Jacking Up Prices for Thanksgiving
So @JedediahBila went on The View shared 100% factual covid data and they cut her off. Watch this: pic.twitter.com/aUVyhLPci6
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 16, 2021
This is an absolutely wild exchange
The most insane part is where the View host states that all of @JedediahBila's information has been "debunked" but everything she said is either CDC-endorsed info or widely accepted medical opinion https://t.co/MJjQOcpOxA
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) November 16, 2021
Alexander Hall: Fox News RIPS Twitter for WashPost’s Discredited Steele Dossier Tweets
The Universal Spectator 
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