Tag: media

The mainstream media – UK version, but still – is finally reporting on Creepy Joe’s “senior moments”. Sure, they’re trying to cover for his dementia by claiming his confused babblings are “gaffes” and engaging in false equivalencies, but they are finally reporting on them.

Biden leaves his Michigan rally confused with his latest senior moment as he claims he and Obama believe ‘it’s a right to have badakathcare’

Biden was on a roll as he told voters how Trump would take away their protections from pre-existing conditions and destroy the Affordable Care Act when he suddenly muttered something completely unintelligible…. Biden has suffered from a stutter throughout his life and recently misread ‘true international pressure’ from his teleprompter during a rally last Saturday as ‘truaninonashufodopressure.’

The former vice president was a longtime senator from Delaware.  

Biden appeared to make another gaffe on the tarmac, appearing to forget Utah Senator Mitt Romney’s name. ‘I got in trouble when we were running against that senator who was a Mormon, the governor,’ he said. Romney was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012. 

Trump seized up on it, tweeting: ‘Biden losing big in Florida. Only Fake Polls show otherwise! Bad for Healthcare. Thinks he’s running for the Senate. Forgot Mitt Romney’s name, and where he was! 

‘Sleepy Joe Biden, not a nice guy, by the way. He had a very bad day today,’ Trump said. ‘If I ever had a day like he had today, they’d say: ‘It’s over. It’s over. He forgot Mitt Romney’s name. He didn’t know what state he was in. And he said today he’s a proud Democrat running for the US Senate.’

Trump joked: ‘Could you imagine if I did that? ‘Great to be with you. It’s great to be a wonderful developer from New York.’ They’d say: ‘he’s out of here. Get him out.”

Biden ‘has got a lot of bad days coming,’ Trump said. ‘The one thing I know for sure, President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, Kim Jong Un – they are 100 per cent sharp. We have someone running who is not 100 per cent, he’s not 80 per cent, he’s not 60 per cent.’

One slight correction. I believe Creepy Joe did not say “truaninonashufodopressure” but rather “trunalimunufidipressur”. And whatever it is, he clearly feels very strongly about it.

Glen Greenwald resigns from the media organization he founded because it was captured and converged by infiltrators:

Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.

The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose….

Making all of this worse, The Intercept — while gradually excluding the co-founders from any role in its editorial mission or direction, and making one choice after the next to which I vocally objected as a betrayal of our core mission — continued publicly to trade on my name in order to raise funds for journalism it knew I did not support. It purposely allowed the perception to fester that I was the person responsible for its journalistic mistakes in order to ensure that blame for those mistakes was heaped on me rather than the editors who were consolidating control and were responsible for them…. It is astonishing to me, but also a reflection of our current discourse and illiberal media environment, that I have been silenced about Joe Biden by my own media outlet.

I have no doubt it was astonishing to him, but it shouldn’t have been. Convergence destroys everything it touches, no matter the industry, no matter the perspective. Not even being an honest man of the Left can save one from the corporate cancer.

All assets activated.

 I found this article about working with Sid Hartman to be both amusing and inspiring.

Another time I thought Sid was dead was when I got a phone call saying he had fallen and broken his hip.

I was unaware how dire a situation that was for an elderly person — and Sid was 96 at the time — but based on the tone of the conversations, I began to think Sid would never work again. I got hold of his son, Chad, to see if I could come visit.

Sid was in a recovery room at Fairview Southdale, lying in a hospital gown with an array of machines connected to him and doctors and nurses and family coming in and out of the room. I had never seen him in a vulnerable position. I went to his bedside and asked him, as quietly and kindly as I could, how he was doing.

He rose up slightly, “You tell them not to touch my column.”

He was back to work three weeks later, writing about the Gophers hiring P.J. Fleck as the football coach.

He would publish 612 more columns.

To put that in perspective, I wrote a grand total of 535 columns for WND, enough to fill three fat hardcovers. Sid Hartman wrote more than that… after the age of 96. You’re not done until you’re well and truly done. 

And on a sadder note, RIP Matt Blair. I met the great Minnesota linebacker twice as a child, and I still have the cards from his photography studio he started after retiring from the Vikings.

 The Daily Mail has addressed the Hunter Biden videos. Allegedly.

Alleged Hunter Biden sex tapes are uploaded on Chinese video site linked to Steve Bannon

Multiple videos and images claiming to show Hunter Biden in sexually explicit scenes and using drugs were shared on Chinese video platform GTV

GTV is a subsidiary of GTV Media Group, which was founded by former Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon and Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui in April 2020

The clips were uploaded by a single user Saturday night and one of the videos accuses Joe Biden of being ‘100{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} controlled by the Chinese Communist party’  

It’s not clear if the footage came from the ‘laptop from hell’, but some images appear to be from a third party laptop 

Bannon has claimed that everything in the Hunter laptop scandal is true and accused Joe Biden of taking a 10 percent equity in his son’s business dealings 

The footage has also been censored on Reddit

There does not appear to be any confirmation that the footage is legitimate.

The media is going to be spinning everything madly, of course, fighting every step along the way to deny what is right in front of their eyes, but the important thing is that the blackout has already failed.

Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story? We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distraction. – Terence Samuels, Managing Editor for News, National Public Radio.

It’s just hard to work in the time to cover all the criminal shenanigans of the Biden crime family when you’ve got to run very important pieces on maple syrup, black cellists in the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, juice-drinking Tik Tok stars, and structural racism in historical Sesame Street episodes.

Really? How excited is he?

Funny you should ask….

The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin. Sources tell VICE it’s because he exposed himself during a Zoom call last week between members of the New Yorker and WNYC radio.

Toobin said in a statement to Motherboard: “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers.”

“I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” he added.

UPDATE: In a stunning ‘correction’ from Vice, which ratchets this story up to ’11’ on the Spinal Tap amplifier of WTF-ness, “This piece has been updated with more detail about the call and the headline has been updated to reflect that Toobin was masturbating.”

Remember, these are the people who believe they are our moral and cultural superiors. Notice that CNN has only “suspended” the freakshow, when they should have fired him immediately.

 It’s informative to see when the media is suddenly all concerned with the possibility of a source being “sketchy”.  

Fox News was first approached by Rudy Giuliani to report on a tranche of files alleged to have come from Hunter Biden’s unclaimed laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, but that the news division chose not to run the story unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.

With the general election just three weeks away, Giuliani ultimately brought the story to the New York Post, which shares the same owner, Rupert Murdoch. The tabloid has been exhaustively covering the contents of the laptop — which include everything from emails regarding Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian company to personal photos of the recovering addict — with each morsel being amplified in the conservative media world, including on Fox News’ top-rated opinion programs. Thus far, the Fox’s News division has only been able to verify one email from the tranche leaked.

The former New York City mayor and personal attorney to President Donald Trump has long had a working relationship with Fox News, the cable news network whose opinion shows have an overwhelmingly pro-Trump point of view.

But according to two sources familiar with the matter, the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network’s news division to pass. Fox News declined to comment on this story.

Some of Fox News’ top news anchors and reporters have distanced themselves from the story. During an on-air report that largely focused on how social media platforms handled this story, Bret Baier said, “Let’s say, just not sugarcoat it. The whole thing is sketchy.”

“You couldn’t write this script in 19 days from an election, but we are digging into where this computer is and the emails and the authenticity of it,” he added.

It appears Fox News has adopted the Wikipedia model of only trusting “reliable sources” where “reliable” means “someone who provides information we want to believe”. And what they want to believe is information favorable to the Democratic Party.

The pictures are obviously of Hunter Biden. Apparently they go back to his childhood. Who else could the laptop possibly belong to, his dead mother?

 It’s mostly about the influence. The success of Tucker Carlson, and the complete refusal of the media to even try to imitate his success, makes it very clear that their motives are not profit-driven:

Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, has shattered record after record to become the highest rated cable news program in television history. On any given night, Carlson’s must-watch program draws nearly 5 million Americans to the television set — a truly astonishing number we may never see again.

According to an analysis by iSpot.tv, Tucker Carlson accounts for 16 percent all ad revenue at Fox News. And during the six-month period of February through July of this year alone, Tucker generated $37.2 million for Fox News and smashed the competition.

The historic popularity and profitability of Tucker’s show raises a simple, yet important question: why have none of the major networks, including Fox, attempted to copy his success? Wouldn’t the fabled “marketplace of ideas” dictate a certain convergence toward the topics and styles that draw the biggest audiences?

Perhaps the ad boycotts aimed at Tucker have scared off would-be copycats. But this simply raises the question of why companies would leave money on the table by refusing to advertise on television’s most popular cable news show. Something is off here, and it suggests that the media industry does not work according to a simple profit motive….

Readers might recall that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million. The paper is of course notoriously biased against Trump, even by the standards of today’s mainstream media. This may be good for business and it may not be — but ultimately this is not what matters. What matters is that the Post is directly or indirectly profitable to its owner, Jeff Bezos. If it lost money, but influenced the public or other important constituencies in a manner that resulted in greater success for Amazon (a company 10,000 times its size), it would still be a worthwhile investment for Bezos.

We can generalize this principle by noting that the parent-subsidiary model is very common in business. Any given subsidiary does not have to be profitable in its own right so long as it benefits the parent company. In the case of The Washington Post, there is a clear “parent company” in the person of Jeff Bezos. But even absent the existence of a formal parent company, one can think of the American power structure itself as the true “parent company” of any sufficiently large and powerful media conglomerate.

Although in some cases this is a metaphor, it captures a very important feature of how the media and our country function. For a media empire operating at the highest levels, the influence it wields on the public’s mind is far more valuable to the ruling power structure than any self-contained profit that could be generated by optimizing their news product to suit the taste of the audience.

One need only look at the fact that despite having a blog with 200 million pageviews, and two of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns of all-time for their respective categories, not a single major publisher or media outlet has expressed any interest in working with me in the last 10 years. Whatever it may be that drives those companies, it obviously isn’t a capitalist profit motive. 

The dean of Minnesota sports, legendary sportswriter Sid Hartman, has died at the age of 100:

Sid Hartman was, for all of his 100-plus years, a hometown guy. Born on the North Side of Minneapolis on March 15, 1920, he worked for newspapers in his hometown for nearly his entire life, until his death on Sunday afternoon.

From a humble start selling newspapers on the street in 1928, he wrote about sports for the Star Tribune for the ensuing decades. He was still writing three columns a week, his final one appearing on the day he died…. He gained a stature very few journalists have achieved, becoming one of this state’s legendary public figures. For years, he was also a power broker in the local sports scene, playing an integral role in the early success of the Minneapolis Lakers pro basketball team while serving as the team’s de facto general manager and working behind the scenes to help bring major league baseball to Minnesota.

He created a rags-to-riches story unlike any his hometown has seen, working his way from the very bottom of the newspaper industry to one of the most influential and popular figures ever to use a typewriter, and later computer, for his livelihood. He also became a popular radio personality for WCCO and for 20 years was a panelist on a Sunday night TV show. If Minnesotans referred to “Sid,” there was no doubt who they were talking about, much the same as the first-name status of the greatest of those he covered, men like “Kirby” and “Harmon” and “Bud.”

According to a count by Star Tribune staffer Joel Rippel, Hartman produced 21,235 bylined stories in his career, from 1944 until the one that ran on C2 of Sunday’s Sports section. That column was his 119th of 2020.

I never met Sid Hartman. But I read him on a regular basis for the last 45 years and listened to him on ‘CCO for nearly two decades. He was the model for success through consistency and hard work, and his career will always serve as an inspiration to those of us who are aging writers. I’m just sorry that he never got to see the Vikings win the Super Bowl.

It seems to me that the mainstream media usually celebrates things that tend to tear families apart, things like divorce and immigration and transgenderism and interracial relationships. I wonder why tearing families apart has suddenly become a bad thing in its eyes?

QAnon can be traced back to a series of 2017 posts on 4chan, the online message board known for its mixture of trolls and alt-right followers. The poster was someone named “Q,” who claimed to be a government insider with Q security clearance, the highest level in the Department of Energy. QAnon’s origin matters less than what it’s become, an umbrella term for a loose set of conspiracy theories ranging from the false claim that vaccines cause illness and are a method of controlling the masses to the bogus assertion that many pop stars and Democratic leaders are pedophiles.

The choose-your-own-adventure nature of QAnon makes it compelling to vulnerable people desperate for a sense of security and difficult for Twitter and Facebook to control, despite their efforts. It’s becoming increasingly mainstreamed as several QAnon-friendly candidates won congressional primaries. And the FBI has warned that it could “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”

As QAnon has crept into the news, it’s become a testament to our age of political disinformation, not to mention easy online comedic currency. But what’s often forgotten in stories and jokes are the people behind the scenes who are baffled at a loved one’s embrace of the “movement,” and who struggle to keep it from tearing their families apart.

Then again, I seem to recall that someone else once came to tear families apart. Perhaps division is not such a bad thing…

Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

– Luke 12:51-53