Tag: media

Media Con #2 in action

You may recall that I mentioned the three cons that reporters run on people they want to submit to playing punching bag for an article. Bre Faucheux turned down Rachel Poser of Harper’s Magazine three times, prompting this threatening variant on Media Con #2.


Your name appears in the piece and it is my responsibility to make sure you and your views are represented accurately.

To help put this in context, consider this little glimpse behind the media curtain.

When I told my editor at Literally, Darling I wanted to write a story about conversations I’d been having with a white nationalist, she told me she thought it would be a good idea, but wanted to be careful that we didn’t “normalize” him. I understood this to mean she wanted to make it clear nobody at Literally, Darling supported or condoned Mr. Patriarch’s views (we don’t).

Neither the reporter, the editor, nor the fact-checker is even remotely interested in ensuring that the target or his views are represented accurately. To the contrary, they are very careful to make sure that neither the target nor his views are portrayed as positive in any way. So, what they do write the story in accordance with the negative narrative, then cherry-pick a kill-quote or two, then attempt to get the target to confirm the accuracy of the kill-quote.

What they are attempting to do is to bolster the narrative with the assistance of the bamboozled target. Bre was wise to turn continue to turn them down, because there is absolutely no benefit to her from bolstering the Harper’s narrative about the women of the Alt-Right.

Three Fake News scalps

CNN throws three employees under the bus, hopes that you’ll believe they’re totally reporting the truth now:

Three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday. The article was removed from CNN.com on Friday after the network decided it could no longer stand by its reporting.

“In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignation of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a network spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

On Thursday, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a story involving an investigation into a Russian investment fund with possible ties to several Trump associates.

According to the network, an internal investigation found that “some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.”

Citing a single unnamed source, the story reported that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” The story, which only appeared on the network’s site, was quickly disputed on Friday, as one Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci — who was mentioned in the story — pushed back on  Frank’s reporting, insisting he “did nothing wrong.”

“Once it was determined that editorial processes were not followed, CNN deleted the story from CNN.com,” the network said Friday on its site. “Soon thereafter, the story was officially retracted and replaced with an editor’s note.” The piece “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” the note said. “Links to the story have been disabled.”

CNN blamed the mistake on a “breakdown in editorial workflow,” explaining that that “these types of stories” did not go through the usual departments such as fact-checkers, journalism standards experts and lawyers.

The gaffe cost three employees their jobs: Frank, who wrote the story, Eric Lichtblau, a unit editor, and the person in charge of the unit, Lex Haris.

The network’s investigative unit was told during a meeting on Monday that the retraction did not necessarily mean the facts of the story were wrong. But, rather, “the story wasn’t solid enough to publish as-is,” according CNN.com.

Haris, Lichtblau and Frank had solid reputations among their colleagues.

Frank worked as reporter for USA Today and Newsday before joining CNN. Lichtblau is a former New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter. And Haris was a former executive editor of CNNMoney.

This is what happens when you put your trust in the reliability of Team NeverTrump. The problem is that if this newfound sense of journalistic integrity caused CNN to force the resignation of three employees every time they published Fake News, they’d soon have none left. Of course, they have learned nothing.

CNN boss Jeff Zucker says despite Donald Trump’s war on the network and what the president says is “fake news,” he is certain that CNN maintains the trust of its viewers, as it extends into digital brands to attract a younger audience.

Speaking at Cannes Lions, he said, “CNN has been around for 37 years, our trustworthiness today is the same as it was a year ago, before people in high offices started questioning it. We know that through our own brand research. Just because somebody says you are not trustworthy, that doesn’t mean it is so … CNN’s brand equity is built over 37 years doing hard work in very dangerous places … those who rely on CNN trust CNN more than ever.”

CNN is dying. No one watches it. Because it is Fake News posing as real news.

Primetime viewers in millions: FNC: 2.346 | CNN: 827 | MSNBC: 1.705

“A massive, massive fuckup”

CNN learns the hard way that relying upon Never-Trumpers as sources is a very bad idea:

CNN late Friday deleted a story from its website that claimed Senate investigators were looking into a Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Trump’s transition team, later issuing a retraction in the story’s place.

The now-deleted story, by investigative reporter Thomas Frank, was published Thursday and cited a single, unnamed source who claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into a “$10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration.”

But by Friday evening, the story had vanished from CNN’s website. It was not immediately clear when the story was removed, but a tweet linking to the story, from CNN’s Politics account, was also deleted sometime Friday evening.

After noticing the story’s disappearance, BuzzFeed News contacted CNN. More than an hour later, an editor’s note appeared on CNN’s website. A company representative sent BuzzFeed News a link to the note, but did not answer other questions about why the story was removed.

“The story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” the editor’s note said. It did not say which parts of the story failed to meet the company’s standards. The note also apologized to Anthony Scaramucci, a member of Trump’s transition team and an adviser to his presidential campaign, who was named in the report.

A source close to the network, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter, told BuzzFeed News the story was a “massive, massive fuck up and people will be disciplined.” The person said CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker and the head of the company’s human resources department are “directly involved” in an internal investigation examining how the story was handled.

The lesson, as always: CNN is Fake News.

Access journalism and fake news

The Zman explains the link between the two:

It has been thrown down the memory hole, but Jordan decided the way to help black sports reporters was to give them exclusive access and deny access to honkies. Guys like Ahmad Rashad and Michael Wilbon were given special access. This made their careers, but it also ushered in the era of access journalism. Players granted access to reporters who were willing to sing their praises in their columns and on TV shows.

Something similar happened around the same time in Washington politics. The Clinton machine was ruthless in controlling the media. They would shutout reporters that did not play ball. There’s always been some of this, as people are naturally going to be nice to those who are nice to them and not so nice to people they see as adversaries. The difference was, the Clinton team turned this into a formal policy and the Washington press corp went along with it. They liked being treated like players so they acted accordingly.

The Bush people could not play the same game, as the Washington media is universally liberal, but they did a little bit of it with operations like Fox and the talk radio guys. Rich Lowry of National Review remodeled the magazine to be a GOP mouth piece for exactly this reason. It gave them access to Republicans. The Weekly Standard largely existed as a public relations vehicle for the Bush family. Much of what has gone wrong with Buckley Conservatism is due to the perils of access journalism.

This is why we see the explosion of fake news. The NBA guys want access or at least the illusion of access. To that end, they tweet out rumors and fake news in the hope of getting a reply from an agent or front office guy. That way they can then shoot down their own rumor or fake news with an actual quote from a real person. “After talking with person X, I can now report that the rumor I reported is false.” Fake news about rumors produces gossip that is eventually addressed by a real person in the news.

That seems to be what’s going on Washington with all the fake news. No one in the Washington media bothered to develop contacts in the Trump team. Instead, they mocked and harassed them through the campaign, figuring they were currying favor with the Clinton people. Now, they have no access so they create fake stories hoping to get a response from the Trump people. In lieu of real reporting, it is provocative fake reporting in the hope of gaining access to real people in the Trump White House.

This is all pretty much news to me, but it’s as explanatory as anything else I’ve heard suggested. Personally, I find it a little strange that Fake News has exploded at the very time that it has never been easier for the average individual to do a little looking around the Internet to debunk it.

The Wikipedia of the Alt-Right

Wired acknowledges the existence of Infogalactic:

Vox Day thinks that Wikipedia is the worst. But the things that bug him aren’t the typical complaints you’ll hear about the crowd-sourced encyclopedia—that it’s plagued by trolls, say, or that its pages on Pokémon lore are overly comprehensive.

Day is bothered because he believes that Wikipedia is a Democratic tool, run “by the left-wing thought police who administer it,” he tells me over email. Yet the millions of articles and stubs that make up the end product are used as fact. And that makes the science fiction writer and alt-right personality, who uses Vox Day as his pen name, angry.

So last fall, in the midst of a public debate about what, exactly, constitutes a fact, Day decided it was time to do something about the Wikipedia problem. He chose to launch his own version of it. He made a copy of the entire site and invited his followers to start rewriting its pages. “Wikipedia was the easiest and the most important of the social justice-converged social media giants to replace,” Day told me.

That site, Infogalactic, is made with Wikipedia’s MediaWiki software—so by design it looks a lot like Wikipedia. At first glance, so does its content. On the homepage is a featured article about peregrine falcons; a highlighted image of a Botticelli masterwork, housed in the Uffizi in Florence, is featured underneath.

But break into some of the more contentious topics and differences begin to emerge. On Infogalactic, Mike Cernovich is a respected bestselling author, “independent journalist,” “writer, attorney, and documentary filmmaker.” On Wikipedia, the Twitter pundit is a “social media personality, writer, and conspiracy theorist.”

The idea is that a stringent, Trump-supporting member of the alt-right shouldn’t have to read the same ideas as a Marxist, or a bleeding-heart college professor. (Day initially considered the tagline, “your universe, your view.”) But Infogalactic is only one of a number of crowdsourced encyclopedias tailored to various conservative factions….

On their own, none of these sites draws a huge audience. According to Alexa’s traffic rankings, Conservapedia is the 18,066th most popular site in the US. Infogalactic clocks in at 14,710. Wikipedia, by comparison, ranks fifth. But since last fall—just as the notion of alternative facts gained cultural primacy—such sites have seen a clear rise in traffic and interest.

Not bad, all things considered. I wouldn’t say the thought policing at Wikipedia makes me angry, but that’s pretty mild as the disqualify-and-discredit game goes. The reporter actually appears to recognize that there is a market for Infogalactic, he’s just not sure about the extent of its appeal; there are no gotchas or kill quotes, just an accurate presentation of the current facts. And while it would have been nice if they’d mentioned our perspective filters and other plans for Phase Two, we don’t have them up and running yet and so it’s entirely fair to leave them out.

I’m just pleased to be informed that in less than nine months, Infogalactic has already surpassed Conservapedia. And if you want to help Infogalactic continue to grow, please support it by joining the Burn Unit and signing up for a monthly donation.

The God-Emperor wins again

Funny, is it not, that Donald Trump keeps winning these “national referendums” on his presidency, even when the media’s polls predict otherwise.

Republican Karen Handel won the special congressional election in Georgia on Tuesday, fending off a challenge from Democrat Jon Ossoff in the heavily Republican House district.

Handel’s victory in the closely fought contest, which drew national interest and was the most expensive House race ever at over $50 million spent by both sides, comes as good news for President Donald Trump. Democrats had promoted the contest as a referendum on the president.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, Handel leads Ossoff 53 percent to 47 percent in a race that many expected to be much closer. Handel had 127,021 votes to the Democrat’s 114,390 ballots.

The thing is, even if Ossoff had won, that would have changed precisely nothing, except the media would be crowing rather than falling into a surly silence. Except that we would not have further proof that the media’s polls are reliably unreliable and we’re back to the old days of needing to reweight their reports four or five points in the Republican’s direction to predict the result.

Tired? Or still not tired?

Media Con #2

Philadelphia Magazine is running Media Con #2 on Jack Posobiec: I just want to give you the chance to tell your side of the story.

Here is hoping Jack has the sense to simply tell them no. Or, I expect, we’ll soon have a fourth illustration in why you Don’t Talk To The Media.

DTTTM: Gavin Mcinnes edition

Gavin McInnes‏ @Gavin_McInnes
I was wrong about @andrewmarantz. He’s a propagandist just like the rest of them. No more talking to liberal media #ProudBoys


They are all. It’s an act. They usually run one of three cons on you:

  1. I’m a big fan.
  2. I just want to give you the chance to tell your side of the story.
  3. Can you educate me on this thing I don’t know about?

They will be your best friend, contacting you multiple times per day and spending hours on the phone with you, right up until the moment they get their kill quote. Then, they’ll quickly vanish and only communicate with you via email, if they even do that. They are very good at this; they do it literally every week, if not every day, to all of the people they want to grind for the media mill.

Don’t talk to the media. No, your clever strategy won’t work. No, recording them won’t make a difference. No, you aren’t a special snowflake who is going to magically transform the ideology of the mainstream media through the sheer power of your presence.

#DTTTM

Clever Takes helpfully provides a cartoon reminder in case you’re having trouble remembering why you should not talk to them.

Don’t. Talk. To. The. Media.

Tommy Robinson is the latest to learn that it is a bad idea, even when it’s live television:

Piers Morgan blasted former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson for being a “bigoted lunatic stirring up hatred” as he clashed with the right-wing activist this morning.

As Robinson pulled out a copy of the Koran on Good Morning Britain, Piers blasted him, saying: “Show some damn respect for people’s religious beliefs.“You’re sounding like a complete lunatic. You’re sounding like a bigoted lunatic.

“You’re stirring up hatred.

“You’re being a complete disgrace.”

Holding up the Koran, Robinson branded it a “violent and cursed book” and said: “This book is the reason we are in such a mess.”

Piers responded: “We’re in this mess because people take Islam, they are terrorists and they abuse the nature of Islam and… perpetrate evil.”

And the former EDL leader refused to accept Islam was a religion, saying: “Islam is an idea – a bad idea.” Asked if he was Islamophobic, Robinson retorted: “There’s no such word as Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational fear, it’s not irrational to fear these things.”

I don’t know if people’s egos are simply too tempted by the thought of appearing on camera or if they truly believe they are smarter than almost every single person who has been summoned to play punching bag before them, but it’s remarkable how whether a reasonable individual is conservative, Alt-Right, Alt-Lite, or simply nationalist, they are drawn like moths to the candleflame of the hostile media’s cameras.

Tommy Robinson complained on Twitter:

Tommy Robinson @TRobinsonNewEra
Piers Morgan usual technique of not letting the person he is interviewing actually answer any questions.  Just…

Supreme Dark Lord‏  @voxday
Do you really not understand that you were there to be a punching bag? He was virtue-signaling at your expense. Don’t talk to the media! 

When you are approached by the media, be it Megyn Kelly, Piers Morgan, Wired, The New York Times, or The Atlantic, you must understand that they see you as the content du jour. And the content is always folded, spindled, and mutilated to fit their current Narrative, which is NOT the reason they will give you when they try to get you to talk to them or appear on their show.

Here is the thing. You don’t need the media. As Mike Cernovich points out, they need you. It is Piers Morgan whose name is on the headlines because Tommy Robinson was willing to make Morgan relevant today, not the other way around. Who is more relevant and has a bigger platform, Richard Spencer, who leaps to talk to the media, or Stefan Molyneux, who will not even return their emails?

And as both Mike and I have noticed, mainstream exposure doesn’t even move the needle. Not in terms of blog traffic, Twitter followers, or book sales. It is probable pain for no gain. Whereas whenever he goes on Infowars or I go on FreeDomainRadio, we see observable bumps in one or more metrics.

In light of this, I should mention that I am modifying my media policy. Previously, I had been willing to answer written questions posed to me by reporters in writing. I have now learned that they will never run those answers because they cannot use them to fit the Narrative. So, I will not be replying to any mainstream media inquiries that do not specifically, and solely, concern Castalia House books, Infogalactic, or games for which I am the lead designer.

UPDATE: had to modify that and add Infogalactic since Wired is apparently doing a story on it. I don’t know if it is a hit piece or a tech piece yet, but their questions – which I have answered in writing – were solely focused on tech-related issues. We’ll see.