Tag: media

The Media Bubble is real

However, the author’s attempts to blame geography and economics notwithstanding, the reality of the geographic concentration of the media in the big Left-dominated cities in no way excuses their dishonesty, partisanship, and attempts to enforce their ever-mutating narratives.

To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.

The answer to the press’ myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” Bannon said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no fucking idea what’s going on.”

But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there’s another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming “bias” and “conspiracy,” or counting D’s and R’s. That’s to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed.

The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.

It’s not an Either/Or situation. The media concentration on the coastal urban centers is real. As is the fact that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly and proudly in the tank for Clinton all along. This is just another attempt to deceive the public and reshape the narrative through half-truths.

The article is an exhibition of the very thing it seeks to disprove.

Sean Hannity is next

Debbie Schussel is accusing Sean Hannity of sexual misconduct:

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly was recently fired from Fox News after mounting accusations of sexual harassment and backlash from network sponsors. This follows the resignation of former CEO of Fox News Roger Ailes in July 2016 after allegations from Gretchen Carlson, Andrea Tantros, and Megyn Kelly of sexual harassment. Tantros also filed suit against Bill O’Reilly and politician Scott Brown. The latest conservative commentator to be accused of sexual misconduct is host Sean Hannity who was accused on the Pat Cambell Show by lawyer, political commentator, and frequent Fox News guest Debbie Schlussel. Debbie claimed on the show that Sean Hannity asked Schlussel to come back to his hotel twice after a book-signing event. Does this constitute sexual misconduct?

Why do these guys even talk to women in a professional capacity? This is further proof that the talking heads simply aren’t all that smart. If a woman shows even the slightest sign of being a fame whore, you’d have to be mad to think that she has any interest in you for yourself.

Anyhow, now that the new standard is “allegations have been made”, Hannity will obviously be expected to resign, since Mrs. Junior Murdoch doesn’t approve of those goings-on at her father-in-law’s company.

It’s rather amusing to see conservatives being ejected by the very “conservative” women they championed. At this rate, the Alt-Right is going to win by default.

Never too big

Bill O’Reilly is just the latest to learn that no matter how big you are, SJWs in the media and the corpocracy can take you down if you give them half a chance.

The Murdochs have decided Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year run at Fox News will come to an end. According to sources briefed on the discussions, network executives are preparing to announce O’Reilly’s departure before he returns from an Italian vacation on April 24…. The Murdochs’ decision to dump O’Reilly shocked many Fox News staffers I’ve spoken to in recent days. Late last week, the feeling inside the company was that Rupert Murdoch would prevail over his son James, who lobbied to jettison the embattled host. It’s still unclear exactly how the tide turned. According to one source, Lachlan Murdoch’s wife helped convince her husband that O’Reilly needed to go, which moved Lachlan into James’s corner.

I’m not a fan of O’Reilly. My book Media Whores was killed by the publisher and I was paid not to write it after Fox News learned that O’Reilly was one of the subjects to whom a chapter was devoted. But the point is that no one is bigger on cable news than he is, and yet a few allegations were enough to bring him down despite his continuing popularity.

This is why you MUST build your own platform. It’s a non-negotiable.

China warns Pyongyang

When reading this editorial, understand that The Global Times is essentially a foreign vehicle for the Chinese government, being published by “the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) paramount mouthpiece”, the People’s Daily.

US President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday that “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them!”

North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly convened on Tuesday. A few days later, North Korea will mark the birth anniversary of the late leader Kim Il-sung on April 15, also known as the Day of the Sun. Pyongyang likes to launch nuclear activities as a political salute around this date. Therefore, April is widely seen as a high-risk period for new nuclear tests by North Korea.

The US aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is headed toward the Korean Peninsula after abruptly turning back from sailing to Australia, and Trump sent a warning via his tweet. These are probably related to reports that satellite surveillance shows North Korea is likely to conduct new nuclear tests. Washington’s latest threat to Pyongyang is more credible given its just launched missile attack at an air base in Syria. The Korean Peninsula has never been so close to a military clash since the North conducted its first nuclear test in 2006.

If Pyongyang conducts its sixth nuclear test in the near future, the possibility of US military action against it will be higher than ever. Not only Washington brimming with confidence and arrogance following the missile attacks on Syria, but Trump is also willing to be regarded as a man who honors his promises.

Now the Trump team seems to have decided to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis. As the discussion runs deeper, a situation of no-solution will not be accepted. A new nuclear test or an intercontinental ballistic missile test, if conducted by Pyongyang at this time, will be a slap in the face of the US government and will intensify the confrontation between North Korea and the US.

Presumably Beijing will react strongly to Pyongyang’s new nuclear actions. China will not remain indifferent to Pyongyang’s aggravating violation of the UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution.

Translation: China is utilizing US bellicosity as an excuse to save face in Asia and use force if necessary to resolve the North Korean situation. It is unlikely that this result is an accident or was unforeseen by the President.

SJW doesn’t like being identified as such

The amusing thing about SJWs taking offense to being called SJWs is that they clearly don’t understand that it was originally their own label adopted by their own kind that was weaponized by the Alt-Right’s sarcasm. Also: Every.Single.Time.

I’ve always said that I appreciate all my readers, both those who agree with me and those who don’t. But lately I’ve been puzzled by the new slurs directed at me by some of the latter. Many I didn’t even understand, so I did some digging.

Apparently, tried-and-true insults such as “fag,” “fairy,” “kike” and “hebe” (yes, I’m Jewish) are old-school, especially among the alt-right. That small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state is developing new coded language, much as the Nazis once did, says noted linguist George Lakoff, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

For instance, in February I wrote about Milo Yiannopoulos, the now-disgraced Breitbart News editor and alt-right poster boy. I heard from many readers about that column, which took Yiannopoulos to task for his incendiary language. But one email caught my eye: “Milo is far less bigoted, misogynist, and hateful than those of you sick sociopathic and psychotic SJW’s who smear him so desperately.” Sick, sociopathic and psychotic, I knew. But SJW? I had no clue. In a personal ad it might mean “straight Jewish woman,” but two of those don’t apply to me. So what was this snarky new gem of an insult?

I emailed back, “What is an SJW?” The reply: “An SJW is a social justice warrior. In the press, this particular public predator tends to be big on PC [political correctness] virtue signaling but happy to smear others viciously with false accusations of sexism, racism, white nationalism, hate speech, etc.”

Well, that was certainly clear — I’m a “public predator” allegedly guilty of smearing Yiannopoulos by referring to his very own, widely reported hateful language.

I started looking into other slurs readers hurled at me. There was “libtard,” and one I really liked at first — “snowflake,” because they’re magical, in moderation.

But here’s the nasty undercurrent: These new words are intrinsic to the alt-right’s rise, according to Lakoff. He connects this to the Nazis and the coded language (prime example: “the master race”) that eventually allowed them to topple governmental institutions. “The strategy is to control discourse,” Lakoff points out. “One way you do that is preemptive name calling . . . based on a moral hierarchy.”

First, the Alt-Right is much bigger than the Alt-White, much less the Alt-Reich. As evidence of this contention, I note that I’ve just been sent translations of the 16 Points in Ukrainian and, of all things, Esperanto. Second, Milo is Alt-Lite, not Alt-Right.

Third, the incessant whining about name-calling by people who don’t hesitate to hurl “Nazi” and “anti-semitic” at a pizza delivery driver who arrives thirty second late with their Veggie Supreme with extra eggplant and tofu is both pathetic as well as indicative of the extreme susceptibility of SJWs to rhetoric.

Fourth, they’re not “codewords”. As one of Steve’s commenters pointed out: ” The alt right is small but has power and this is for one reason only – the alt right is the one group that Calls Things By Their True Name.” And fifth, it’s not hard to understand why Steve Sailer’s appeal remains self-limited, he’s the classic example of the dialectic speaker who simply can’t bring himself to accept the necessity of rhetoric. I mean, if you’re still loftily sperging at this point about using the term “warrior” for SJWs, you simply don’t grasp the way rhetoric works.

Steven Petrow’s column is prima facie evidence of why you should simply utilize SJW instead of whatever your preferred dialectic alternative might be.

Cernovich vs 60 Minutes: the complete transcript

It’s interesting to see how their little tricks and traps are so much less effective in print:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.
Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What’s the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let’s find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That’s the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That’s not a narrative I’m familiar with. Who’s narrative is that?

Mike Cernovich: Well, I guess, the question I always ask people is, why’s David Duke relevant? He’s not. But the media drags him out every time there’s a Republican runs for office because David Duke knows if he endorses a candidate, then people will say oh my god, you better disavow this guy. You better disavow. Why? Nobody has anything to do with that guy. He’s trash, right?

Whereas on the left, when you have people like Reverend Jeremiah White, a right rath-Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and other kind of fringe people. I don’t see them being dragged out and saying Bernie, you better disavow, Hillary, you better disavow this guy.

Scott Pelley: But my, my question is who’s narrative is that?

Mike Cernovich: Well, it’s largely cultural. There narrative would definitely be conventional mainstream media. Which is made up of certain people. 90% of journalist who donate to campaigns, gave to Hillary Clinton. There’s a left-leaning bias for sure. Which is not necessarily nefarious, but is the result of our own human limitations to view the world rationally. To filter things, our own confirmation bias, and through cultural norms.

Scott Pelley: And, uh, you describe the mainstream media as what? Who is that?

Mike Cernovich: The industry. 90% of media companies are owned by six corporations. Concentration media ownership. So the New York times would be. The New York Times, the Washington Post, they’re all writing the same kind of stories.

Playing dumb is a lot less effective in print than it is on television, perhaps because it requires playing down to the level of the average TV viewership, which is probably around 90.

Now you know why I insist on written questions, and why doing so tends to make the reporters seeking interviews with me disappear.

Who is Mike Cernovitch

The New York Times helpfully tells you how to think about its current bête noire:

Mr. Cernovich is a blogger, author of books, YouTube personality and filmmaker with a far-right social media following. Much of his online persona is driven by two mottos: “conflict is attention” and “attention is influence.”

He told The New Yorker, “I use trolling tactics to build my brand.”

Before this week, he was perhaps best known for promoting false claims that Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile ring located in the basement of a pizzeria. He describes himself as an “American nationalist” and has been involved in shaping alt-right messages on social media, according to The New Yorker. But he has denied being part of the alt-right movement, calling it “too obsessed with gossip and drama for my tastes” in a blog post….

During his YouTube broadcast on Tuesday, Mr. Cernovich denied accusations from critics that he is a misogynist, a rape apologist or a white nationalist. He said his past statements had been taken out of context and called some of them “obvious satire” that had been misinterpreted in bad faith.

“Nobody tells you how to be famous,” he said.

Later, shortly before appearing on a talk show hosted by Alex Jones, another far-right conspiracy theorist, Mr. Cernovich said he did not care if the media portrayed him positively or not.

“Look at me,” he said, speaking into the camera. “I did this to Susan Rice. I did this to Hillary Clinton. I’m doing real journalism. I’m destroying your fake news outlets. Look at me. Look at my face. I’m the media now.”

I know I feel much better informed now that I have been given permission to hate hate hate the evil Mikhael Chernobylich, who is obviously a liar, a misogynist, a rape apologist, an alt-right white nationalist and a far-right conspiracy theorist who will be devastated by this thoughtful, informative article by a trustworthy news source.

I also like the way they grabbed images from YouTube rather than risk using an excessively flattering professional photo. See, this is why you don’t talk to them. The fact that they couldn’t get access to him just makes them look like anklebiters.

UPDATE: The would-be hit piece by the cucks at National Review is inadvertently hilarious.

The White House Should Not Be Promoting Mike Cernovich
The testosterone-obsessed conspiracist makes an unsavory social-media warrior for the White House.

Translation: We have neither balls nor spine and we will go down to noble defeat in only the most graceful and decorous manner. Please to permit us to surrender on your behalf.

Fool me once

Apparently Wired thinks I can’t remember two whole years ago.

I’m a writer at WIRED magazine. I saw the Hugo noms this morning, and I have to ask about Stix Hiscock. What can you tell me about him? How did you discover him, and why was he a Rabid Puppies candidate this year?

My response:


That’s hilarious. I made the mistake of talking to you jokers once before. No thanks. You’ll have to sustain your Narrative without my help. 

The amusing thing is that I even received two emails from Wired editors trying, and failing, to defend their writer’s little off-topic hit piece after I wrote about it here. They know they’re full of shit, they just want to hide that uncomfortable little fact from their readership.

As Andrew Torba says, I don’t talk to Fake News.

Deeper and deeper

Now that Mike Cernovich has ripped off the cover, the media is finally digging into the Susan Rice spying story:

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.

Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.

Didn’t you just know that Clapper would be involved somehow?

One would think the media would be cautious about leaping to Rice’s defense here. After all, if they argue that her activities were perfectly legal, then there will be no reason for the Trump administration not to engage in the same behavior, and leak the names of Democrats whenever they happen to come across them while spying on legitimate foreign targets.

The missing name

It’s interesting to see how, even as the mainstream media divides its reports about Susan Rice’s unlawful unmasking of the Trump administration figures on predictably partisan lines, one common element remains. They all appear to assiduously avoid mentioning the name of the individual responsible for breaking the story:

A massive revelation in the alleged surveillance of President Trump’s aides broke Monday morning when Bloomberg reported that “[f]ormer National Security Adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” With their identities unmasked, it allowed for someone to freely and illegally leak their names to the press. It’s controversial news but ABC and NBC both chose to ignore it that night, while CBS defended Rice.

“We learned more today about the President’s allegation that he and his aides were caught up in Obama-era surveillance,” CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley said, teeing up reporter Margaret Brennan. Strangely, Pelley stayed away from flinging the fiery insults which drew him much praise from the left. Instead of calling Trump’s claims “baseless,” he kept it neutral, only referring to them as “allegations.” He also described what the concern was as “Obama-era surveillance,” something he had not done in the past.

Brennan played defense for Rice, stating: “Well, Scott, as national security adviser to the president, Susan Rice could and did request the names of individuals who were picked up during legal surveillance of foreign nationals.” She then cited unnamed sources who told her there was nothing wrong with what Rice did:

Now, according to a former national security official, Trump associates were not the sole focus of Rice’s request, but they may have been revealed when she asked to understand why they were appearing in intelligence reports. However, Rice did not spread the information according to this former official, who insisted that there was nothing improper or political involved.

On Fox News’s Special Report, it was a whole different story as they led the program with Rice’s unmasking efforts. “The surveillance of people close to President Trump, possibly the President himself, now has a name and a face attached to it. And it’s one you’ve seen in major scandals before,” declared fill-in host James Rosen during the opening tease.

“Two weeks ago, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee announced to the press and President he had uncovered a disturbing trend of intelligence collection on Trump officials, some of which was made public,” reported Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts, “Today, we learn more about the ‘how’ and ‘who’ of what’s going on.”

The Fox News reporter noted that when it came to statements from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes about Trump aides being swept up in incidental collection, Rice claimed she didn’t know anything. “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today,” she claimed on PBS NewsHour on March 22. That is now exposed as a lie, just like then she lied about what caused the Benghazi attack.

It’s fascinating to see the way in which the name “Mike Cernovich” doesn’t appear in any of these reports that I’ve seen. It’s particularly interesting in light of the fact that Scott Pelley just broadcast a 60 Minutes report accusing Cerno of being “fake news”; one would think that this breaking new story would be at least somewhat relevant in this regard.

Much the same is true when Drudge breaks a story. The obvious conclusion is that the mainstream news organizations are determined to defend their perceived status, even if that means omitting where they got the story in the first place and pretending it was the result of their own reporting. Then again, they are the fake news.

This is entirely par for the course. It’s the same thing as the way you’ll see all the references to religion not causing war that are very careful to never mention either me or The Irrational Atheist. Even when the ideas are important and undeniable, even when the story cannot be ignored, they are determined not to credit the author for fear of elevating his profile. Of course, they do the exact opposite when they wish to raise someone’s profile, such as a Malcolm Gladwell or a Richard Dawkins, and in such cases will actually credit them for merely popularizing someone else’s ideas.

Mike tells Zerohedge how he got the story. Which happens to be the same way Drudge got the Lewinsky dress story:

“Maggie Haberman had it.  She will not run any articles that are critical of the Obama administration. Eli Lake had it.  He didn’t want to run it and Bloomberg didn’t want to run it because it vindicates Trump’s claim that he had been spied upon.  And Eli Lake is a ‘never Trumper.’  Bloomberg was a ‘never Trump’ publication.”

“I’m showing you the politics of ‘real journalism’.  ‘Real journalism’ is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn’t run it because  they don’t want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump.  They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that’s why they sat on it.”

“So where did I get the story?  I didn’t get it from the intelligence community.  Everybody’s trying to figure out where I got it from.  I got it from somebody who works in one of those media companies.  I have spies in every media organization.  I got people in news rooms.  I got it from a source within the news room who said ‘Cernovich, they’re sitting on this story, they’re not going to run it, so you can run it’.”

“If you’re at Bloomberg, I have people in there.  If you’re at the New York Times, I have people in there.  LA Times, Washington Post, you name it, I have my people in there.  I got IT people in every major news room in this country.  The IT people see every email so that’s how I knew it.”

Moral of the story: the Fake News sits on real news when it contradicts their Narrative.