Media Bias

[Brian Peacock]

Diddums.

[Tero]

On Fox/Murdoch and pals:
Called “Patriot Purge,” Carlson explained, “The U.S. government has in fact launched a new war on terror, but it’s not against al Qaeda, it’s against American citizens. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of our country. This is an attack on core civil liberties and it’s essential that you know what’s happening and that you resist it.” Carlson has more than flirted with the idea that the January 6 Capitol riot was incited, if not perpetrated by the federal government. In September, he downplayed the riot and said, “We still don’t know how many federal agents were involved in the event that day on January 6. But we have very good reason to believe from court documents that it’s a significant number.”

Carlson himself appears and says, “The helicopters have left Afghanistan, and now they’re here at home.”
“The left is hunting the right,” alleges another voice. “Sticking them in Guantanamo Bay, for American citizens, leaving them there to rot.” Yet another voice chimes in as the trailer shows a man at a shooting range, “We are dealing with an insurgency in the United States.” A clip of President Joe Biden denouncing White supremacy and calling it a “lethal threat” as footage of the 1926 Ku Klux Klan march on Washington rolled. “False flags have happened in this country,” says another voice. “One of which may have been January 6th.” The trailer ends with a brief audio of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... =algorithm

[Tero]

thoughts on Fox and Carlson
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com/2021/10/foxnews.html

[L'Emmerdeur]

It would warm the cockles of Screwtape's black heart.

'Newsmax Star Claims Vaccines Contain ‘Bioluminescent’ Tracker Linked to Devil'

Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson on Monday night tweeted out the utterly batshit claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain a “bioluminescent marker” named after Lucifer “so that you can be tracked.”

Twitter has since taken down Robinson’s post, replacing it with a note stating the tweet violated the social platform’s rules.

Newsmax, meanwhile, distanced itself from the “false claims” made by its reporter, noting that the network has “never reported” that the vaccines contain tracking devices.

Robinson, who has a long history of making provocative and outrageous statements on social media, reacted to another Twitter user’s post that the “Moderna vaccine DOES contain Luciferase.” That user also attached a clip featuring a Wikipedia description of the enzyme, which notes that “the name is derived from the Latin word lucifer, meaning ‘lightbearer’” and the enzyme produces bioluminescence.

“Dear Christians: the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” Robinson blared in her Monday night tweet. “Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.”

The Biblical reference cites the Book of Revelation, which describes a war in heaven between the Archangel Michael and “fallen angels” led by the devil, also known as Lucifer. The book also warns that “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

[Joe]

But they were just following Trump's suggestion to bring light inside the body to kill the virus.

[JimC]

You know, deep down, I think that right wing christian nut jobs recognise that science is their inexorable enemy, something that will lay their delusions bare to laughing scrutiny.

So, of course, they hate and fear it...

[Joe]

Yeahbut, the greatest of these, who has "blessed" us with his presence, claims scientific proof of his delusions.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Much more about Tim Pool than most coherent people would want to subject themselves to. The smart kid's pundit, the Daily Mail rebroadcaster who votes Republican but claims to be 'left of center,' the golden boy of the it-getters. I'm regrettably already familiar with the inglorious path he blazed to his current success. Still, there are some amusing sections.

'How "Coward and Phony" Tim Pool Became One of the Biggest Political YouTubers on the Planet'

A former digital media journalist who originally built up his name with on-the-ground reporting and livestreaming, including stints at Vice and Fusion, Pool now postures as a rational centrist or “disaffected liberal” who grew to loathe the excesses of the left. If you buy Pool’s branding, he stands in contrast to the bulk of his journalistic peers: “evil” “liars,” he says, who’ve supposedly capitulated to the agendas of Black Lives Matter, antifa, Democrats, Big Tech companies, feminists, and the like.

This self-generated mythology—an anti-authoritarian truth-teller whose successes stemmed from confronting “the machine,” as Pool puts it—bears little resemblance to reality.

Contrary to the overall manner in which Pool portrays himself, he was not an intrepid field reporter and streamer who barreled into conflict zones filled with an unshakable desire to ferret out the real story. Pool was at times reluctant to leave the safety of his hotel room, according to several of the nearly 30 former co-workers and other acquaintances from the past decade who spoke with The Daily Beast. He’d come across as uninterested in interviewing subjects or doing much research. During shoots, Pool’s head was frequently buried in his phone, diligently tracking social media, only to blame his co-workers or equipment when he couldn’t live up to his clippings. Pool’s main focus when reporting, those on the ground with him said, was drawing attention to himself.

...

[Pool's audience] can be assured their extremely online, skater-ish millennial buddy will hit the same beats at some point during each episode: the left has gone insane, the “Fake News” media is lying to you, the right is being targeted, and societal collapse or a “peaceful separation” is imminent.

...

Before the 2020 election, Democrats plotted to rig the election, Pool brayed that summer and fall. After Biden won, Pool pinned the defeat on Trump being “Ocean’s 11’d”—the unwitting victim of an intricate scheme involving shadowy, powerful public and private actors determined to thwart Trump, whom Pool considers an “anti-establishment” figure. (A Time magazine report detailing how a coalition mobilized to protect election integrity and increase voting access was regularly cited as evidence he’d been right.) One day before Jan. 6, he suggested Pence could declare Trump the winner. QAnon circles had been spreading this unconstitutional fantasy, calling it “the Pence Card.”

Confronting these perceived adversaries will win Pool’s praise. He showers Tucker Carlson and James O’Keefe with hosannas and respects the “spine” shown by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon promoter and conspiracy theorist. QAnon-friendly Rep. Lauren Boebert, who tweeted “Today is 1776” on Jan. 6, also earned Pool’s admiration for being “strong’’ and carrying firearms unlike other “spineless, little, weaselly” GOP politicians. On the morning of the Capitol riot, Pool praised Boebert as being “principled” and a person of “integrity.” Afterwards, not much had changed. “I actually think she’s kind of all right,” he said a week later. “She seems cool.”

...

[O]n the rare occasions he comes face-to-face with an actual leftist, it usually doesn’t go well. Sam Seder, the host of The Majority Report, appeared on Pool’s channel in 2019. For the bulk of the broadcast, Pool stammered and sputtered, unable to offer cogent arguments. In one widely shared and derided clip, Pool said he refused to vote for Hillary Clinton. The only way to justify doing so, he explained, was by adopting a utilitarian philosophy, not unlike the Marvel supervillain Thanos, who wanted to eradicate half of all life in the universe.

...

Cassandra Fairbanks, an extremist online personality and bureau chief for the far-right website The Gateway Pundit, was named editor-in-chief of Timcast.com in June. She has a habit of posting and deleting gleeful tweets about those she disagrees with politically being physically harmed. On the day officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty in the murder of George Floyd, Fairbanks declared him a “political prisoner.” (Other extreme-right figures reacted similarly.) The daughter of white nationalist Peter Brimelow started blogging for Timcast.com later in June. (In his email to The Daily Beast, Pool wrote, “I don’t know who [her] dad is,” adding that Fairbanks recommended her.) In one paywall-protected video, Pool’s co-host Ian Crossland bitterly complained about not being able to say the n-word. “It’s a fucking English word,” Crossland yelled. “It means black in Spanish.”

[A description of the infamous episode in which Pool and his cronies failed to comprehend that a Jacobin cover depicting Biden as a saint was satire, and got worked up about it as an example of horrible leftist propaganda. Later in the same episode ignorant bigotry featured prominently.]

All told, those two hours of fact-free, at times bigoted bantering put a few thousand YouTube ad dollars in Pool’s pocket. His audience got a free dose of white nationalism.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The leftie from the shores of Tucho being absent, this story has yet to be noted here. Kinda twitchy, seems to me. Those Bidens are just leaving their stuff laying around, what do people expect?!

'Project Veritas claims Ashley Biden's diary was "legally obtained" after she "abandoned it": report'

Project Veritas claims it thought Ashley Biden's diary had been "legally obtained" by two people who provided it to the right-wing group after the president's daughter "abandoned it."

"Project Veritas had no involvement with how those two individuals acquired the diary," lawyers for the group said in a letter dated Wednesday to a federal judge, the New York Times reported Friday night.

The Project Veritas lawyers added that the group's knowledge about how the diary was obtained came from the two people themselves. The two people who obtained the diary are identified in the letter by their initials, "R.K. and A.H."

Federal investigators, however, believe the diary was stolen, according to a warrant used to search the home of Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe last weekend. The Department of Justice is investigating how the diary came to be published days before the 2020 election.

[Brian Peacock]

Typical example of statist overreach, impinging on the free press like that.

[Joe]

You know you've gone too far when the guy who wrote Liberal Fascism quits over your program.

A pair of Fox News contributors have quit their roles at the network, saying prime-time host Tucker Carlson's recent documentary series examining the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a breaking point.

Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, two leading conservative writers and pundits who have regularly appeared on the network since 2009, announced they had finalized their resignations from Fox following the release of Carlson's controversial documentary.

News of the pair's departure was first reported by the New York Times on Sunday evening.

"The special — which ran on Fox’s subscription streaming service earlier this month and was promoted on Fox News — is presented in the style of an exposé, a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism," the two journalists wrote in an entry on their political news and commentary website The Dispatch.

"In reality, it is a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions. And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner — and with the same tools — that it used to target al Qaeda," they added.

Of course, that won't stop Fox. They're addicted to this stuff now.

[L'Emmerdeur]

They did a course correction to the right in response to Newsmax and One America. They had pulled back a little, but the shift appears permanent at this point.

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The Project Censored top ten list is out, and there's a lot to dig into there. A write-up below. Number 5, microplastics, is regularly covered by Harry Shearer, but he's hardly mainstream media.

'New Normal is Normalized Censorship'

Several stories this year deal with topics that have gotten widespread attention — but with aspects that have been virtually, or entirely ignored. The number one story, for example, deals with prescription drug costs, a widely covered story, but with a significant difference in focus: how much those costs translate to in lost lives. The number nine story deals with police violence against people of color, but with a new focus that’s actually quite old: vicious police dog attacks. The number four story deals with climate change, again with a different focus: how heavily-industrialized nations like the U.S. “have effectively colonized the global atmospheric commons for the sake of their own industrial growth.”
The point of Project Censored has never been just to expose significant stories that have been ignored, but rather to expose them as portals to a wider landscape of understanding and action.

[Brian Peacock]

We have Byline, Open Democracy, and Novara over here doing similar things - something akin to old-fashioned investigative journalism that doesn't place access to power or the conveniences of a well-turned press release above quaint concepts like the facts or obligations to challenge official rhetoric. Remember when HuffPost used to do that kind of stuff?

[L'Emmerdeur]

One imagines unbridled glee on the shores of Tucho. Take your pick--Dr. Fauci is either Josef Mengele or Benito Mussolini.

'Lara Logan Says "People" Tell Her That Fauci Is Just Like Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele'

"What you see on Dr. Fauci – this is what people say to me: that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Joseph Mengele. Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the second World War and in the concentration camps. And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this because the response from Covid, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty, it has obliterated economies."

Logan did not specify which “people” are saying this.

'Tucker Carlson Calls Fauci a "Shorter Version of Benito Mussolini" Who Took Over the U.S. and "Promptly Went Insane"'

About an hour after Lara Logan said on Fox News that “people” are telling her that Dr. Anthony Fauci is like Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, Tucker Carlson said Fauci is a “shorter version of Mussolini” on the same network.

In his opening monologue, Carlson railed against the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and claimed he “took control” of the United States and subsequently lost his mind.

“When the fog lifts and art returns, somebody’s gonna write a hilarious novel about this moment,” said the Fox News host. “And of course, one of the stars of it will be a nearly 81-year-old bureaucrat who really shouldn’t be driving a car at this point, but who somehow took control of the most powerful country on Earth and then promptly went insane.”

I suppose they don't like Fauci's plain language.

'Fauci: "I'm going to be saving lives and they're going to be lying"

[Brian Peacock]

I wonder, what kinds of advertising are they taking - to what extent do they rely on the parent company to subsidise the bottom line?