Posts Tagged → media
A Day of Infamy: The Day the American Media Declared War on the American People
Today is a Day of Infamy like the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was a Day of Infamy, except that this day is marked by a treasonous insider attack by fellow Americans on the entire American people.
Today, the American press openly and joyously colluded and coordinated amongst themselves to attack the American president, for merely being the president they don’t like. This is also an attack on the American people, who overwhelmingly chose this president over another candidate.
After two solid years of openly biased and partisan media attacks on the president, something like a measured 97% negative reporting on President Trump across the print and cable media, today the establishment media dare to present today’s nationwide editorial attack as some sort of unbiased, carefully measured, well-deserved action.
But the media are not balanced, thoughtful, careful analysts, or fair-minded arbiters of fact and truth. Rather, the mainstream media are openly a partisan activist arm of ONE political party. They are completely one-sided. Their attack today is just one more partisan attempt to damage a president they did not cheer for, cover for, and promote in 2016.
As if the American media is above criticism!
The media deserve the criticism they have gotten, because they have earned it over and over. The American media are indeed the enemy of the American people, because that same media is not in the news business, it is in the partisan political activism business. The media has prostituted the glorious First Amendment, and hidden behind it while using it to launch partisan political attacks. This destructive warfare has severely damaged America’s social fabric, because the role of the press is supposed to be honest, holding everyone in government accountable. Not just politicians the establishment media don’t like. Even as Mueller’s fake and falsely justified witch hunt is under way, the news media will not report on that actual facts about the illegally obtained FISA warrant used to begin the investigation in the first place.
The political activists posing as “news reporters” on CNN, NPR, CBS, MSNBC, the NYT, Washington Post, etc. deserve every bit of criticism they have received, from the president on down to local citizens complaining that the Patriot News here in Harrisburg harangues, hectors and lectures people about subjects John Micek and the other editors there have no interest in learning about. These activist “reporters” are just a bunch of politically partisan liberals who think they are in charge of all information the American people receive, and these “reporters” get angry when people call them out on their falsehoods.
Without inflicting damage on the president, the American media has severely damaged American democracy and representative government. American democracy is damaged by the media because they constantly cover up for crooked politicians it favors (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama), and constantly attack politicians they did not support, including politicians the American people do want.
Today’s nationwide editorial attack on the president only proves that he has been correct all along. It demonstrates that once again the media are not treating him fairly, that they collude, plan and plot among themselves. They are not delivering actual factual news to the American people. Rather, the media delivers one false narrative and fake set of facts after another after another, in an attempt to shape public opinion, not inform it.
The media have traded away their credibility in their drive to attain certain political outcomes, including damaging this president’s public standing so the mid-term elections will be better for the media’s chosen political party.
So today is just one more day of liberal propaganda, the same as yesterday’s propaganda and the week before and the month before that.
Today is a day of shame, a day of infamy, because it is the day the American media made it openly public that they are indeed the enemies of the American people.
Duly noted.
The real NFL stats
The other day a political website overflowing with the typical hatred for the current president published a supposedly carefully analyzed essay that boasted the NFL is doing just fine, despite the NFL’s politicization and the current president’s subsequent criticisms of that politicization.
Though supposed to be a careful numbers analysis, the essay was full of personal invective against the president. It is a hint that the numbers argument is not strong enough to stand on its own.
This essay stated that current NFL advertising payments demonstrate the NFL is in full financial health; that there is no measurable financial result from the NFL’s politicization or the public disputes and discourteous behavior many of its employees have shown toward average Americans and the US president.
In short, the NFL is doing fine with the American people and President Trump has no traction.
It was the kind of article that I had to read three times over to ensure that the writer really meant what he wrote. And in fact, he did mean it, and yet it is just another example of how just about everything has been politicized, and how anything that can be politicized to score a point will be so used. Even if it is so obviously factually wrong.
Never mind that this week’s New Yorker magazine has a front cover showing a dead, bleeding Donald Trump at the bottom of an escalator. That is obvious bias and unhinged crazy (imagine if it had been the past president so portrayed). What is more intriguing is when someone reaches into a random numbers hat and tries to make a coherent argument, as the subject essay did, and pass it off as careful logic.
The problem with arguing that the NFL is doing great! fantastic! so there! based on current advertising payments is that those payments are not directly connected to actual league performance. Those ad numbers are heavily indexed and fixed long ago to past data and calculations of expected market performance. Long before Colin Kaepernick started his anti-America kneeling thing. Long before the NFL was politicized.
The cited NFL numbers are heavily lagged, meaning they reflect past, not present or even close to present performance. Also, these ad numbers are relative to other markers/ variables that are either unrelated to NFL performance or are fixed. This means they either cannot or likely will not change due to NFL performance for a long time. This means the market-driven financial fallout from the politicized NFL’s self-inflicted damage is yet to be tallied or measured by the sectors being cited by the essay (unless you are looking at short-term sales of NFL merchandise, which has been yo-yo-ing for the past two years, or half-empty NFL stadiums and unbelievably low game ticket sales, as one would expect as a result of the NFL’s politicization and purposeful alienation of at least half of America).
Using the advertising measures in that political essay in a logical way, an actual analysis in five years would be appropriate. That would catch the standard market-based reevaluation of the NFL’s actual performance. And that probably won’t be a happy situation; certainly nothing for political writers to crow about. I am willing to bet that the NFL will be in real trouble in five years, as a result of openly disrespecting their audience and market.
I conclude this by looking at the most telling, most relevant statistics: Low ticket sales, half-filled stadiums, NFL merchandise sales way down, measurable TV-broadcast NFL game viewership down.
But by then the essay in question will be long forgotten, because almost all such essays are done for their immediate effect. That is, they are trying to create an appearance, a narrative, with the simple goal of damaging and reducing the president’s current polling numbers among his supporters. Accuracy, facts, numbers do not matter. And no one else in the legacy media will call them out on their inaccuracy, anyhow.
Essays based on numbers written by politicos who are ignorant about numbers and markets are not really, truly, meant to persuade people that the numbers are meaningful. Rather, high-churn essays like this are simply meant to score temporary political points. Just like the vast majority of the US establishment legacy media. It is just another angle, that’s all.
US Media: immoral head fake, or illegal “fire!” in a crowded theater?
The First Amendment to the US Constitution is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
The First Amendment guarantees individual citizens, and the press (media), certain free speech, communication, and assembly protections and rights, as well as religious freedom rights.
But one exception to this amazing free speech right we all know is that the First Amendment does not guarantee a right to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, because there is no public benefit, or private right, to cause an injurious stampede. You cannot use a liberty to cause injury to innocent people, which is what yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater does.
One after another fake, manufactured media crises over the past eighteen months have come and gone, and if all of them call into question the meaning of the First Amendment for today’s fake press, any one of them will suffice.
Russia collusion (after two years there is zero evidence, and never mind the FBI\DOJ collusion with Hillary Clinton’s campaign). Stormy Daniels (never mind that rapist and serial sexual harasser Bill Clinton is still a hero to half the nation). Milania’s pathetic shoes or Sarah Sanders’ face structure and clothing (weren’t we -correctly- supposed to not criticize women’s appearances?). Now it’s Hispanic babies fake-crying in English (not Spanish) for long distant parents who sent them alone to break American law and illegally enter America under the care of thieves, pedophiles, and human traffickers.
Every month or so the American press manufactures another crisis meant to stir up the American people, to put people in a panic, to get them racing and stampeding over one another. The press is essentially yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, in an attempt to damage a president they dislike.
Each cry of “Fire! Fire!” by the press is at the very least an immoral head fake meant to distract from the documented crimes by many senior staff of the Obama administration, now wide open to the public as a result of the Dept. of Justice’s Inspector General. Or to distract from the amazing economic news, because they can’t let Trump get any credit or good news.
Incredibly, over 90% of the mainstream press’s coverage of President Trump is negative. That is not honest, it is not reporting. It is straight forward political activism.
The press today is not the press of the First Amendment’s 1787 ratification. Today’s press is not dedicated to serving as The People’s watchdog over government, helping hold government officials to account.
Rather, today’s press\media is a completely partisan, dedicated communication arm of just one political party. The press covers up for the crimes of one party, and helps invent fake crimes for the other political party. And yet, America’s press gets the benefits and protections of the First Amendment, as if press members are doing holy work for the Republic.
The question is, does the First Amendment apply to a partisan activist “press,” whose political advertising and advocacy contributions to just one political party are worth billions of dollars as undeclared in-kind political contributions?
We have to ask, because at a certain point CBS, ABC, NPR, BBC, NYT, Washington Post, et al must have their political contributions assessed. If they are found to have violated campaign election law, then let the legal chips fall where they must.
White House Correspondents Dinner Proves It
If anyone really had been or still is under the illusion that America’s media are somehow professional truth-seekers, Saturday’s bizarre annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner ended that.
If you have not yet watched it, you should watch some, just for the educational experience. It will help you understand why and how conservatives and regular Americans are so skeptical about the American media.
When you hear the accusation “fake news” leveled against the mainstream media, this event illuminates the why and how.
An impressively responsive audience lived and breathed public white-hot hatred and cruel mockery Saturday night. Hatred of President Trump, hatred of regular Americans, hatred for American patriots and patriotism, cruel mockery of conservative women’s appearances, their bodies, their clothes, their hair, their faces.
This is repulsive behavior, but the liberal audience ate it up openly, nonetheless.
The audience’s open contempt and disdain for average Americans tells a lot about the media’s disconnect from real people.
That the liberal audience was made up of the Washington, DC, elite “expert” and “professional” reporters says it all. These are not reporters of news and facts. Rather, they are elitists, partisan political activists using the First Amendment’s protection of the media as a fig leaf over their political and cultural activism.
The dinner’s motto should be “All The Fake News We Can Print.”
Speaking of campaign contributions
Is anyone tallying the in-kind political campaign contributions donated by the US media, Google, FakeBook, Twitter, and the rest of Silicon Valley to one particular political party?
The hoopla surrounding the pairing of FakeBook user data with Cambridge Analytica sounds like someone committed a crime. But that is only because conservatives did it, and they actually paid money for it. As opposed to Google and FakeBook, which practically lived full-time at the Obama White House.
For free. As in they donated their private user data to one political party for free. Without disclosure, without attribution.
Google and FakeBook in particular have been working hand-in-glove with just one political party, and especially with the past Obama administration, giving away user data for free, and artificially suppressing users opposed to the Obama revolution.
Recall how typing into the Google search engine variations of “Hillary Clinton crime criminal” would generate ridiculous results, like “Hillary Clinton’s position on crime control” complete with a smiling glamor shot of Hillary Clinton. Nowhere in Google’s search results would be anything about how Hillary Clinton was an actual criminal, or a suspected criminal who had been and was being criminally investigated.
That is worth money.
And how about that September 2016 Barron’s Weekly, with the grinning glamor photo of Hillary Clinton under the headline “Time for President Hillary?”
This kind of free promotional advertising is worth huge bucks.
And the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times were all proud to openly promote Clinton and attack Republicans. Not just in their editorial pages, but in their “news.” Their “news” reporting became wall-to-wall political advertising and attacks.
The US media has been an obvious mouthpiece for this one political party and its candidates, cheering them on and covering up for them. Big bucks, folks, huge contributions.
What’s that you say, what about Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity?
Folks, if the US media just did their jobs as reporters – facts instead of activism – there would be no demand for Limbaugh or Fox News or Breitbart. Only because the media is a wholly owned subsidiary of one political party is there a demand for other views to be aired. And that is going to happen somewhere.
God forbid there are literally a handful of news outlets not controlled by the establishment media and their political party!
So what is the value of all this collusion between Google, and FakeBook, and Twitter? All the user data they gleefully provided to the Obama White House and the 2012 Obama campaign? You know, the private user data that the Obama campaign gloated about in public.
Someone needs to get to the bottom of this. I’d just ballpark the in-kind contribution value at about a billion dollars. At least. And none of it was officially disclosed on campaign disclosure documents.
All illegal behavior and political contributions, folks. A lot of fines, and maybe jail time for people. But because the chosen side did it, it’s fine, apparently. Well, not to me, it isn’t, despite the mainstream media’s unwillingness to report it.
Get a special investigator and prosecutor on this right away. Hold these law-breakers accountable. Because we all really care about upholding the law, right?
Pentagon Papers II receive a cold reception
What is the modern equivalent of the Pentagon Papers is receiving an unusually cold reception from the establishment media, from people who have not even seen or read it yet, and yet who already have talking points and criticisms of it, without actually knowing what is in it.
Back in the early 1970s, what became known as the Pentagon Papers were leaked from secret government files to the Washington Post, a news-paper that used to operate in Washington DC.
Those Pentagon Papers helped build a public case against the politicization of official government duties, and they formed the basis for investigatory reporting by something called news reporters, an extinct animal that has not been seen since.
When the Pentagon Papers reporting was done, a sitting president was impeached and forced from office, because the public was disgusted by his obvious mis-use of public power.
Fast forward to February 1, 2018, and we have a similar situation unfolding in Washington, DC. Reams of text messages, emails, and document analysis have recently uncovered a clear conspiracy among FBI agents and DOJ officials to unfairly exonerate Hillary Clinton of obvious crimes, and to unfairly target for illegal spying and criminal prosecution a presidential candidate and then president-elect, Donald Trump.
None of this behavior by the FBI and DOJ staffs is legal. None of it is OK. None of it is acceptable. It is the very essence of corruption and misuse of government power.
The Mueller “investigation” is exposed as an open-ended political witch hunt and fishing expedition based on a fake “dossier” bought by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, illegally used to obtain a search warrant used to illegally spy on a political campaign and then the president-elect, all for political purposes.
Despite knowing this first-hand himself, Mueller continues with the only thing he has, fake “process crimes,” like alleged obstruction of justice. Evidence is clear that FBI agent Peter Strzok (and many others) used his official position for partisan political purposes, and Mueller removed him from his witch hunt because of it. But Mueller himself does not have the integrity to call off the entire farce, most of which is based on Agent Strzok’s previous activity.
Now there is a concise memo about this illegal government activity, by an obscure Congressman Nunes from California. This memo lists the data sources and how they were analyzed to uncover this criminal conspiracy, and it is being provided to the sitting president. This is standard protocol. This is how representative government works.
Instead of retrospection and respect for the rule of law, however, the opposition party and their communication arm AKA the media are in full out assault against the memo and its author.
Instead of taking the memo and reading it, sharing it with the American public, and shedding light on government abuse so the American people can make informed political choices and hold political officials accountable, the media are doing the opposite. They are doing everything they can to protect the prior administration, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the current opposition party, despite knowing full well what illegal things they did. They take attacks by members of that opposition party and report them verbatim as fact. They ignore or denigrate the information in the memo.
Which makes one wonder about the whole Pentagon Papers thingy way back when.
Was that really news reporting in the public interest, or was it the first successful take-down of a sitting president by a partisan media?
After all, President John F. Kennedy had plenty of naughty, unethical, immoral and illegal behavior going on in his administration (as did his successor, LBJ), and yet the media treated Americans to nothing but close-ups of fake smiles by JFK’s long suffering wife and of his fakey white smile.
For the enterprising media watchdog, the JFK administration had lots to chew on, if the desire was but there. Obviously it was not. Lying, cheating JFK was promoted as a hero, and his misdeeds were swept under the rug for decades.
“Camelot” the charade was called. Oh golly, the shivers!
The press’s treatment of the Kennedy Administration became a model for how the media would subsequently treat the administrations of JFK’s political party: The president is always brilliant, kind, heroic. Never mind that he is selling our uranium stocks to our biggest enemy, and lots of private money is changing in public hands. On the other hand, the Republican presidents are always portrayed as evil, stupid, a foolish dullard, a tool of outside interests.
Looking back, it is now evident the Pentagon Papers served as the press’s first big political hit, a model which the media have tried to employ about every four years ever since. They never fail to have an “October surprise” for Republican candidates, and hardly vet or investigate Democrat candidates at all, always protecting them from public scrutiny.
A new movie about the Pentagon Papers is out starring serial sexual harassment enabler Meryl Streep and my once-favorite actor, Tom Hanks. This movie glorifies news reporting as a sacred duty and core function of a free republic, which it is. But it also puts the partisan news reporters of the Pentagon Papers on an unassailable pedestal. Judging by today’s openly politicized, partisan media, no such credibility or accolades are currently warranted, and now we realize they probably were not warranted back in the 1970s, either.
The subjects of this new movie, former Washington Post employees Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, remain openly and unrepentant political partisans to this day, their purportedly fair-minded views relied upon as though handed down by Moses on Mount Sinai by a fawning younger generation of partisan media communicators.
And this is how the entertainment-media industrial complex creates fake news, fake heroes, fake election results, and protects a government rotting from within, starting with the very people sworn to uphold the law.
Release the Nunes memo, Mister President, and let the accountability begin. This, not the hoarding of power, is the role of government.
Judge Roy Moore is a Victim, and He is Going to Win Alabama
Judge Roy Moore is a candidate for the vacant US Senate seat in Alabama.
Moore had the temerity, or strength of character, to openly criticize a bipartisan political establishment that is destroying America from within.
As a US senator, he would be in a unique position to openly confront those same people who cling to power and lord it over a cowed American public.
For that “crime” Moore has suffered unbelievable attacks on his character from top elected officials in both main parties, as well as endless fake news and tens of millions of Dollars spent to deliver it all to the voters of Alabama.
If you are at all interested in this story, then you can simply start to read about it. Read widely. Look for the facts, as opposed to the common fake news started and spread by the Washington Post.
The Washington Post is not a news organization. Rather, it is an aggressive communication arm of the political party opposing Moore’s quest to fill that senate seat.
This is a gentle way of saying the Washington Post is a propaganda machine.
An example of this is how the organization simply repeats lies like Moore has seven, eight or nine “accusers,” as if somehow he is awash in sexual harassment claims.
As it turns out, Moore has been accused of sexual anything by two women, not seven or nine, one of whom sounds somewhat credible, and the other is now being shown to be a bold faced liar.
The lady with credibility describes how forty years ago (40!) Moore invited her to his home for sex when she was a teenager (she was then at the age of consent in Alabama, which for a Yankee like me is pretty bizarre), and how she went there, and then declined, he accepted that and then he took her home.
The balance of the women involved simply say that they were young when he asked to date them, and that there was no sex-anything about it.
To call these women “accusers” is a lie. It is not true, it is not truth.
This is simply an effort by the Washington Post and the bipartisan political establishment in Washington to keep Moore away from their taxpayer-funded honey hole.
Moore has done absolutely nothing wrong, though where I am from the age of consent in Alabama is pretty freaky and it makes me uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, the guy has clean hands, and the accusations against him are junk, lies, made up political assassination to try to keep him from getting to Washington and upsetting the apple cart.
Moore is up in the polls, some showing a 5% lead, others a 15% lead.
Either way, it is likely that Moore will win this senate race, and that he will be seated. He has done nothing wrong, and therefore cannot be subjected to further attacks by ethics committees or other organs of the state.
What has bothered me the most about this is how craven the “moderate” Republicans have been. People like pollster Frank Luntz, and local politicos like Charlie Gerow (who I have always liked and admired), have sought to stay on the anti-Moore bandwagon. It just looks like they are trying to curry favor with the liberal media, as if they are afraid of the media, instead of doing the right thing and standing up to it and confronting its open warfare against the American People, against their form of government, and against honesty, truth, and accuracy.
Everyone shoulder to shoulder now with Judge Roy Moore, for America, for truth, for honesty.