“I am thrilled to join CNN+. After decades in broadcast and cable news, I am excited to explore the world of streaming. I look forward to the new freedom and flexibility streaming affords in interviewing major figures across the news landscape—and finding new ways to tell stories,” Wallace said in the release. “As I embark on this adventure, I am honored and delighted to join Jeff Zucker and his great team. I can’t wait to get started.”
Not going to be missed.
The events in Wisconsin’s Kenosha and Waukesha offer useful perspectives on a recent clash between pundits Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark over the accuracy of the news media. Sullivan argues that the press makes numerous errors, while Last suggests that they get almost all matters of fact correct.
Fake news isn’t new. It was probably invented two minutes after the printing press. The problem is, it won’t go away.
In 1835, a newspaper called the New York Sun ran a series of six articles claiming the moon was inhabited by unicorns and “batmen.” The stories caught on and were reprinted worldwide. The author of the bogus stories used the name of a famous astronomer and a bogus but fancy-sounding telescope to back up the lies. A telescope so powerful it allowed the astronomer to see topless bat-babes flying around a moon also inhabited by “highly intelligent beavers.”
CBS News, the Associated Press (AP), the Washington Post, and various other media outlets have been taking serious heat on social media for labeling the horrific attack in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a “parade crash.”
When it comes to the liberal media, there seems to be an unspoken rule to never abandon the narrative, even when it’s been proven false.
We’ve seen this before, of course. Even after it was proven there was no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016, and that the entire narrative was cooked up by Hillary Clinton and her allies, some refuse to give it up.
After a MSNBC producer was reportedly caught FOLLOWING the jury bus on their way to the next hearing on Kyle Rittenhouse’s case, the outlet was EXCLUDED from the remainder of the trial. pic.twitter.com/pdxtlam18h
— RT (@RT_com) November 18, 2021
For over a year the media enforced falsehoods about the pandemic’s origins, never evaluated the evidence, never apologized, and was never held accountable
On Jan. 24, 2020, British peer-reviewed journal The Lancet published a study on a novel coronavirus it identified as 2019-nCoV. The study substantially contradicted the official Chinese government narrative about when and how the virus originated, placing its emergence months earlier. It also cast doubt on how the virus emerged. While the Chinese government had pointed to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, the now-infamous wet market in Wuhan, the paper found that at least one-third of initial cases—including “patient zero,” the first person known to have been sick with the virus—had no connection to the market whatsoever.
In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.
The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.
But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.
It’s injustice from top to bottom in Kenosha, and it’s provoked by the media.
The media crime syndicate strikes again, targeting a teenager and creating mayhem in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Will they pay a price? Doubtful.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, a mid-sized midwestern town on the west side of Lake Michigan, has around 99,000 residents. There are family-owned restaurants and businesses and neighbors know one another. Kenosha is about five minutes from the Illinois border. It’s two hours to Chicago or Madison and 45 minutes to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Critics have called for the revocation of a Pulitzer Prize given to the Washington Post for its “relentless” Russiagate reporting, after the newspaper made heavy corrections to two stories based on the discredited Steele dossier.
In a statement on Friday, the Washington Post announced that it had removed “large portions” of two articles covering the discredited Steele dossier – a political opposition report commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign which claimed to have evidence of a conspiracy between President Donald Trump and Russia.
A prominent press critic has warned mainstream media outlets they face a “steep journalistic challenge” to back up their initial reporting on the Steele dossier in the wake of the latest indictment secured by special counsel John Durham.
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote Monday that last week’s indictment of Igor Danchenko, a key source for former British spy Christopher Steele’s report, is “bad news” for several media outlets — including Wemple’s own employer.
Media censorship is really monopoly protectionism—and the “unfair competition” is you.
It is bitterly ironic how America’s current corporate media embrace censorship—for others, of course. After all, the First Amendment’s recognition and protection of the unalienable right to free speech and the freedom of the press have long been rightly and ardently defended by those making a living in the industry. Their rationale was elementary: an attack on the free speech of one citizen was an attack on the free speech of all citizens.
Cynics smile before they say, “Perception is reality.” What we see must be true because we see it! If we don’t see it, then it cannot be real. Anyone who has ever used Photoshop knows that “seeing is believing” is false, just as misleading as expecting politicians to do what they promise.
The mainstream (complicit) media are the worst offenders. They believe they control reality by determining what the public sees or doesn’t see.
We’ve been focused on President Biden’s collapsing polls. It’s the definition of free fall, to say the least.
The media are also having a “trust” problem, and I don’t mean CNN’s ratings. As a friend said, the only people watching CNN these days are stuck in airports!
The media have lost the public…
The media’s betrayal of the poor
At the end of his career, in his 1907 retirement speech, Joseph Pulitzer wrote up his credo for journalism. He was adamant about the thing that made it a noble profession, one worth dedicating your life to: “Never lack sympathy with the poor.”
Living in the Gilded Age, there were plenty of poor people for journalists to sympathise with — the streets were teeming with working-class Americans who had been cast out of the comforts enjoyed by the obscenely wealthy industrialists. You might think modern-day America — a new Gilded Age in which the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than it has been in living memory — would provide another such opportunity for American journalists to sympathise with the lower classes. You would be wrong.
