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dneal
February 12th, 2022, 06:56 PM
David Sirota hits it out of the park with this piece (https://www.dailyposter.com/corporate-media-is-the-misinformation-problem/)


Corporate Media Is The Misinformation Problem
The largest media outlets are platforming con artists, skewing the news, and immersing the country in a flood of lies.

David SirotaFeb 9, 2022

“Misinformation” is all the rage these days — it’s the topic du jour. Polls suggest we all agree that it’s a problem, and lately liberals appear most mad at it — but seemingly only at certain kinds of misinformation that originate outside the corporate media sphere.

Notably, the ire is rarely directed at a corporate media machine that systematically rewards and praises the purveyors of misleading propaganda, and continues to flood the country with information sewage.

This selective outrage is a huge problem — because the only way to systematically combat misinformation is to construct a Fourth Estate that develops some trust with the audience. That trust will never be rebuilt if liberals pretend to hate misinformation while they patronize a media establishment that fortifies the pathologies that originally created a credibility crisis.

Consider the past week of media news, while the Joe Rogan controversy dominated headlines:


NBC News hired Stephen Hayes, one of the key architects of Iraq War misinformation, to serve as a political analyst across all of its properties amid a media drumbeat for a war with Russia. Despite Hayes publishing the seminal book amplifying one of the most egregious lies of the Iraq debacle, NBC’s Chuck Todd lauded him as “a principled reporter and analyst who always puts truth and facts above emotion and sentiment.” Meanwhile, CNN just hired another Iraq War proponent, right-wing propagandist Jonah Goldberg.

Speaking of CNN, its employees effusively praised their network’s recently deposed president, Jeff Zucker, even after Zucker oversaw the lionization of Andrew Cuomo while the New York governor was shielding his health care industry donors from legal consequences amid a massacre of nursing home residents. Rolling Stone reported that one source said Zucker was personally involved in engineering the Cuomo promotion — and even helped write talking points for the governor.

Corporate media began touting a comeback for Cuomo and his brother, Chris, with no mention of the nursing home catastrophe, as if nothing bad happened over the last two years.

An MSNBC-platformed Washington newsletter blasted out propaganda touting Kroger’s “great pay and benefits” — even as thousands of its employees are struggling to afford basic necessities, and even as the grocery chain bankrolls lobbying groups working to kill union rights legislation.

The New York Times told its readers that President Joe Biden’s “big climate goals depend on Congress” — somehow not mentioning that they also depend on Biden, who has been using his executive authority to expand drilling at a faster pace than President Donald Trump.

Less than two years after the New York Times told its readers that 100,000 pandemic deaths under Trump was “incalculable,” the newspaper has now decided that 900,000 deaths is now a ho-hum story that Americans are bored with. "Though deaths are still mounting, the threat from the virus is moving, for now, farther into the background of daily life for many Americans,” the paper wrote.

MSNBC aired an interview with a New York Times columnist blaming inflation on workers getting COVID relief money, rather than on corporations using their monopoly power to fleece consumers with higher prices that then fund giant executive pay packages and shareholder dividends.

Obviously, multiple wrongs don’t make a right. Rogan platforming public health nonsense and environmental misinformation — and using racial slurs — is not somehow absolved by corporate media concurrently immersing the world in an ocean of self-serving bullshit. His behavior is bad on its own merits. Full stop.



But corporate media doesn’t get to lie the country into a war and a financial crisis, continue enriching right-wing fabulists, offer up news literally “presented by” corporate villains, and then pretend that a podcaster is the singular source of misinformation. And it sure as hell doesn’t get to feign surprise when after decades of lies, almost nobody ends up trusting corporate media about anything.

Despite crocodile tears about “free speech,” none of the central players in the hullabaloo are heroes or victims — they are all making a mint off selling controversy, garbage, and fake outrage. And it’s hardly a surprise that the loudest of them screaming about censorship have had little to say about the most pervasive censorship of all: corporate media’s near-complete erasure of economic and anti-corruption reporting that might offend business sponsors.

The real victim here is the general public.

We need a Fourth Estate that does not reward peddlers of the most outrageous lies — like, say, a Saddam-Al Qaeda “connection” — with prominent gigs.

We need television networks whose anchors don’t run out onto the airwaves to defend top brass amid reports that they helped politicians and political operatives effectively cover up a public health disaster.

And we need an information infrastructure that preferences accurate, verifiable, and indisputable facts so that the public can make informed decisions.

We don’t have much of that right now, in part because political tribalism has taught audiences to selectively love and hate misinformation based on whether it comes from “their” team.

Many liberals love monikers like “believe science” and see themselves as dispassionate protectors of the truth. But let’s be clear: If you’re a liberal who purports to hate misinformation but also cheers on Liz Cheney or Bill Kristol or some other war propagandist as a beacon of integrity just because you see them defending Democrats or bashing Donald Trump on your favorite TV network, then you don’t actually hate misinformation — you just happen to like your misinformation colored blue (even if that misinformation was previously colored neocon red).

Likewise, if you are a Rogan fan or a Fox News maven who purports to want the “real truth” while you cheer him or Tucker Carlson peddling climate denial and vaccine misinformation, then you don’t actually care about truth at all.

And if you’re in corporate media and think it’s OK for your news outlet to routinely skew and cover up the crimes of politicians and business, then you’re not actually interested in journalism’s mission to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.

The difference between “media” and actual journalism is the root of the misinformation crisis. We’re drowning in content that is increasingly valued only for its potency in the political wars, rather than judged on its factual merits and its choice of targets. That kind of media content strays farther and farther from reality because it’s about entertaining and inflaming rather than educating and informing.

The answer to misinformation, then, is not some censorship regime, and it’s not more intense fan culture around individual media icons so that everything is a self-enriching culture war between cable TV pundits and Spotify hosts.

The answer is an audience that actually values accurate and necessary information, even if it offends their preconceived notions — an audience that runs away from corporate media outlets that force-feed them lies and liars, and runs toward news organizations that report hard truths.

That’s the kind of news organization we’re working to build here. And we know it’s going to take a long time to build a true independent and trustworthy Fourth Estate in the wreckage of a corporate media landscape, where the flames of bullshit smolder and suffocate the discourse.

But that’s the only way forward.

dneal
February 12th, 2022, 07:07 PM
As I noted in a different thread, this "culture war" and inability to engage in civil discussion or debate appears to have started with Trump and covid. The polarization and tribalism is insane at this point.

It amazes me the ease with which one dismisses one piece of information simply because of where it came from, and then genuinely offer the political opposite but equally partisan view as the "true" news.

There is something wrong with the world when Russell Brand is more objective and makes more sense than Tucker Carlson or Don Lemon, the NYT or NY Post, or whatever dichotomy of "news" one wants to use as an example.

An entertaining review of the David Sirota piece cited in the OP.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS-jnhsVKws

Chuck Naill
February 13th, 2022, 06:25 AM
Modern people, unacquainted with history, tend to make assumptions that something happening now has never happened before. Nothing presented above is anything new under the sun. As the Apostle Paul said 2000 years ago, a time will come when people will no longer want sound doctrine, but will seek out teachers who tickle their ears with information they want to hear. New outlets would cease if no one watched or read their stories.

Businesses and politics need each other to exist. I would prefer this to a state owned/ controlled business culture. There is no more corrupt setting than that.

Folks have always been in clans of one type or another.

That said, if one wants to know the truth, the truth can be found. And one cannot be afraid if the truth is something they don't want to hear. A bigger problem is to assume we know each other enough to come to judgement of them because our perspective is so limited.

For me, the Times expands my knowledge of many perspectives in the same way a history book informs me about things I would never consider otherwise. When I hear anyone pine for the good old days I remember my grandfather saying, "the good old days weren't that good".

dneal
February 13th, 2022, 06:52 AM
Just because it's happened before doesn't mean it's a good thing or that it shouldn't be addressed. A more salient point about being acquainted with history is Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. Smedly Butler wrote a book about business and politics, and leveraging military power on behalf of business (see: "War is a Racket" about his experience with the banana wars). "Yellow Journalism" is a term for a reason.

Today's problem is the access and availability of information, and there's no historical precedent. "You can't stop the signal" (it'll be curious to see who gets that reference... ;) ). Polarization, tribalism and distrust are at dangerous levels. Orwell wrote a book about this. Dismiss it as "this is nothing new" at your peril.

Chuck Naill
February 13th, 2022, 09:22 AM
I have spent years on forums discussing topics with people who don't agree with me. It makes me think.

dneal
February 13th, 2022, 09:49 AM
So have I. I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic.

Chuck Naill
February 13th, 2022, 11:38 AM
You could have asked why they went felt it was relevant.

I tools your first two posts as a complaint. Is this accurate?

I read and listen broadly not to get marching orders, but to here differing opinions which may come to cause me to realize it’s okay to be in separate camps.

TSherbs
February 17th, 2023, 05:52 AM
Certainly, after the election of 2020, Fox news corp was a big part of a national disinformation campaign, even when they knew it was lies. Recent documents reveal private correspondence behind the scenes of Fox between major players and owner Murdoch (etc). They privately mocked those fraud conspiracy theorists peddling lies but then publicly fanned conspiracy flames to bolster the brand to not lose more viewers to Newsmax (etc).

More details here: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/16/media/fox-news-stars-executives-court-documents/index.html

Chuck Naill
February 17th, 2023, 06:35 AM
"The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

Mr. Carlson continued, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” he added, making clear that he did not."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/business/media/fox-dominion-lawsuit.html

Chuck Naill
February 18th, 2023, 06:47 AM
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-foxs-false-claims-of-fraud-after-the-last-presidential-election?utm_source=PBS+NewsHour&utm_campaign=a40f4263c4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_09_16_05_40_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_47f99db221-a40f4263c4-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

TSherbs
February 21st, 2023, 08:13 AM
I agree with nearly all of this: Commentary on the purpose and implications of broadcasting falsehoods to one's own audience in the guise of truth:

Why Fox News Lied to Its Viewers
The Atlantic
By Adam Serwer

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact.

Early in the Trump era, news organizations were torn over whether to refer to Donald Trump’s false statements as lies, because it is difficult to know an individual’s state of mind, to know what they know. In the throes of insecurity, ideological conviction, or carelessness, people can make statements that are false without malicious intent. The argument over what a person knows to be true or false can take on a metaphysical aspect.

Sometimes, though, you have proof that someone knew one thing and said another. With Fox News, examples of the network’s commitment to knowingly misleading its viewers abound. There was the irresponsible hyping of anti-vaccine propaganda even as it imposed a vaccine mandate on its employees. There were the text messages from Fox hosts released by the January 6 committee showing that they saw Trump as responsible for inspiring the mob that sacked the Capitol, even as they defended him on air and downplayed the significance of the event.

Sometimes, defending itself in court, the network will argue that a reasonable person would not assume that everything its on-air personalities say are true. In 2020, the network successfully beat a defamation lawsuit by arguing that Tucker Carlson is “not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’”
The most compelling example of Fox News consciously lying to its viewers, however, arrived yesterday with the evidence in the defamation lawsuits filed by the voting-machine company Dominion, over claims aired on Fox News echoing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been fixed by compromised voting machines. Dominion’s latest filing argues that privately, Fox News hosts admitted that the allegations of election fraud being floated by Trump allies were baseless, but they kept airing them, in part because they feared that another right-wing network, Newsmax, was stealing their audience. The filing shows that when Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities were livid, complaining internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand. “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” the Fox News executive Bill Sammon wrote to a colleague about the network’s coverage of the “fraud” conspiracy.

Fox News’s lawyers have responded by arguing that they were merely covering newsworthy allegations; a spokesperson dismissed the revelations in the Dominion filing as “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context” to The New York Times. “Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be illusory if the prevailing side in a public controversy could sue the press for giving a forum to the losing side,” the lawyers said in a filing.

This is true, as far as it goes. But internally, the messages in Dominion’s filing suggest that network officials knew they were exercising editorial judgment that would lead their audience to see the fictitious election-fraud allegations as not simply newsworthy, but legitimate, which they properly understood to be irresponsible.

The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive. Another is that despite the long-standing right-wing argument that conservatives distrust mainstream media outlets because they do not tell the truth, Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear. There are infinite examples of the mainstream press making errors of omission, fact, or framing. But as the private communications in the Dominion filing show, the mainstream media’s unforgivable sin with this constituency is not lying, but failing to consistently lie the way conservative audiences want them to.

Looking at these internal messages however, the confident, implacable cynicism on the right about how mainstream media outlets work is easier to understand. It is a reflection of how some of their own media institutions function, combined with an assumption that everyone else operates in a similarly amoral way.

Internally, Carlson referred to Sidney Powell, the attorney who was spreading the false fraud allegations, as a “complete nut,” while the Fox News host Sean Hannity said in a deposition that the “whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.” But Carlson and Hannity also demanded that the Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she fact-checked one of Trump’s tweets spreading the false election-fraud claims about Dominion, with one Fox executive fretting that viewers would be “disgusted.” The offending tweet was deleted. In another email, a different Fox executive feared that what he called “conspiratorial reporting” at Newsmax “might be exactly what the disgruntled FNC viewer is looking for,” later warning, “Do not ever give viewers a reason to turn us off. Every topic and guest must perform.”
There is also a story here about how social media and analytics can compel even powerful media institutions to meet a strong demand for falsehoods. Fox News executives understood that the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood that their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.

Finally, if Fox News beats this lawsuit, it will be because of the very free-speech protections that the conservative movement has spent years railing against. The appropriately high “actual malice” legal standard, which holds that only statements about public figures that are knowingly false or show a reckless disregard for the truth are actionable, has protected public criticism of powerful figures for decades. Right-wing legal elites, including several Supreme Court justices, would like to destroy this standard, which would enable the rich and powerful to more easily silence criticism of their conduct.

The network may ultimately prevail; that’s what all those fancy lawyers get paid for. But if consciously lying to your audience about election fraud in order to keep them watching your network doesn’t meet the standard for actual malice, it’s difficult to imagine what a powerful media company could do that would. And even if Fox News ultimately loses the Dominion lawsuit, I would not expect its audience to abandon it. After all, the network remains willing to tell them what they know to be true—even if it isn’t.

Chip
February 21st, 2023, 04:39 PM
The decision in the Dominion suit against Fox and News Corp. has the potential to change the conduct of the public media considerably. Gonzalez vs. Google, being argued in the US Supreme Court with a focus on the Section 230 liability shield for media companies as far as the content of the user-created posts they display, could shift the boundaries still farther. But I imagine the cowardly corporate captives on the court won't dare to rule against the multi-zillion dollar media outfits: Google, Meta, YouTube, Twitter, et al.

Chip
March 3rd, 2023, 01:01 PM
Fox News reportedly imposes ‘soft ban’ on Donald Trump

The former president has not made a weekday showing on the channel since appearing on Sean Hannity’s show in September

Ed Pilkington

Fri 3 Mar 2023

Fox News has imposed a “soft ban” on Donald Trump appearing on the channel, his inner circle is reportedly complaining, even as the broadcaster extends a warm invitation to other Republican hopefuls in next year’s presidential election.

The news startup Semafor reports that the cooling of relations between the former president and his once-beloved cable news channel has gone so far that a “soft ban” or “silent ban” is now holding Trump at arm’s length. The former US president has not made a weekday showing on Fox News since he chatted with his closest friend among the network’s star hosts, Sean Hannity, in September.

Meanwhile, Trump’s rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination are currently frequent guests on Fox. Media Matters for America, a watchdog that keeps a close eye on the network’s output, has counted seven weekday appearances by the former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley since she launched her presidential bid last month. Even the lesser known right-wing activist and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who threw his hat into the ring last week, has appeared four times on Fox. Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to compete with Trump though he has yet to declare, is also repeatedly seen on the network.

Semafor said it based its story on information supplied by four members of Trump’s circle. It quoted an unnamed individual “close to Trump” saying: “Everyone knows that there’s this ‘soft ban’ or ‘silent ban’. It’s certainly – however you want to say, quiet ban, soft ban, whatever it is – indicative of how the Murdochs feel about Trump in this particular moment.”

The Guardian asked Fox News to confirm or deny the existence of such a ban, but did not immediately receive a reply.

The undeniable tailing off of Trump’s exposure on Fox comes at a tense moment for the network, which is battling a $1.6bn lawsuit from the voting machines company Dominion. The suit claims that Fox News Network, with the complicit approval of its parent company Fox Corp, allowed wild defamatory conspiracy theories to proliferate on its platform, falsely accusing Dominion machines of stealing the 2020 presidential election from Trump by flipping votes from him to Joe Biden.

In excerpts of a deposition given in the case by Rupert Murdoch in January, the owner and chair of Fox Corp admitted that he knew that several Fox hosts were endorsing lies about the election being stolen from Trump yet he chose not to stop them. Legal and media experts have suggested that the admission places Murdoch’s empire in considerable legal and financial peril.

During Trump’s rise to the White House in 2015-16, and his ensuing years in office, he was virtually inseparable from Fox News. He regularly made impromptu calls into his favourite shows, and in the single year 2019 posted 657 tweets responding to content aired by the channel or its sister outlet Fox Business.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 election, Fox hosts were permitted to continue broadcasting lies about massive voter fraud. But since the stolen election campaign reached its nadir on 6 January 2021, with the insurrection at the US Capitol, followed later that year by the lodging of lawsuits by Dominion and another voting machine company, Fox has gradually backed away.

In turn, Trump has increasingly vented his anger towards his former media friend. This week he posted a rant on his social media platform Truth Social in which he accused Murdoch himself of peddling “fake news” after the Fox chief was revealed to have said in a deposition that he did not believe the stolen election lie from the beginning.

“If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the presidential election of 2020, despite massive amounts of proof to the contrary, was not rigged & stolen, then he & his group of Maga hating globalist Rinos [Republicans in name only] should get out of the news business as soon as possible,” Trump said.

There is no evidence that the election was rigged, as numerous top officials, including Trump’s own former US attorney general Bill Barr, have attested.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/fox-news-soft-ban-trump-murdoch-sean-hannity?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Chip
March 3rd, 2023, 01:16 PM
https://i.imgur.com/LtbwtiR.jpg

TSherbs
March 3rd, 2023, 06:17 PM
One of the most damning elements of the January 6 fiasco for the news media already came out: the degree to which Fox personalities had personal access to the phones of top administration persons and were giving leadership advice.

I've never heard of such a thing between media and any presidential administration before. I can't imagine that this was ever done to this kind of degree (advice to a chief of staff???) between Clinton, Obama, or Biden with any news network. But maybe I am wrong.

Chip
March 4th, 2023, 12:49 PM
Fox News was the propaganda arm of the Trump administration. The gift of the security cam videos to Tucker Carlson by House speaker Kevin McCarthy is the most recent evidence of the unholy alliance.

TSherbs
March 4th, 2023, 12:57 PM
True, that was some quid pro quo.

Chip
March 6th, 2023, 12:51 PM
Wouldn't surprise me if Carlson hires scumbag video fakers from Project Veritas or the like to "edit" the material.

Spin City.

TSherbs
March 21st, 2023, 07:48 AM
Well, well. Not surprised to see them at Fox turning on each other now. The stakes are mounting.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-producer-sues-dominion-lawsuit_n_641911e8e4b0bc5cb652188e?utm_source=cord ial&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=hp-us-reg-morning-email_2023-03-21&utm_term=us-morning-email

dneal
March 21st, 2023, 08:30 AM
Banks are collapsing, but corporate media tells you to pay attention to gossip at Fox.

Point proven.

Chip
March 21st, 2023, 12:25 PM
Are those named in the suit (Bartiromo, Dobbs, et al) personally liable for damages?

Or is it a corporate thing?

TSherbs
March 21st, 2023, 01:14 PM
Are those named in the suit (Bartiromo, Dobbs, et al) personally liable for damages?

Or is it a corporate thing?

I don't know. But with Murdoch emphasising that it was the show hosts (and not the corporation or himself) making the decisions, I suppose that the finger-pointing will naturally start to go from the hosts to the producers behind the scenes. This all seems like legal jockeying for leverage and protection before the pressure to settle really sets in. But I don't know the legal finery of it. Everyone is scrambling to cover their butts, no doubt.

Chip
March 21st, 2023, 04:37 PM
It's happening as we speak. A Fox News producer filed suit against her employer claiming that she was pressured to act against her own interests and sense of rightness, and is now being set up by the network as a scapegoat. I'll see if I can get a link to the atory.

TSherbs
March 21st, 2023, 04:45 PM
It's happening as we speak. A Fox News producer filed suit against her employer claiming that she was pressured to act against her own interests and sense of rightness, and is now being set up by the network as a scapegoat. I'll see if I can get a link to the atory.

I linked it, above

Chip
March 26th, 2023, 04:46 PM
‘It’s all about trolling’: how far-right influencers are shaping Republican narrative

With the old media order losing ground, a new cadre of extreme voices has emerged, precipitating a GOP shift to Maga populism

David Smith
26 Mar 2023

He has a platform that most politicians would envy. But Jack Posobiec is not to be found on America’s major TV networks or in its newspapers. He is among a cadre of online influencers who now shape the far right – and could help decide the Republican presidential primary race in 2024.

“Two operatives made the very same prediction, that Posobiec will matter as much to future GOP voters as Washington Post columnist George Will did to Republicans a generation ago,” political journalist David Weigel wrote in a Semafor newsletter last week. That observation prompted Alyssa Farah Griffin, a CNN political commentator and former White House official, to tweet in response: “We’re doomed.”

Such expectations speak volumes about the breakdown of the old media order, flawed as it was, and the rise of new and often extreme voices in the digital age. It also reflects a parallel shift in the Republican party from country club to “Make America great again” populism.

Will, 81, edited the conservative National Review magazine, won a Pulitzer prize for commentary in 1977, was described by the Wall Street Journal as “perhaps the most powerful journalist in America” and quit the Republican party over Donald Trump in 2016.

Posobiec, 38, gained prominence as a pro-Trump activist during the 2016 election. He promoted bogus conspiracy theories such as “Pizzagate”, which held that Democrats were running a child sex and torture ring beneath a pizzeria in Washington. He is a senior editor at the far-right news and commentary website Human Events. Posobiec has used Twitter – where his 2 million followers include representatives, senators and journalists – to promote Russian military intelligence operations, pushed false claims of election fraud and collaborated with white nationalists, Proud Boys and neo-Nazis, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit legal advocacy organisation. Yet it is Posobiec and others like him who are already helping to set the narrative for the Republican presidential primary. Posobiec’s recent online activity includes crude attacks on Antifa, the New York Times’s 1619 Project and transgender rights (“Genital Gestapo”) – ready-made talking points for candidates.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who belonged to the conservative Tea Party, recognises the changes of a fragmented media landscape. “Ten years ago, going on CNN and MSNBC, you had great influence,” he said. “Now not a lot of people watch any more. More people will listen to me if I go on somebody’s podcast or something. It’s a completely different world now where influencers have great say.”

But at what cost? Walsh added: “It has nothing to do with ideas. It has nothing to do with intellect. It’s all about trolling people, getting clicks and being outrageous. There’s a whole cast of characters that has sprung up over the last five to six years and they have great influence now. The Jack Posobiecs and all the rest of these guys are not fringe; they speak for a big chunk of the base.”

The growth of partisan echo chambers was evident in last year’s midterm elections as Republicans, in particular, snubbed the mainstream media in favour of rightwing outlets and often refused to debate their Democratic opponents. And earlier this month, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland, the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon loomed large, drawing crowds as he opined loudly on Real America’s Voice, a channel that is popular with the base but little known outside it.

Bannon’s War Room podcast was named the number one spreader of misinformation among political talkshows in a recent study by the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. Yet its guests have included prominent Republicans in Congress such as Elise Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Leading online influencers appear united in their support for Trumpism, and rejection of the Republican establishment, but divided over the fate of the party nomination for 2024. Early shots have been fired in what could be a ferocious battle between them.

Trump sympathisers include Alex Bruesewitz, Mike Cernovich and Laura Loomer as well as a Twitter user known as “Catturd” and the former president’s own son, Don Jr. Among supporters of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is expected to run, are John Cardillo and Bill Mitchell. Another influencer, Chaya Raichik, has dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida (“He seems nice!”) but also disclosed that, when she was revealed to be behind a provocative Twitter account called Libs of Tik Tok, she received a call from DeSantis’s team offering her a guest house if she needed to go into hiding.

Other rightwing personalities such as Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens augment their social media presence with countless in-person appearances at conferences, on television and at university campuses. The “owning the libs” talking points that circulate in this ecosystem frequently work their way into the discourse of the conservative network Fox News.

David Litt, an author and former speechwriter for Barack Obama, said: “This is like research and development for Fox. If something gets enough traction with the online audience, then I wouldn’t be surprised if you start to see Fox hosts piggybacking on that once they think that’s where their audience is headed.”

Posobiec’s “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory had real world consequences when a man travelled to Washington and fired an assault rifle inside the relevant pizza restaurant, later receiving a four-year prison sentence. Litt said it was alarming that, despite such incidents, Republicans have welcomed far-right influencers into their “big tent” rather than condemning them.

“The threat of violence is out there and the flames are being fanned by a lot of these ‘influencers’. We wouldn’t have called David Duke an influencer back in the day. We would have been very clear about who he was and the danger that he posed to our democracy and to the society that the rest of us would like to continue to enjoy living in, regardless of which party is in charge.”

As for Will, who is approaching a half-century at the Washington Post, his column this week discussed freedom of speech and unauthorised immigration. It may not matter much to the Republican primary. Walsh, the ex-congressman, observed: “The base no longer knows who the fuck George Will is and that’s an absolute shame.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/26/jack-posobiec-digital-influencers-far-right-republicans-trolling?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other[/URL]

TSherbs
March 26th, 2023, 05:40 PM
Good article. The landscape has been changing for decades.

The part on alt-right roots for some of these people reminded me of your question about dneal's avatar. I've always taken it to be a stylized green frog, a la Pepe the Frog. But maybe that's my projection from his having said that he chats at those sites. Maybe it's a green person in a lotus position at peace ✌️.

Chip
March 26th, 2023, 10:31 PM
Is it Art?

TSherbs
March 27th, 2023, 06:16 AM
I once saw an exhibit of a collection of paintings of corpses in various stages of dissection.

So, sure.

dneal
March 27th, 2023, 06:24 AM
Good article. The landscape has been changing for decades.

The part on alt-right roots for some of these people reminded me of your question about dneal's avatar. I've always taken it to be a stylized green frog, a la Pepe the Frog. But maybe that's my projection from his having said that he chats at those sites. Maybe it's a green person in a lotus position at peace ✌️.

Speaking of misinformation, dneal doesn’t chat at Pepe the Frog (i.e.:4chan) sites.

It’s a headstock logo for Froggy Bottom guitars. There’s a whole thread about people’s avatars.

You woke morons sure do love your alt-right conspiracies.

"There's a Proud Boy behind every tree!!!"

Chuck Naill
March 27th, 2023, 07:04 AM
Good on you for owning a Froggy Bottom @dneal.

dneal
March 27th, 2023, 10:05 AM
Chuck - it’s a little L In Adirondack and mahogany. Designed from a re-top of an old Martin 1-17.

Michael Millard is now technically retired, having built guitars for over 50 years. Some amazing instruments have come out of a shed in Vermont. I’ve been fortunate enough to have owned 3.

76522


I just have the L now, and a Thomas Rein 00. He’s a classical builder who dabbles in steel strings on occasion.

Chuck Naill
March 27th, 2023, 10:27 AM
Chuck - it’s a little L In Adirondack and mahogany. Designed from a re-top of an old Martin 1-17.

Michael Millard is now technically retired, having built guitars for over 50 years. Some amazing instruments have come out of a shed in Vermont. I’ve been fortunate enough to have owned 3.

76522


I just have the L now, and a Thomas Rein 00. He’s a classical builder who dabbles in steel strings on occasion.

Very nice, @dneal. I love red spruce also. Two of my fiddlers and one mandolin is topped with Smoky Mountain (1995) or West Virginia (1991) red spruce both sourced from John Arnold.

I have a 1990 John Arnold 12 fret he made me and a 2004 Martin GE that John greatly modified to put to pre war specs.

dneal
March 27th, 2023, 10:44 AM
Very nice. John Arnold builds fine guitars, and posts frequently on the AGF.

Chip
March 28th, 2023, 01:29 PM
Fox News Fires Producer Who Accused Network of Coercion

The producer, Abby Grossberg, has said the network pushed her to give a false deposition in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit.

Katie Robertson
March 27, 2023

Fox News Media has fired a producer who last week accused the network of discrimination and of coercing her into providing misleading testimony in a blockbuster defamation case, according to court documents filed on Monday.

Lawyers for the producer, Abby Grossberg, who had worked for the hosts Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson, said in the complaints that she was fired on Friday in retaliation for a pair of lawsuits she had filed against the company several days earlier. In those suits, Ms. Grossberg claimed that Fox lawyers had coached her to deflect blame from executives and male hosts in her deposition for Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox. Dominion says Fox’s coverage repeatedly aired false claims about the company’s election equipment in saying it contributed to widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Ms. Grossberg said in her suits, filed in New York and Delaware, that she and Ms. Bartiromo were being set up to take the fall for Fox’s actions because of the company’s culture of misogyny and discrimination at Fox. She claimed that she endured a toxic environment at Fox and that male producers had harassed her.

As part of the legal filings on Monday, Ms. Grossberg’s lawyers included her errata sheet, which witnesses use to correct mistakes in their depositions. Ms. Grossberg changed her answers to several questions from her deposition in the Dominion case. In one, about whether she trusted the producers at Fox whom she worked with, she changed her answer from “yes” to “no.” The producers, she said in her revised comments, are “activists, not journalists, and impose their political agendas on the programming.”

A Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement that the company’s lawyers had advised Ms. Grossberg that “while she was free to file whatever legal claims she wished,” she was not allowed to disclose privileged information about the Dominion case. “We were clear that if she violated our instructions, Fox would take appropriate action including termination.” The spokeswoman added that the company would continue to “vigorously defend” itself against Ms. Grossberg’s claims, “which are riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees.”

Ms. Grossberg’s firing was reported earlier by Variety.

Parisis G. Filippatos, a lawyer for Ms. Grossberg, said in a statement: “The frivolous litigation tactics by Fox News punctuate its blatant disregard for the law, which is further underscored by the company’s recent retaliatory firing of Ms. Grossberg.”

The Dominion defamation case is scheduled for trial in April. Fox has denied any wrongdoing, and both parties have asked the judge to rule on the case in their favor before a trial, and are awaiting his decision.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/business/media/fox-news-fires-producer-coercion.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

TSherbs
April 24th, 2023, 11:43 AM
that motherTucker is out at Fox

any more?

Chip
April 24th, 2023, 02:41 PM
They told him when he arrived at the studio Monday. His head producer also got fired.

No prior notice. No chance to arrange a farewell appearance. Nada but the boot.

The lying cost Uncle Rupie a heap of money, with more to come. He's no doubt fuming and gobbling antacid tablets.

He can't exactly fire himself. So somebody had to get whacked.

TSherbs
April 24th, 2023, 03:39 PM
yup, the Smartmatic suit is pending yet.

Maybe this is preparatory to actually suing some of these producers and on camera liars for their part of the liability in it all. Murdoch was quoted more than once, saying, basically, those people did it.

I guess we'll see.

TSherbs
April 24th, 2023, 03:40 PM
I heard that the last thing motherTucker did on air at Fox was eat pizza.

dneal
April 24th, 2023, 03:50 PM
I heard that the last thing motherTucker did on air at Fox was eat pizza.

The “conversation” you offer, for consideration.

TSherbs
April 24th, 2023, 05:58 PM
I'm curious how many of those on-air persons named in the first suit are still working for Fox. I haven't found a list yet.

But this is an interesting article on the liability to shareholders that Fox is now apparently vulnerable to. And there are likely several more suits coming, perhaps even a battle between Fox and its insurance company (if Fox claims that they need to pay up on a policy of some kind):

https://time.com/6272910/dominion-settlement-fox-news-nightmare/

TSherbs
April 24th, 2023, 06:03 PM
They told him when he arrived at the studio Monday....

No prior notice. No chance to arrange a farewell appearance. Nada but the boot.

"Hey, why won't my key card get me in?"

Chip
April 25th, 2023, 11:11 PM
Tucker got defenestrated.

https://i.imgur.com/GLMB4Ly.jpg

TSherbs
April 26th, 2023, 07:56 AM
Tucker got defenestrated.

https://i.imgur.com/GLMB4Ly.jpg

and Fox has been deTuckerated

meanwhile, Don Lemon is also out at CNN. He said he was "blindsided" and "stunned." But, um, he was on suspension, so....how "blindsided" can he be?

Chip
April 29th, 2023, 01:16 PM
https://i.imgur.com/SD41tk3.jpg

dneal
May 10th, 2023, 06:06 PM
On CNN waiting for the Townhall*, and the homepage still doesn't have anything about Biden family payments from the Chinese.

Santos is there though.

If a major national news network didn't publish a story on a House committee detailing, I don't know, the documentation of millions of dollars of bank transactions from Chinese entities to shell LLC's set up by the President's son and brother... would that be a misinformation problem? They literally have the [bank] receipts. Seems like news to me.

There is no reference to it on CNN's mainpage as I'm typing this. Not worthy of a headline, I suppose.

The thesis in the OP stands.

---edit---

Townhall meh... Hostile host with gotcha questions, Trump answering in stream of consciousness with a few zingers to a generally approving audience (registered Republicans and undecideds). AOC already tweeted that CNN should be ashamed, because "the audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host"

Chip
May 10th, 2023, 11:00 PM
If a major national news network didn't publish a story on a House committee detailing, I don't know, the documentation of millions of dollars of bank transactions from Chinese entities to shell LLC's set up by the President's son and brother... would that be a misinformation problem? They literally have the receipts. Seems like news to me.

There is no reference to it on CNN's mainpage as I'm typing this. Not worthy of a headline, I suppose.

The thesis in the OP stands.


House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden

After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against Mr. Biden and his family, the first report of the premier House G.O.P. inquiry showed no proof of such misconduct.

Luke Broadwater
May 10, 2023

After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.

At a much-publicized news conference on Capitol Hill to show the preliminary findings of their premier investigation into Mr. Biden and his family, leading Republicans released financial documents detailing how some of the president’s relatives were paid more than $10 million from foreign sources between 2015 and 2017.

Republicans described the transactions as proof of “influence peddling” by Mr. Biden’s family, including his son Hunter Biden, and referenced some previously known, if unflattering, details of the younger Mr. Biden’s business dealings. Those included an episode in which he accepted a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese businessman. G.O.P. lawmakers also produced material suggesting that President Biden and his allies had at times made misleading statements in their efforts to push back aggressively against accusations of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

But on Wednesday, the Republicans conceded that they had yet to find evidence of a specific corrupt action Mr. Biden took in office in connection with any of the business deals his son entered into. Instead, their presentation underscored how little headway top G.O.P. lawmakers have made in finding clear evidence of questionable transactions they can tie to Mr. Biden, their chief political rival.

It has not stopped them from accusing the president of serious misconduct.

“I want to be clear: This committee is investigating President Biden and his family’s shady business dealings to capitalize on Joe Biden’s public office that risks our country’s national security,” said Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee. He emphasized that the president — not just his son — would be the target of his investigation, which he said would now “enter a new phase,” in which he would subpoena specific financial information based on material learned through bank records.

Federal prosecutors have examined Hunter Biden’s international business activities as part of a criminal investigation. But the only charges they are considering, according to people familiar with the case, are unrelated to his work abroad. They include tax charges related to his failure to file his tax returns over several years, and a charge of lying about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.

To date, Mr. Comer’s committee has issued four bank subpoenas, obtained thousands of financial records and spoken with several people he describes as whistle-blowers. Mr. Comer has also hired James Mandolfo, a former federal prosecutor who has experience investigating foreign corruption, to oversee the inquiry.

Businesses connected to Hunter Biden received more than $10 million from foreign companies, some with criminal ties.

The House Oversight Committee report focused on payments made to companies connected to Hunter Biden from businesses and individuals in Romania and China. Bank records obtained by the committee show the receipt of money from a foreign company connected to Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania.

In 2015, Mr. Popoviciu retained Hunter Biden, who is a lawyer, while his father was vice president, to help try to fend off charges. That effort was unsuccessful and, in 2016, Mr. Popoviciu was convicted on charges related to a land deal in northern Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

Mr. Comer has also focused on John R. Walker, an associate of Hunter Biden who was involved in a joint venture with executives of CEFC China Energy, a now-bankrupt Chinese conglomerate.

A Shanghai-based company, State Energy HK Limited, that was affiliated with CEFC China Energy sent millions to Robinson Walker LLC, a company associated with Mr. Walker, who then made payments to Hunter Biden and other Biden family members.

Hunter Biden had cultivated a business relationship with Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC, who has been investigated by the Chinese authorities on suspicion of economic crimes. In 2017, Mr. Ye gave Hunter Biden a 2.8-carat diamond as a thank-you for a meeting.

“What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office,” Hunter Biden told The New Yorker in 2019, adding that he gave the diamond to his associates. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird.”

CEFC had hoped to invest in a liquefied natural gas venture in Louisiana, but that deal ultimately flopped. Representatives of Hunter Biden characterize his business offerings at the time as providing legal and consulting services.

The payments came at a time when Hunter Biden’s life and finances were spiraling amid his drug addiction, and after the death of his brother, Beau Biden, from brain cancer. Hunter Biden had begun a romantic relationship with his brother’s widow. His business partner, Mr. Walker, and his uncle James Biden were pursuing international business work.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, said in a statement that House Republicans had revealed nothing new in their report.

“Today’s so-called ‘revelations' are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” Mr. Lowell said.

[B]President Biden has falsely denied his son had ties to Chinese businesses.

None of the payments detailed in the report went to President Biden himself, nor has Mr. Comer’s investigation produced any evidence that Mr. Biden ever took a corrupt action in connection with his son’s business dealings.

But Mr. Biden has made several false or misleading statements about the matter.

During the 2020 presidential debate, Mr. Biden claimed that no one in his family had received money from China.

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about, China,” Mr. Biden said, turning the charge on his opponent, President Donald J. Trump. “The only guy who made money from China is this guy. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.”

This year, Mr. Biden also claimed that it was “not true” that family members received more than $1 million from a Chinese firm. Aides to Mr. Biden said he was speaking colloquially and was pushing back generally on claims that his administration had been corrupted by Chinese money.

The House Republicans’ report highlighted some previously known, if unflattering, details of the Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Presidents’ families have long made money off the family name.

During his news conference, Mr. Comer acknowledged that Hunter Biden would have been far from the first relative of a president or vice president to try to make money off the family name.

He invoked Billy Carter, the brother of former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Libya and received a $220,000 loan; and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law whose firm has received hundreds of millions from Persian Gulf nations.

“This has been a pattern for a long time,” Mr. Comer said. “Republicans and Democrats have both complained about presidents’ families receiving money.”

However, Mr. Comer has conceded that he has no interest in investigating Mr. Kushner’s conduct.

Officials allied with Mr. Biden played a role in wrongly discrediting Hunter Biden’s laptop. The report from Mr. Comer came as a second Republican-led House committee is investigating a related issue. The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday released a report about a letter from 51 former intelligence and security officials in 2020 that questioned materials — substantial portions of which were later verified as authentic — from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop and suggested they might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The Republicans argue that the letter influenced the public to discount the materials on the laptop, which contained evidence of Hunter Biden’s drug use and sex life, which they believed would harm his father’s electoral chances against Mr. Trump.

The Judiciary Committee report detailed the role played by Antony J. Blinken, now the secretary of state and then a Biden campaign official, in spearheading the letter, and said a C.I.A. employee had been involved in soliciting at least one signature for it.

The intelligence officials maintain their letter stated they had no evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that they were merely stating an opinion.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents seven signatories to the letter, said on Twitter that the report merely proved that “private citizens lawfully exercised 1st Amendment rights” and added that there was not “even one falsehood” in the letter.

“I know of no signatory who retracts a single word,” Mr. Zaid wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/us/politics/hunter-biden-house-republicans-report.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

dneal
May 11th, 2023, 04:31 AM
I wonder if the NYT has read the FOIA emails.

TSherbs
May 11th, 2023, 06:17 AM
If a major national news network didn't publish a story on a House committee detailing, I don't know, the documentation of millions of dollars of bank transactions from Chinese entities to shell LLC's set up by the President's son and brother... would that be a misinformation problem? They literally have the receipts. Seems like news to me.

There is no reference to it on CNN's mainpage as I'm typing this. Not worthy of a headline, I suppose.

The thesis in the OP stands.


House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden

After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against Mr. Biden and his family, the first report of the premier House G.O.P. inquiry showed no proof of such misconduct.

Luke Broadwater
May 10, 2023

After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.

At a much-publicized news conference on Capitol Hill to show the preliminary findings of their premier investigation into Mr. Biden and his family, leading Republicans released financial documents detailing how some of the president’s relatives were paid more than $10 million from foreign sources between 2015 and 2017.

Republicans described the transactions as proof of “influence peddling” by Mr. Biden’s family, including his son Hunter Biden, and referenced some previously known, if unflattering, details of the younger Mr. Biden’s business dealings. Those included an episode in which he accepted a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese businessman. G.O.P. lawmakers also produced material suggesting that President Biden and his allies had at times made misleading statements in their efforts to push back aggressively against accusations of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

But on Wednesday, the Republicans conceded that they had yet to find evidence of a specific corrupt action Mr. Biden took in office in connection with any of the business deals his son entered into. Instead, their presentation underscored how little headway top G.O.P. lawmakers have made in finding clear evidence of questionable transactions they can tie to Mr. Biden, their chief political rival.

It has not stopped them from accusing the president of serious misconduct.

“I want to be clear: This committee is investigating President Biden and his family’s shady business dealings to capitalize on Joe Biden’s public office that risks our country’s national security,” said Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee. He emphasized that the president — not just his son — would be the target of his investigation, which he said would now “enter a new phase,” in which he would subpoena specific financial information based on material learned through bank records.

Federal prosecutors have examined Hunter Biden’s international business activities as part of a criminal investigation. But the only charges they are considering, according to people familiar with the case, are unrelated to his work abroad. They include tax charges related to his failure to file his tax returns over several years, and a charge of lying about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.

To date, Mr. Comer’s committee has issued four bank subpoenas, obtained thousands of financial records and spoken with several people he describes as whistle-blowers. Mr. Comer has also hired James Mandolfo, a former federal prosecutor who has experience investigating foreign corruption, to oversee the inquiry.

Businesses connected to Hunter Biden received more than $10 million from foreign companies, some with criminal ties.

The House Oversight Committee report focused on payments made to companies connected to Hunter Biden from businesses and individuals in Romania and China. Bank records obtained by the committee show the receipt of money from a foreign company connected to Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania.

In 2015, Mr. Popoviciu retained Hunter Biden, who is a lawyer, while his father was vice president, to help try to fend off charges. That effort was unsuccessful and, in 2016, Mr. Popoviciu was convicted on charges related to a land deal in northern Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

Mr. Comer has also focused on John R. Walker, an associate of Hunter Biden who was involved in a joint venture with executives of CEFC China Energy, a now-bankrupt Chinese conglomerate.

A Shanghai-based company, State Energy HK Limited, that was affiliated with CEFC China Energy sent millions to Robinson Walker LLC, a company associated with Mr. Walker, who then made payments to Hunter Biden and other Biden family members.

Hunter Biden had cultivated a business relationship with Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC, who has been investigated by the Chinese authorities on suspicion of economic crimes. In 2017, Mr. Ye gave Hunter Biden a 2.8-carat diamond as a thank-you for a meeting.

“What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office,” Hunter Biden told The New Yorker in 2019, adding that he gave the diamond to his associates. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird.”

CEFC had hoped to invest in a liquefied natural gas venture in Louisiana, but that deal ultimately flopped. Representatives of Hunter Biden characterize his business offerings at the time as providing legal and consulting services.

The payments came at a time when Hunter Biden’s life and finances were spiraling amid his drug addiction, and after the death of his brother, Beau Biden, from brain cancer. Hunter Biden had begun a romantic relationship with his brother’s widow. His business partner, Mr. Walker, and his uncle James Biden were pursuing international business work.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, said in a statement that House Republicans had revealed nothing new in their report.

“Today’s so-called ‘revelations' are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” Mr. Lowell said.

[B]President Biden has falsely denied his son had ties to Chinese businesses.

None of the payments detailed in the report went to President Biden himself, nor has Mr. Comer’s investigation produced any evidence that Mr. Biden ever took a corrupt action in connection with his son’s business dealings.

But Mr. Biden has made several false or misleading statements about the matter.

During the 2020 presidential debate, Mr. Biden claimed that no one in his family had received money from China.

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about, China,” Mr. Biden said, turning the charge on his opponent, President Donald J. Trump. “The only guy who made money from China is this guy. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.”

This year, Mr. Biden also claimed that it was “not true” that family members received more than $1 million from a Chinese firm. Aides to Mr. Biden said he was speaking colloquially and was pushing back generally on claims that his administration had been corrupted by Chinese money.

The House Republicans’ report highlighted some previously known, if unflattering, details of the Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Presidents’ families have long made money off the family name.

During his news conference, Mr. Comer acknowledged that Hunter Biden would have been far from the first relative of a president or vice president to try to make money off the family name.

He invoked Billy Carter, the brother of former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Libya and received a $220,000 loan; and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law whose firm has received hundreds of millions from Persian Gulf nations.

“This has been a pattern for a long time,” Mr. Comer said. “Republicans and Democrats have both complained about presidents’ families receiving money.”

However, Mr. Comer has conceded that he has no interest in investigating Mr. Kushner’s conduct.

Officials allied with Mr. Biden played a role in wrongly discrediting Hunter Biden’s laptop. The report from Mr. Comer came as a second Republican-led House committee is investigating a related issue. The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday released a report about a letter from 51 former intelligence and security officials in 2020 that questioned materials — substantial portions of which were later verified as authentic — from a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop and suggested they might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The Republicans argue that the letter influenced the public to discount the materials on the laptop, which contained evidence of Hunter Biden’s drug use and sex life, which they believed would harm his father’s electoral chances against Mr. Trump.

The Judiciary Committee report detailed the role played by Antony J. Blinken, now the secretary of state and then a Biden campaign official, in spearheading the letter, and said a C.I.A. employee had been involved in soliciting at least one signature for it.

The intelligence officials maintain their letter stated they had no evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that they were merely stating an opinion.

Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents seven signatories to the letter, said on Twitter that the report merely proved that “private citizens lawfully exercised 1st Amendment rights” and added that there was not “even one falsehood” in the letter.

“I know of no signatory who retracts a single word,” Mr. Zaid wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/us/politics/hunter-biden-house-republicans-report.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I am sure that they will continue to dig and dig. We'll see whatever comes up and if it is actionable legally. I think that it a sign of a healthy and robust journalism industry (and democratic society) to have many reporters digging away through the records of politicians and other persons of power.

Meanwhile, Chip, I appreciate these NYT articles posted here in their entirety because I otherwise cannot read them.

dneal
May 11th, 2023, 09:18 AM
As noted earlier, the best defense the NYT can come up with (now that they've actually had to address it) is: "none of those payments, made when he was the VP, went to Joe Biden directly. GOP hasn't established a direct connection" (outside his brother, his son, and other immediate family members).

Yes, why did the Chinese pay Hunter millions of dollars when his dad was the Vice President?

But let's pretend we can't fathom the reason, or that it doesn't count "because actually..."

If this were Trump and Jr you guys would be shitting yourselves with glee.

Chip
May 11th, 2023, 01:09 PM
Meanwhile, Chip, I appreciate these NYT articles posted here in their entirety because I otherwise cannot read them.

It's an effort, but worth the bother. I never click on blind links (lacking any sort of summary or excerpt) because I don't want any loony RWW stuff showing up on my search record, that having been a problem in the past: the algorithmic grind starts sending me crazy ads. I also switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, which helped decrease the stream of e-garbage.

Chuck Naill
May 11th, 2023, 01:26 PM
Btw, when I post a NYT story, it’s gifted so that anyone can access.

Chip
May 11th, 2023, 01:40 PM
Btw, when I post a NYT story, it’s gifted so that anyone can access.

I think that has a limit of ten per year.

TSherbs
May 11th, 2023, 01:43 PM
Btw, when I post a NYT story, it’s gifted so that anyone can access.

I think that has a limit of ten per year.

Wow, that is stingy!

WAPO is ten per MONTH.

Chuck Naill
May 11th, 2023, 02:25 PM
My bad, I thought it was 10 per month.

Chip
May 12th, 2023, 11:07 PM
I could be wrong. I'll check. But I'd rather post the thing so it can be read without clicking a link.

Chuck Naill
May 13th, 2023, 04:29 PM
Good point, Chip. Given the level of interest, I’m hesitant to waste a gifted link.

TSherbs
May 27th, 2023, 04:18 AM
Here is corporate media fixing a deliberate lie made elsewhere:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/05/26/kari-lakes-latest-election-challenge-was-dismissed-in-may-fact-check/70257441007/

Chip
May 27th, 2023, 01:00 PM
The larger problem is how many people will believe a lie that fits their preconceptions.

If it supports their bias and hate, they don't seem to care whether it's false.

Chuck Naill
May 27th, 2023, 07:04 PM
The larger problem is how many people will believe a lie that fits their preconceptions.

If it supports their bias and hate, they don't seem to care whether it's false.

Do you consider your immune?

dneal
May 27th, 2023, 07:36 PM
The larger problem is how many people will believe a lie that fits their preconceptions.

If it supports their bias and hate, they don't seem to care whether it's false.

Good question. Maybe start with Russian Collusion. Do you still believe it?

TSherbs
May 28th, 2023, 05:58 AM
For some help seeing media bias and how to manage it:

https://www.allsides.com/media-bias

I appreciate how they label individual articles, too.

As I was browsing some international news on Reuters last night, I was appreciating their no-nonsense approach to mostly factual reporting.

TSherbs
May 28th, 2023, 06:03 AM
Here is an AI algorithm based media rating site, founded in 2017. Interesting.

https://www.biasly.com/

Chip
June 7th, 2023, 12:15 PM
Golly! He forgot to mention Hunter Biden's laptop.

Tucker Carlson peddles conspiracy theories on Twitter debut from barn

Ex-Fox News host backs Russia and insults Ukraine’s Zelenskiy in 10-minute monologue greeted with widespread derision

Martin Pengelly
7 Jun 2023 10.32 EDT

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c303f39974214097c4a65dd59a1bbb93210aa65c/0_59_5472_3283/master/5472.jpg?width=620&quality=85&dpr=1&s=none

Tucker Carlson’s debut on Twitter was greeted with widespread derision, as the former Fox News host backed Russia in its war with Ukraine, abused the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, invoked conspiracy theories about 9/11 and Jeffrey Epstein and mused on the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life.

“Tucker Carlson’s lies cost Fox $800m,” said Anne Applebaum, a historian of authoritarianism, referring to the $787.5m settlement the network signed with Dominion Voting Systems over its broadcast of Donald Trump’s election lies, shortly before Carlson was fired. “Now he is still lying, and Twitter will eventually pay the price too.”

At the end of Carlson’s first show, a 10-minute monologue in a barn, with a wide shot showing he was operating his own teleprompter, the host said he would bypass the mainstream media to tell viewers the truth, as Russians under communism once found ways to hear broadcasts from other countries. He said: “We’ve come to Twitter which we hope will be the shortwave radio under the blankets. We’re told there are no gatekeepers here. If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave … We’ll be back with much more very soon.”

Elon Musk, the Twitter owner, retweeted the video and said it would be “great to have shows from all parts of the political spectrum on this platform”.

By Wednesday, Twitter said Carlson’s video had been viewed more than 65m times.

The first taste of what that audience can expect included claims that Ukraine blew up the Kakhovka dam, not Russia, and lewd insinuations about the Republican senator Lindsey Graham. Carlson said Graham was “attracted” to the “rat-like” Zelenskiy and “aroused” by “the aroma of death”. Carlson also called Zelenskiy “sweaty … a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians”.

Carlson also said: “What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still classified. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money. How did he die? How about JFK and so endlessly on.”

He also raised the case of a retired air force officer who claims the US has extensive evidence of alien life. “It was clear he was telling the truth,” Carlson said, without elaborating.

Matthew Gertz, senior fellow at the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America, called Carlson’s video “bleak” and added: “It’s jarring how his shtick just does not work without the Fox bells-and-whistles. “He was maybe the most powerful man in [rightwing] media; now he’s just another streamer with half-baked opinions peddling conspiracy theories. He’s Alex Jones in jacket and tie.”

Jones, a conspiracy theorist influential on the far right, was ordered to pay $1.5bn for saying the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was faked.

Gertz added: “I notice [Carlson] presented other media as dishonest and foolish for not realizing that Ukraine blew up [the] Nord Stream [pipeline] but he previously said the US did it, and also the new evidence he cites was broken by New York Times.”

On the right, Carlson found eager viewers. The anonymous Twitter account Catturd (known to Rolling Stone as “the shitposting king of Maga Twitter”), wrote: “Good morning to everyone especially Tucker Carlson for breaking Twitter with now over 50 million views and talking truth to power. “This is the future of media ... the mainstream Democrat, lying propaganda media is done.”

But condemnation and ridicule were widespread.

Reed Galen, a former Republican operative turned anti-Trump campaigner, tweeted a picture of Carlson operating his own teleprompter and a message pointing to the unknown payoff Carlson took from Fox News. “You’d think with all those Rupert [Murdoch] bucks he could hire a producer,” Galen said.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/07/tucker-carlson-twitter-first-show?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Chuck Naill
June 7th, 2023, 04:02 PM
Yawn

Chip
June 16th, 2023, 12:16 PM
Fox News producer behind Biden ‘wannabe dictator’ chyron resigns

Alexander McCaskill left network following banner about Biden that read ‘wannabe dictator speaks at the White House’

Edward Helmore
16 Jun 2023

The Fox News producer thought to have been responsible for running a provocative banner headline about Joe Biden during Donald Trump’s response to his criminal indictment on Tuesday has left the network, according to reports. Alexander McCaskill, former managing editor of Tucker Carlson Tonight, resigned following the banner, or chyron, that read “wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested”, according to the Daily Beast.

Fox News had addressed the banner debacle in a statement on Wednesday, saying “the chyron was taken down immediately and was addressed”. But it still provoked criticism from multiple angles.

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said that Fox airing the chyron was “wrong”, while the former Fox host Tucker Carlson said during his Twitter show on Thursday that the banner, which he said was up for 27 seconds, had caused “the women who run the network” to panic. “First they scolded the producer who put the banner on the screen,” Carlson claimed. “Less than 24 hours after that, he resigned. He had been at Fox for more than a decade. He was considered one of the most capable people in the building. He offered to stay for the customary two weeks, but Fox told him to clear out his desk and leave immediately.”

McCaskill, the Fox News producer at the center of the chyron controversy, also featured in a lawsuit brought by former Fox talent booker Abby Grossberg that claims Fox News, Fox Corp and employees including Tucker Carlson fostered a workplace riven with abusive behaviors. Grossberg claims she was subjected to religious discrimination by McCaskill, who placed three inflatable Christmas decorations in the bookings area – “a preposterous display that was distracting and loud” and a smaller one by her desk with a sign that read “Hannukah bush”. Grossberg is Jewish.

McCaskill, the lawsuit claims, “habitually belittled female employees”. While pitching a promotional idea for Carlson’s End of Men documentary, McCaskill remarked that the breastfeeding “mother’s room” was a “waste of space” and should be replaced with a “room of tanning beds for the guys to tan their testicles”. Grossberg also claims that McCaskill and another producer, Justin Wells, once remarked that a junior booker who reported to Grossberg “should use her sex appeal to the TCT team’s advantage, such as by ‘sleep[ing] with Elon Musk to get [an] interview’”.

Fox News has said that Grossberg’s lawsuit was “riddled with false allegations”. But following its multimillion-dollar settlement in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, and Carlson’s exit from Fox News sooner after, CNN reported on Thursday that the Murdoch-owned station was close to settling with Grossberg.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/16/fox-news-wannabe-dictator-producer-alexander-mccaskill?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

dneal
June 16th, 2023, 03:38 PM
I love that woke Archie continues to prove the thesis.

TSherbs
June 16th, 2023, 03:54 PM
[B]... But following its multimillion-dollar settlement in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, and Carlson’s exit from Fox News sooner after, CNN reported on Thursday that the Murdoch-owned station was close to settling with Grossberg.


As well they should.

dneal
June 16th, 2023, 04:36 PM
Cool. Now do CNN and Chris Cuomo.

Chip
June 16th, 2023, 10:30 PM
Okay. You do Bannon.

dneal
June 17th, 2023, 04:50 AM
I’ve tried. You guys get triggered and start shrieking.

Chip
June 17th, 2023, 04:17 PM
That's not shrieking.

It's laughter.

dneal
June 17th, 2023, 10:35 PM
I’d like to take your word for that, but your tribe thinks men can have periods and women can have a penis.

Not a good track record for credibility.

Chip
June 20th, 2023, 01:11 PM
The War Against Truth and Facts.

G.O.P. Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election

A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics.

Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel
June 19, 2023

On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation, accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online. The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved.

They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“I think it’s quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that works to safeguard freedom of speech and the press.

The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public. It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough.

A conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants. Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online.

In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful. A House subcommittee was created to scrutinize what Republicans have charged is a government effort to silence conservatives. The committee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a close ally of Mr. Trump, has accused the organizations of “censorship of disfavored speech” involving issues that have galvanized the Republican Party: the policies around the Covid-19 pandemic and the integrity of the American political system, including the outcome of the 2020 election.

Much of the disinformation surrounding both issues has come from the right. Many Republicans are convinced that researchers who study disinformation have pressed social media platforms to discriminate against conservative voices. Those complaints have been fueled by Twitter’s decision under its new owner, Elon Musk, to release selected internal communications between government officials and Twitter employees. The communications show government officials urging Twitter to take action against accounts spreading disinformation but stopping short of ordering them to do, as some critics claimed.

Patrick L. Warren, an associate professor at Clemson University, said researchers at the school have provided documents to the committee, and given some staff members a short presentation. “I think most of this has been spurred by our appearance in the Twitter files, which left people with a pretty distorted sense of our mission and work,” he said.

Last year, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration in U.S. District Court in Louisiana, arguing that government officials effectively cajoled or coerced Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms by threatening legislative changes. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, rejected a defense motion to dismiss the lawsuit in March. The current campaign’s focus is not government officials but rather private individuals working for universities or nongovernmental organizations. They have their own First Amendment guarantees of free speech, including their interactions with the social media companies.

The group behind the class action, America First Legal, named as defendants two researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta; a professor at the University of Washington, Kate Starbird; an executive of Graphika, Camille François; and the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graham Brookie. If the lawsuit proceeds, they could face trial and, potentially, civil damages if the accusations are upheld.

Stephen Miller, the president of America First Legal, did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, he said the lawsuit was “striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex.” The researchers, who have been asked by the House committee to submit emails and other records, are also defendants in the lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The plaintiffs include Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization that has been accused of disinformation, and Jim Hoft, the founder of the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site. The court in the Western District of Louisiana has, under Judge Doughty, become a favored venue for legal challenges against the Biden administration.

The attacks use “the same argument that starts with some false premises,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, which is not a party to any of the legal action. “We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about the government giving some type of direction to the research we do.”

The House Judiciary Committee has focused much of its questioning on two collaborative projects. One was the Election Integrity Partnership, which Stanford and the University of Washington formed before the 2020 election to identify attempts “to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters or delegitimize election results without evidence.” The other, also organized by Stanford, was called the Virality Project and focused on the spread of disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. Both subjects have become political lightning rods, exposing the researchers to partisan attacks online that have become ominously personal at times.

In the case of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the requests for information — including all emails — have even extended to students who volunteered to work as interns for the Election Integrity Partnership. A central premise of the committee’s investigation — and the other complaints about censorship — is that the researchers or government officials had the power or ability to shut down accounts on social media. They did not, according to former employees at Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, who said the decision to punish users who violated platform rules belonged solely to the companies.

No evidence has emerged that government officials coerced the companies to take action against accounts, even when the groups flagged problematic content. “We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules,” Mr. Hancock said.

The universities and research organizations have sought to comply with the committee’s requests, though the collection of years of emails has been a time-consuming task complicated by issues of privacy. They face mounting legal costs and questions from directors and donors about the risks raised by studying disinformation. Online attacks have also taken a toll on morale and, in some cases, scared away students.

In May, Mr. Jordan, the committee’s chairman, threatened Stanford with unspecified legal action for not complying with a previously issued subpoena, even though the university’s lawyers have been negotiating with the committee’s lawyers over how to shield students’ privacy. (Several of the students who volunteered are identified in the America First Legal lawsuit.) The committee declined to discuss details of the investigation, including how many requests or subpoenas it has filed in total. Nor has it disclosed how it expects the inquiry to unfold — whether it would prepare a final report or make criminal referrals and, if so, when. In its statements, though, it appears to have already reached a broad conclusion.

“The Twitter files and information from private litigation show how the federal government worked with social media companies and other entities to silence disfavored speech online,” a spokesman, Russell Dye, said in a statement. “The committee is working hard to get to the bottom of this censorship to protect First Amendment rights for all Americans.”

The partisan controversy is having an effect on not only the researchers but also the social media giants. Twitter, under Mr. Musk, has made a point of lifting restrictions and restoring accounts that had been suspended, including the Gateway Pundit’s. YouTube recently announced that it would no longer ban videos that advanced “false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. presidential elections.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/business/gop-disinformation-researchers-2024-election.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

TSherbs
June 20th, 2023, 08:55 PM
False conspiracy videos get too many views and generate too much revenue. God bless the mighty dollar!

In my own case, I get <1% of my news information from Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube combined. Can't speak for others on that, though. My one brother, a fairly solid Republican, sends me anti-Dem stuff from Reddit regularly (I get no news info from Reddit--but I look at pen sales there!). The Reddit stuff he sends me is mostly bullshit.

dneal
June 20th, 2023, 09:36 PM
Is supposed that an indictment of Reddit? If so, you don’t understand how it works (or Twitter, for that matter).

Chip
June 21st, 2023, 12:54 PM
What stands out is the tacit admission by the GOP that so-called "conservative speech" consists mostly of lies, falsehoods, fantasies, and Russian disinformation.

TSherbs
June 21st, 2023, 03:20 PM
God forbid you try to study the propagation of falsehoods with some govt funds.

Chip
June 21st, 2023, 10:50 PM
God forbid you try to study the propagation of falsehoods with some govt funds.

What about the Benghazi hearings?

Or is propagating falsehoods different than the study of how they are propagated?

TSherbs
June 28th, 2023, 07:41 PM
It doesn't help if the media reports these kind of untruths made by politicians running for office (without fact checks): https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jun/26/tim-scott/tim-scotts-misleading-statements-on-median-income/

dneal
June 28th, 2023, 08:30 PM
TSherbs has several sets of rosary beads. Next he'll be bumping the election trust thread, although the latest Rasmussen poll would make that a mistake.

TSherbs
June 29th, 2023, 07:39 AM
Are you ok, dneal? You seem triggered and not in control of your animus.

dneal
June 29th, 2023, 09:01 AM
You haven’t been paying attention. You can’t trigger me, and certainly not by copying the rhetoric I effectively use against you.

TSherbs
June 29th, 2023, 09:36 AM
...You can’t trigger me, and certainly not by copying the rhetoric I effectively use against you.

There's that pat on the back you give yourself. Declaring another win, I see.

What is it, 1000-0, dneal over the "idiots"?

dneal
June 29th, 2023, 10:19 AM
Again you interpret rather than consider what’s actually written.

You’re still here posting partisan nonsense, so no I haven’t “won”.

Winning for me* would be breaking you out of your echo chamber, seeing you formulate a rational response that doesn’t rely on an op-ed piece, or (worst case) making you quit.

Game theory is something you might explore.

-edit-

*That list is not exclusive. There are others.

Chip
June 29th, 2023, 12:05 PM
Are you ok, dneal? You seem triggered and not in control of your animus.

Bet my anima can whip his animus.

https://i.imgur.com/qUUkjpW.jpg

dneal
June 29th, 2023, 01:24 PM
Chip's all hat and no cattle, as usual.

-edit-

TSherbs - that's a joke at Chip's expense. See how it addresses his online puffery? See the references to his "look at me, I'm a cowboy" braggadocio? See how it references his State's miserable cattle industry history?

Yeah, it's not as funny when you explain it; but you guys appear to have defective funnybones. Do I need to explain the two references imbedded in there as well?

It's not even a challenge. *sigh*

dneal
July 13th, 2023, 03:36 PM
Just data. Make of it what you will…

78838

Chuck Naill
July 14th, 2023, 03:32 PM
It’s humorous that you guys criticize in others the same things each of you do yourselves.

I’ve always liked the “all hat and no cattle”. It is worse if you’re all cattle and no hay!!

I don’t miss the livestock.

dneal
July 14th, 2023, 03:43 PM
Triggered about that little Fauci problem, and TSherbs handing you your ass in the Christianity thread?

No need to let it spill over with trolling here. We all see what you won't admit.

Chuck Naill
July 14th, 2023, 04:05 PM
It’s okay, I handed it back to him. I got some help from Candy.

dneal
August 1st, 2023, 06:50 PM
Coincidence? Which narrative did your media sources focus on?

79292

Chip
August 2nd, 2023, 12:33 PM
Twitter sues anti-hate speech group over ‘tens of millions of dollars’ in lost advertising

CCDH dismisses lawsuit for damages saying Elon Musk’s X aims to ‘bully us into silence’

Dan Milmo
2 Aug 2023

Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter has accused an anti-hate speech group of costing the social media app “tens of millions of dollars” in revenues after advertisers paused spending on the platform, according to a lawsuit. A legal filing by the owner of X, the new name for Twitter as of last month, accuses the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) of hurting the business financially through its research of content on the social media service.

The lawsuit filed in a US district court claimed that 16 unnamed advertisers had stopped spending on the platform, paused advertising plans or decided not to reactivate campaigns, after reading CCDH work. It said at least eight organisations and companies, including multinational corporations that have advertised on X historically, had paused spending on the platform in June and July after reading CCDH reports. The lawsuit added that a further five separate companies, including large multinationals, had paused advertising spending plans around November last year – shortly after Musk’s purchase of the company – after reading CCDH research. Three more companies were not reactivating ad campaigns due to CCDH, the lawsuit said.

The filing said the cost of the advertising postponements ran into tens of millions of dollars. “Based on the historical spend of the companies and organisations that have paused paid advertising and/or paused plans for future paid advertising, X Corp estimates that it has lost at least tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues as of the date of this complaint, with those amounts subject to increasing as time goes on,” the lawsuit said. Advertising accounted for 90% of revenues in the last published annual results by Twitter, which covered 2021. Since then, ad revenue has plummeted with Musk tweeting recently that it had halved.

CCDH, a US-UK group, has regularly published research into X’s content since it was bought by Musk for $44bn (£34.4m) in October last year. Advertisers who have paused spending on the platform include carmaker Audi and Pfizer, the pharmaceuticals company.

The lawsuit filed on Monday in the US district court for the northern district of California is seeking unspecified damages for breach of contract, violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, intentional interference with contractual relations and inducing breach of contract. Among other allegations, the lawsuit accuses CCDH of “unlawfully” scraping data from Twitter for its “flawed” research. CCDH research includes a recent study claiming that 99% of hate speech posted by a sample of subscribers to Twitter Blue – X’s premium service – was not acted on by the platform. The lawsuit also accuses CCDH of obtaining unauthorised access to data from Brandwatch, a consumer research company.

On Monday, CCDH published a letter from Musk’s legal representative, Alex Spiro of US law firm Quinn Emanuel, threatening legal action under the Lanham Act, a piece of US legislation that covers trademark law. However, the California lawsuit uses a different law firm, White & Case, and leans on a different piece of legislation. CCDH’s chief executive, Imran Ahmed, said Musk was attempting to “bully us into silence”. In a statement he said: “Elon Musk’s latest legal threat is straight out of the authoritarian playbook – he is now showing he will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticises him for his own decisions and actions.”

Ahmed added: “Musk is trying to ‘shoot the messenger’ who highlights the toxic content on his platform rather than deal with the toxic environment he’s created.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/twitter-accuses-anti-hate-speech-group-over-tens-of-millions-of-dollars-in-lost-advertising?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

dneal
August 2nd, 2023, 12:35 PM
Which of those are corporate media? Twitter or CCDH?

dneal
August 3rd, 2023, 10:39 AM
Perfect example from Newsweek. Aside from the fact that they appear to have included 11 year olds in their polling (maybe that's a typo and should read 2002 instead of 2012), 1/3 of Americans supporting means 2/3 don't - which is probably what the headline should read.

Corporate media is the misinformation problem.

https://www.newsweek.com/us-troops-ukraine-poll-russia-joe-biden-america-military-1816570

79320

Chuck Naill
August 4th, 2023, 12:13 PM
Probably not as serious as defrauding donors to build wall or requesting to have his legal fees reimbursed.

dneal
August 4th, 2023, 12:24 PM
What does that have to do with corporate media?

Chuck Naill
August 4th, 2023, 02:49 PM
Breitbart is a corporation.

dneal
August 4th, 2023, 04:17 PM
You were talking about Breitbart?

Chip
August 6th, 2023, 01:06 PM
Musk is acting like a Cyber-Putin.

When we held up a mirror to Elon Musk’s Twitter/X he tried to sue us into silence

My organisation is standing up to the tech billionaires whose social media platforms are full of hate and lies

Imran Ahmed
6 Aug 2023

It started with childish name-calling on Twitter two weeks ago, when Elon Musk called my organisation “evil” and me personally a “rat”. It has since escalated to a lawsuit filed against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which I founded and run, in a California court last week. The CCDH exists to research online hate and disinformation, and hold social media companies accountable for the erosion of human rights and civil liberties. Our mission is to stem the tide of racism, antisemitism, harms to children, climate denial, anti-LGBTQ+ hate, health misinformation and many other dangers to society.

Last week, we became the target of an aggressive and cynical intimidation campaign by Musk, the world’s richest person and owner of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Musk is singling us out because our research has exposed his failings – the suit is designed to silence critics of X Corp/Twitter. But attacking CCDH will not remove the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and disinformation superspreaders he has allowed back. Only Musk can undo his own errors.

The CCDH has been at the forefront of reporting on the hate proliferating on X/Twitter since Musk completed his takeover in late October 2022. Our reporting has shown that, under his watch, the number of tweets containing slurs has risen by up to 202%; that tweets linking LGBTQ+ people to “child grooming” have more than doubled; demonstrated that climate denial content and accounts are surging; and revealed Twitter’s failure to act on hate posted by Twitter Blue subscribers. Members of Twitter’s own trust and safety council have resigned, citing CCDH findings, and our research has been widely reported by news outlets around the world.

CCDH holds up a mirror to social media platforms and asks them to consider whether or not they like the reflection they see in it. We are proud of our record of investigating and raising the alarm whenever and wherever we discover the proliferation of serious harms on Twitter/X, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, YouTube and other platforms. Musk didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. But rather than take responsibility and admit the problem, he is trying to sue the mirror. Attacking CCDH will not remove the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and disinformation superspreaders he has welcomed back

There is a great irony in attempts by this self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” – to shut down honest debate and fair, research-backed criticism with legal threats.

This episode has highlighted another, extremely grave, problem. A tiny coterie of social media companies hold immense, unchecked and unaccountable power over the digital world, which is now inextricably intertwined with the real world. Not only does Musk have the ability to make drastic and sudden changes to the platform with little regard for the potentially disastrous consequences for the safety of millions of users – he is also wielding absolute power to restrict the questions that the public, advertisers and our democratically elected representatives are allowed to ask of him.

This was noted by three US legislators on Capitol Hill last week, who wrote an excoriating letter to Musk condemning X’s “hostile stance” towards independent research efforts, and for “uniquely resisting” researchers’ efforts to hold social media platforms accountable. Representatives Lori Trahan, Adam B Schiff and Sean Casten also pressed him for clarity around X’s decision to drastically restrict data access for this kind of research, reiterating a request that has gone unanswered by the company since March 2023. In the UK, Lucy Powell, the shadow digital, culture, media and sport secretary, noted that “we desperately need the online safety bill to put rules in place, so powerful platforms don’t act on the whims of one man”. Powell and others are spot on in this assessment. Tech executives operate with impunity because there are no rules keeping them in check. Until the world’s governments pass legislation built around the principles of safety by product design, transparency, accountability and responsibility, we will be forced to live with the negative consequences of tech’s failures – with no recourse or democratic oversight.

If we allow billionaires to bully their way out of accountability, the damage to our democracy will be devastating. For now, my organisation is resolved to stand up against this Silicon Valley bully. We stand by our fact-based research, our demands for accountability, and our right to criticise the world’s richest person.

This fight is bigger than CCDH – it is a line-in-the-sand moment. If we allow ourselves to be strongarmed by Musk and X, it will give the green light to every other social media behemoth to do the same to anyone who dares to speak truth to power. It would also send a message to Big Oil, Big Tobacco and further afield, that reporting or research on businesses that they claim interfere with their ability to profit can be challenged through the courts. Without transparency and accountability for billionaires or corporations, our democracy would be severely weakened.

We have been humbled and emboldened by the outpouring of support so far, both from our colleagues in civil society and from members of the public who believe, like us, that if we allow billionaires to bully their way out of accountability, the damage to our democracy will be devastating. This battle is not ours alone – it must be a collective effort by all those who believe in standing up to the powerful to establish a free and safe internet.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/06/when-we-held-up-a-mirror-to-elon-musks-twitterx-he-tried-to-sue-us-into-silence?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Chuck Naill
August 6th, 2023, 05:35 PM
You were talking about Breitbart?

You were talking about corporate media.

kazoolaw
August 31st, 2023, 08:14 AM
Pop Quiz
Just over 2 weeks ago more than 1,600 scientists from around the world signed on to a "World Climate Declaration" titled THERE IS NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
My question is not whether you agree with the Declaration or its contents.
Instead, in line with the title of this thread, I have 3 questions:
(1) Have you heard about this Declaration?
(2) If so, where and when did you hear of the Declaration?
(3) If so, how would you describe the "tone" of the coverage, such as biased for, biased against, neutral reporting?
The Declaration is dated August 14, 2023.
https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/WCD-version-081423.pdf

Chip
August 31st, 2023, 11:09 PM
1) No.

2) On your post. Sucker.

3) Seems like a replay of the tobacco/smoking thing. Liars, scumbags, loonies, and shills peddling disinformation for money.

A "World Climate Declaration" signed by more than 1,200 people and widely shared on social media challenges the scientific consensus on human-driven climate change. But only a small number of the signatories are climate scientists, some have links to the oil industry or climate-skeptic organizations, and the claims have been widely debunked.

"A global network of over 1200 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific," says the text of the declaration under the title: "There is no climate emergency." The declaration was shared on platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in August 2022."

https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.32HG6HR

kazoolaw
September 1st, 2023, 12:08 AM
Thanks for your reaction Chip..

TSherbs
September 1st, 2023, 08:30 AM
I have been getting news notices from the 1440 group. Not bad, and quite middle of the road. You get ads to scroll past, but I've been learning to blur my brain as I go past them. Curated by humans, not by algorithms.

724Seney
September 1st, 2023, 09:07 AM
Thanks for your reaction Chip..


Isn't he a swell guy!!
:puke:

TSherbs
September 1st, 2023, 10:10 AM
Here is an interesting critique of bad news interview behavior and bad politician behavior in reply (from Tangle):

Andrea Mitchell vs Vivek Ramaswamy

https://www.readtangle.com/vivek-ramaswamy-andrea-mitchell-climate-change/?ref=tangle-newsletter

Chip
September 5th, 2023, 12:56 PM
Windex Ramasalamy?

Is he a politician? Hardly. Never been elected, no record of governing.

He's just a mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego (remind you of anyone?) scrabbling to attract the Trumpoid base.

Chip
September 5th, 2023, 01:04 PM
This is a genuine conspiracy.

Texas fracking billionaire brothers fuel rightwing media with millions of dollars

Farris and Dan Wilks’ deep pockets fund climate denialism education, conservative politicians and pro-fossil fuel projects

Peter Stone
5 Sep 2023

Two billionaire Texas brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking have pumped millions of dollars into rightwing media outfits that have promoted climate-crisis denialism and sent more big checks to back an array of evangelical projects and conservative Texas politicians. The fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks have each doled out millions of dollars through separate foundations over the last decade to a number of high-profile conservative and religious groups including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.

“Thanks to their incredible wealth and largesse, the country as well as the [Republican] party are now feeling the effects of their aggressive brand of religiously-charged political activism,” said Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of Anointed with Oil.

Farris Wilks and his wife control the Thirteen Foundation, while Dan Wilks and his wife lead the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, both of which have been funded with proceeds from the 2011 sale of their majority stake in Frac Tech Services for $3.2bn. Since they created their foundations, six- and seven-figure checks from the Wilks brothers have bolstered numerous pro-fossil fuel and evangelical projects.

The Wilks brothers, for instance, have poured millions of dollars into PragerU and the Daily Wire, two rightwing media outlets that have promoted wide-ranging conservative agendas, including climate crisis denialism to school-age kids and adults via short videos, articles and other materials. The two brothers have given at least $8m to PragerU, which is unaccredited, according to Texas financial records. In July, Florida approved the use of what PragerU has called its “edutainment” videos and other materials for use in its classrooms, and PragerU has said it is trying to get other states, including Texas, to do likewise.

In 2015, Farris Wilks gave $4.7m to help launch the Daily Wire and remains an owner of the media company, whose founding editor and co-owner Ben Shapiro has forged ties with Dennis Prager, the PragerU founder and talkshow host. Shapiro and Prager are slated to attend a PragerU “founders’ retreat” in September for donors who give at least $100,000 a year. Historically, the two brothers have also backed a number of rightwing Texas Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz, whose abortive run for president in 2016 was bolstered by $15m they gave to a pro-Cruz Super Pac.

More recent tax reports from the two foundations underscore their deep pockets. The Thirteen Foundation donated about $5m in 2021 and ended the year with close to $60m in assets. By contrast, the Heavenly Fathers Foundation gave away just under $11m in fiscal year 2022 and ended the year with about $187m in assets. The evangelical ties of the Wilks brothers are deep and personal. Farris Wilks is a preacher in Cisco, Texas, a town of approximately 3,000 people, where he leads the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day church, which was founded by his father and interprets the Bible literally while embracing Old and New Testament teachings.

Farris Wilks has railed against homosexuality, which he deems a sin. According to recordings of his sermons, homosexuality is “a perversion tantamount to bestiality, pedophilia and incest”. Farris Wilks also seems to equate the climate crisis with God’s will. “If [God] wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there,” he said to worshippers at a 2013 service. To promote his evangelical views, Farris Wilks and his brother have donated millions of dollars to several conservative Christian groups including Liberty Counsel, Heartbeat International and Family Talk.

Scholars who have studied the influence of big oil and the US right credit the Wilks brothers with playing a growing role in funding and shaping the conservative and evangelical right in Texas and nationally. “The Wilks brothers epitomize the new strain of religious-right culture-warring that has taken hold of the GOP. Blending fierce allegiance to free-market economics with equally fierce commitment to social conservatism [and] anti-statist rage with Christian nationalist sentiments, they seek to draw the church itself (not just church folk) into battle for control of the country,” said Dochuk.

“What makes the Wilks’ strain of religious-right politics so potent and impactful is its striking range of priorities, including abortion, gay rights and the broader crusade for traditional family values. Significantly, the Wilks’ big checks are also aimed at influencing the politics of climate and environment, energy and extraction, to protect fossil fuel interests.”

To be sure, the Wilks brothers’ big checks have both long-term conservative ideological goals and short-term political ones. In recent years in Texas, the Wilks brothers – often in tandem with another billionaire, the Texas fossil-fuel mogul Tim Dunn – have poured millions of dollars into nonprofits like Defend Texas Liberty and Empower Texans to push their ultraconservative social and political views. Defend Texas Liberty, for instance, has donated about $3m to the state’s Lt Gov Dan Patrick, who will be the acting judge at the upcoming Texas senate trial of the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton, who in May was impeached by the Texas house on bribery, abuse of power and other charges. Patrick received a $2m loan and a $1m donation from Defend Texas Liberty Pac, according to recent Texas records.

The Pac is well-known for funding conservative challengers to Texas house GOP members and, in a recent campaign filing, reported receiving a $1.5m check from Farris Wilks and his wife and close to $2m dollars from Dunn.

Defend Texas Liberty has been blunt about its anger over Paxton’s impeachment. “Defend Texas Liberty will ensure that every Republican voter in Texas knows just what a sham the Texas house has been this session and just how absurd this last minute Democrat led impeachment effort is,” the group said in a 26 May tweet. Experts who follow the influence of the Wilks brothers say their sprawling agendas and big checks spark strong concerns.

“Farris and Dan Wilks, who believe their billions were given to them by God, have spent the last decade working to advance a dominionist ideology by funding far-right organizations and politicians that seek to dismiss climate change as ‘God’s will’, remove choice, demonize the LGBTQ community, and tear down public education, all to turn America into a country that gives preference to and imposes their extreme beliefs on everyone,” said Chris Tackett, a Texas-based campaign finance analyst. “The goal of [the] Wilks and those that share their ideology is to gain control of levers of power and control information. That’s why they invest heavily into politicians, agenda-driven non-profits and media organizations like PragerU and the Daily Wire. It is all connected.”

Dochuk voices similar concerns. “The Wilks brothers aren’t the only ones with oil and gas ties to question climate change science from a position of self-interest; with so much invested in hydrocarbon society, their pro-fossil fuel, anti-climate-crisis science position only makes sense. Where the Wilks take things further, however, is their articulation of climate change denialism in theological terms, as if we are all destined by God for a future of environmental ruin we have no responsibility for and can’t control. The force of their advocacy, informing PragerU, the Daily Wire and other conservative media outlets, is what makes their influence so penetrating and paralyzing, and insidious.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/05/texas-fracking-billionaire-brothers-prageru-daily-wire?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

724Seney
September 5th, 2023, 01:19 PM
He's just a mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego (remind you of anyone?)

YES!
The resemblance is really striking.
He reminds me of YOU.

TSherbs
September 5th, 2023, 04:36 PM
He's just a mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego (remind you of anyone?)

YES!
The resemblance is really striking.
He reminds me of YOU.

I notice that you don't deny this description of Ramaswamy. I think that it is spot on. I'd add the word "smarmy," also. He is irritating in the extreme. But, since the GOP has not been nominating anyone who isn't noxious in the extreme for 7 years now, I guess that this isn't disqualifying in any way. In fact, I consider it to be quite calculated.

TSherbs
September 5th, 2023, 04:43 PM
...Scholars who have studied the influence of big oil and the US right credit the Wilks brothers with playing a growing role in funding and shaping the conservative and evangelical right in Texas and nationally. “The Wilks brothers epitomize the new strain of religious-right culture-warring that has taken hold of the GOP. Blending fierce allegiance to free-market economics with equally fierce commitment to social conservatism [and] anti-statist rage with Christian nationalist sentiments, they seek to draw the church itself (not just church folk) into battle for control of the country,” said Dochuk.



“What makes the Wilks’ strain of religious-right politics so potent and impactful is its striking range of priorities, including abortion, gay rights and the broader crusade for traditional family values. Significantly, the Wilks’ big checks are also aimed at influencing the politics of climate and environment, energy and extraction, to protect fossil fuel interests.”





The blessings of that unique brand of American religious extremism and wealth, especially where those involved are brimming with self-righteous certitude in their crusade against social change and against the expansion of liberty, freedom, and justice for all.

724Seney
September 5th, 2023, 04:52 PM
He's just a mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego (remind you of anyone?)

YES!
The resemblance is really striking.
He reminds me of YOU.

I notice that you don't deny this description of Ramaswamy. I think that it is spot on. I'd add the word "smarmy," also. He is irritating in the extreme. But, since the GOP has not been nominating anyone who isn't noxious in the extreme for 7 years now, I guess that this isn't disqualifying in any way. In fact, I consider it to be quite calculated.

Thanks for noticing. But also be aware it was a worthless "notice." My comment was directed solely at the question posed by Chip. As a reminder, that question was "Remind you of anyone?"
And, my oh my, it did!! Very strikingly so! Again, to refresh your memory (or what's left of it) I observed "A mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego" as a comment which describes Chip to a "T."

No reference to or insinuation of Ramaswamy is anywhere to be found in my post. So, you noticed correctly but, as usual, you connected the wrong dots.
#pinhead

Chip
September 5th, 2023, 05:08 PM
Is 724 your cell number at the institution?

https://i.imgur.com/Shp4dmY.jpg

TSherbs
September 5th, 2023, 05:53 PM
He's just a mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego (remind you of anyone?)

YES!
The resemblance is really striking.
He reminds me of YOU.

I notice that you don't deny this description of Ramaswamy. I think that it is spot on. I'd add the word "smarmy," also. He is irritating in the extreme. But, since the GOP has not been nominating anyone who isn't noxious in the extreme for 7 years now, I guess that this isn't disqualifying in any way. In fact, I consider it to be quite calculated.

Thanks for noticing. But also be aware it was a worthless "notice." My comment was directed solely at the question posed by Chip. As a reminder, that question was "Remind you of anyone?"
And, my oh my, it did!! Very strikingly so! Again, to refresh your memory (or what's left of it) I observed "A mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego" as a comment which describes Chip to a "T."

No reference to or insinuation of Ramaswamy is anywhere to be found in my post. So, you noticed correctly but, as usual, you connected the wrong dots.
#pinhead

Of course you did not refer to Ramaswamy. That would have actually been on topic.

It's always a "pleasure" to have you around to castigate members and not have a single word to say on the topic. The degree to which you do this is as instructive as anything else around here done by anyone else.

724Seney
September 5th, 2023, 06:55 PM
He's just a mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego (remind you of anyone?)

YES!
The resemblance is really striking.
He reminds me of YOU.

I notice that you don't deny this description of Ramaswamy. I think that it is spot on. I'd add the word "smarmy," also. He is irritating in the extreme. But, since the GOP has not been nominating anyone who isn't noxious in the extreme for 7 years now, I guess that this isn't disqualifying in any way. In fact, I consider it to be quite calculated.

Thanks for noticing. But also be aware it was a worthless "notice." My comment was directed solely at the question posed by Chip. As a reminder, that question was "Remind you of anyone?"
And, my oh my, it did!! Very strikingly so! Again, to refresh your memory (or what's left of it) I observed "A mouthy rich twat with a hyperinflated ego" as a comment which describes Chip to a "T."

No reference to or insinuation of Ramaswamy is anywhere to be found in my post. So, you noticed correctly but, as usual, you connected the wrong dots.
#pinhead

Of course you did not refer to Ramaswamy. That would have actually been on topic.

It's always a "pleasure" to have you around to castigate members and not have a single word to say on the topic. The degree to which you do this is as instructive as anything else around here done by anyone else.

Oh, I see....the idea is to remain "on topic?"
How can you even say that with a straight face?
You are such a frikkin' hypocrite, it is ridiculous.
#pinhead

TSherbs
September 5th, 2023, 07:50 PM
Once again, you grant the content of the statement by simply attacking the messenger.

If you were to say something on the topic, you would say something about the recent media disinformation you see (or don't see), or perhaps something about Ramaswamay's interview on MSNBC (I quoted an article about the bad interview and his bad responses).

TSherbs
September 5th, 2023, 07:53 PM
Here is an interesting critique of bad news interview behavior and bad politician behavior in reply (from Tangle):

Andrea Mitchell vs Vivek Ramaswamy

https://www.readtangle.com/vivek-ramaswamy-andrea-mitchell-climate-change/?ref=tangle-newsletter

Here, Seney. Reposted for clarity. Right on the topic.

One of the strengths of Tangle is that the writer provides BOTH a point of view from the "Right" and a point of view from the "Left" and then gives "his take"--and he works hard to be balanced and independent. I don't always agree with him, but I ALWAYS read his opinion (Isaac Saul). AdFontes Media rates their bias in the middle, but just slightly right-leaning. Refreshing at times.

https://www.readtangle.com/about/

TSherbs
September 5th, 2023, 07:58 PM
Two billionaire Texas brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking have pumped millions of dollars into rightwing media outfits that have promoted climate-crisis denialism and sent more big checks to back an array of evangelical projects and conservative Texas politicians. The fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks have each doled out millions of dollars through separate foundations over the last decade to a number of high-profile conservative and religious groups including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.

“Thanks to their incredible wealth and largesse, the country as well as the [Republican] party are now feeling the effects of their aggressive brand of religiously-charged political activism,” said Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of Anointed with Oil.

Farris Wilks and his wife control the Thirteen Foundation, while Dan Wilks and his wife lead the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, both of which have been funded with proceeds from the 2011 sale of their majority stake in Frac Tech Services for $3.2bn. Since they created their foundations, six- and seven-figure checks from the Wilks brothers have bolstered numerous pro-fossil fuel and evangelical projects.

The Wilks brothers, for instance, have poured millions of dollars into PragerU and the Daily Wire, two rightwing media outlets that have promoted wide-ranging conservative agendas, including climate crisis denialism to school-age kids and adults via short videos, articles and other materials. The two brothers have given at least $8m to PragerU, which is unaccredited, according to Texas financial records. In July, Florida approved the use of what PragerU has called its “edutainment” videos and other materials for use in its classrooms, and PragerU has said it is trying to get other states, including Texas, to do likewise.

In 2015, Farris Wilks gave $4.7m to help launch the Daily Wire and remains an owner of the media company, whose founding editor and co-owner Ben Shapiro has forged ties with Dennis Prager, the PragerU founder and talkshow host. Shapiro and Prager are slated to attend a PragerU “founders’ retreat” in September for donors who give at least $100,000 a year. Historically, the two brothers have also backed a number of rightwing Texas Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz, whose abortive run for president in 2016 was bolstered by $15m they gave to a pro-Cruz Super Pac.

...

Or here, Seney, right on topic. You might respond to *any* of the material from this article, which is about money and religious influence in conservative media outlets and other places.

dneal
November 6th, 2023, 01:30 PM
To be generous, let’s just say the legacy media was simply incorrect with these “stories” they advanced.

How many did you fall for, and why do you still believe the same media?

81174

Chuck Naill
November 6th, 2023, 04:24 PM
Whoever compiled that list was playing with someone’s mind. I’ll provide an example. No one ever said that getting any vaccine would prevent contracting an infection.

What was stated clearly that a vaccine provides the best protection against hospitalization and death, for which it has been proven to have provided. We can add protection against “long Covid”.

It is obvious to me that some of you get your information from alternative sites. Maybe face book or YouTube. I say this because it’s easy to search on what you say and end up on those sorts of websites.

dneal
November 6th, 2023, 06:49 PM
Whoever compiled that list was playing with someone’s mind. I’ll provide an example. No one ever said that getting any vaccine would prevent contracting an infection.

You have been brainwashed. They all said if you get the vaccine, you wouldn't get covid.


81175

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 06:13 AM
The only folks here who you should quote is Fauci and Walenski. They are the only ones that matter. However, the topic is not individuals making statements, but media. In the case of the Wilensky misquotes, her not being in line with the CDC was reported and walked back. This means our media worked. That's what a useful and responsible media does.

Anyone with a smattering of experience with vaccines, childhood or adult, will know that vaccines are not 100 percent. It is just the nature of vaccines, but certainly no reason not to avail yourself of whatever protection can be derived and especially as one ages, and immune function is diminished. There is so much misinformation concerning vaccines. I use NPR, PBS, and NYT for information. I have noticed that they fact check well.

dneal
November 7th, 2023, 07:02 AM
That's one of your most pathetic dodges yet.

Only quote Fauci and Walenski? Fine, their quotes are right there.

However the topic is not individuals, but media? Fine, Rachel Maddow (media host) said it. Albert Bourla and Bill Gates appear in the media.

You said no one said it. There they are saying it.

Your media (that you still cite) has a long history of publishing misinformation. It's right there in that list of hoaxes.

They clearly have an accuracy or truthfulness problem. Why do you still find them credible?

724Seney
November 7th, 2023, 08:01 AM
That's one of your most pathetic dodges yet.

Agree!
And, just why does he do this?????
The root cause is, as you say, he is brainwashed. Those amenable to brainwashing find their way into the pharmaceutical industry and make a living by becoming brainwashed then then spouting off the misinformation they are spoon fed.
And, the better they do at it, the more free luxury trips they get, the more bonuses they get and the more they get paid.
In sum, he's a professional at it and we should not have any expectation that it will change anytime soon.
So, get your popcorn, sit back and be entertained.

dneal
November 7th, 2023, 08:27 AM
Wanna pick another one Chuck?

How many recent mainstream media hoaxes did you fall for?

- Russian collusion
- 2020 Election most secure in history
- Trump called neo-nazis "fine people"
- If you get vaccinated you won't catch COVID
- Jussie Smollett
- Bubba Wallace garage pull
- Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation
- Covington kids
- Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot
- Chinese weather balloon
- Kavanaugh rape
- Trump said drinking bleach would fight COVID
- Russia bombed their own pipeline
- Trump pee tape
- COVID lab leak was a conspiracy theory
- Border agents whipped migrants
- Trump saved nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago
- Steele Dossier
- Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan
- Muslim travel ban
- Andrew Cuomo showed the best COVID leadership
- Ghost of Kyiv
- Trump built cages for migrant kids
- al-Baghdadi was an "austere religious scholar"
- Trump overfed Koi fish in Japan
- Trump tax cuts benefited only the rich
- Cloth masks prevent COVID
- An SUV killed parade marchers
- Trump used teargas to clear a crowd for a bible photo
- Don't Say Gay was in a bill
- Putin price hike
- Ivermectin is a horse dewormer and not for humans
- Mostly peaceful protests
- Trump overpowered secret service for wheel of "The Beast"
- Officer Sicknick was murdered by protesters
- January 6th was an insurrection
- Trump mocked a reporter's disability

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 10:54 AM
Trump did say, very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville. Neo Nazis were present.

Manafort and Stone were involved with Russia for years and they worked with Trump to get elected. Yes, Russia was involved and the involvement was complex.

Most secure, no idea, but Trump lost the election by a wide margin. None of his or his cronies allegations were legally validated.

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 10:56 AM
When you’ve been wrong as many times as you you have in so many topics, the only recourse is to accuse anything contrary as a dodge.

dneal
November 7th, 2023, 02:32 PM
Trump did say, very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville. Neo Nazis were present.

Manafort and Stone were involved with Russia for years and they worked with Trump to get elected. Yes, Russia was involved and the involvement was complex.

Most secure, no idea, but Trump lost the election by a wide margin. None of his or his cronies allegations were legally validated.

You have no idea on the "most secure" narrative? Go see many of TSherbs' links/talking points. Here's an AP article: Repudiating Trump, officials say election ‘most secure’ (https://apnews.com/article/top-officials-elections-most-secure-66f9361084ccbc461e3bbf42861057a5)

Manafort and Stone is a guilt by association narrative. Mueller found no collusion with Trump, and we know Hillary paid for the Steele Dossier which started the whole thing.

Fine people. You often insist that transcripts be examined. Here you go.

81208


You're a victim of a media you should know is either incompetent to report what is actually happening, or is intentionally misleading you.

But you continue to give them credence.

Weird...

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 02:57 PM
I know you didn’t compile the list. You most likely copied and pasted from a fringe site.

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 03:08 PM
Yes, ivermectin is a horse wormer.

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 03:11 PM
Yes, he mocked the disabled reporter.

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 03:12 PM
Yes, Jan 6 actions fits the definition of insurrection.

dneal
November 7th, 2023, 03:16 PM
Yes, he mocked the disabled reporter.

Yes, with the same motions he had mocked many others with - to represent ineptitude.

The fact that this particular reporter had a disability was simply coincidence.

This is all demonstrable - please speak up if you want to watch that demonstration - but you believe the narrative.

I'm sorry your media did that to your brain.

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 03:16 PM
Yes…lol!
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/23/trump-bleach-one-year-484399

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 03:18 PM
Unless Trump had suddenly contacted a debilitating muscular disease with spastic symptoms, he made fun of the reporter.

Chuck Naill
November 7th, 2023, 03:21 PM
Yes he did…🤪

"I'm the 'effing' president, take me up to the Capitol now!" Trump insisted, according to the aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, describing what she was told had happened in the limo that day by another White House aide, Tony Ornato.”

dneal
November 7th, 2023, 03:40 PM
The briefest demonstration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oTqFoOGiro

Your media constructs your echo chamber.

kazoolaw
November 8th, 2023, 06:03 AM
Yes, ivermectin is a horse wormer.

Curious: do you not know of approved human usage, or do you know and conceal that?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043740/

Chuck Naill
November 9th, 2023, 04:49 PM
What I do know, ivermectin is not an approved medication for Covid 19 infections. If you know otherwise, I’m all ears.

dneal
November 9th, 2023, 04:53 PM
Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment. It's pennies a dose.

Another hauls in billions of taxpayer money to pay for research that they will then sell for more billions to taxpayers.

I'm sure no money is being skimmed anywhere and that's all on the up and up.

Did I mention that all those billions being shuffled around depends on no other treatment - like ivermectin - being available?

Chuck Naill
November 11th, 2023, 06:12 AM
It is safe and effective because you say so. I am seeing a pattern for several of your recent posts. I hope your rosacea clears up but be sure to limit your alcohol intake.

dneal
November 11th, 2023, 07:09 AM
It is safe and effective because you say so. I am seeing a pattern for several of your recent posts. I hope your rosacea clears up but be sure to limit your alcohol intake.

Chuck, what possible reason could there be for you to introduce "rosacea" in a post in this thread?

You get more bizarre by the day.

kazoolaw
November 11th, 2023, 09:18 AM
Yes, Jan 6 actions fits the definition of insurrection.

Source please.

Chuck Naill
November 12th, 2023, 03:42 PM
Yes, Jan 6 actions fits the definition of insurrection.

Source please.

You’re a smart person. Google it…

kazoolaw
November 12th, 2023, 04:42 PM
Didn’t think you had one.

kazoolaw
November 12th, 2023, 04:51 PM
Israel/Hamas has been strangely absent from this forum.
On topic: shocked at reports that “journalists “ embedded with Hamas entered Israel alongside them and were on scene recording the slaughter. And that the major media failed to disclose this.
Still early in the story, but looks bad. One”journalist “ fired upon release of a photo with a Hamas official.

Chuck Naill
November 13th, 2023, 05:59 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/other/journalists-embedded-with-hamas-on-oct-7-violated-all-media-redlines-editorial/ar-AA1jH91b

https://www.christianpost.com/news/mainstream-news-outlets-deny-prior-knowledge-of-hamas-attack.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/photos-of-reporters-with-hamas-spark-new-theory-about-attacks/ar-AA1jF46U

dneal
November 18th, 2023, 10:33 AM
Isn't this what one of those "fringe epidemiologists" said would happen?

Why did corporate media go along with the fake narrative (aside from Pfizer advertising money, of course...).

"The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children."

81413

Chuck Naill
November 19th, 2023, 06:05 AM
Hindsight is 20/20.

dneal
November 19th, 2023, 07:34 AM
Hindsight? Dr. Bhattacharya said it before lockdown choices were made.

He's an epidemiologist though, who teaches health policy; and also has a PhD in economics. Corporate media paid by Pfizer and leftist social media colluding with the government silenced one of the experts who was right. From the beginning.

He joined the epidemiologist at Harvard who developed the VAERS system for the NIH, and another world-renowned epidemiologist from Oxford in Great Barrington.

This is how a bureaucrat responded.

81434

The second paragraph of the declaration did say:


Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.

Chuck Naill
November 19th, 2023, 07:52 AM
His affiliated group advocated a "herd immunity" approach. This is an option only if you lack any official responsibilities. Depending on herd immunity lacks an evidenced based approach. It works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't.

dneal
November 19th, 2023, 08:48 AM
Herd immunity is a fundamental principle of immunology and epidemiology. We have written record of the Plague of Athens, and that we understand it.

Corporate media convinced you otherwise.

Corporate media convinced you the doctor who tried to remind a bureacracy of it was "fringe".

That was intentional libel. It's a matter of record. You can read the email right there in the post above.

Why do you believe otherwise, if not your media. You still believe even with the contrary evidence right before your eyes.

Sweden knew from the start. Their lead national epidemiologist was mocked too, by corporate media and bureaucrats pushing intentional misinformation.

Sweden is not hindsight.

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This is all your narrative collapsing. I told you it would, after all. All those things you've been saying I'm "wrong" about? Those are all the things your media is discovering in hindsight. Hmmm.

Chuck Naill
November 19th, 2023, 11:51 AM
Some moms use "herd immunity" by having Chicken Pox Parties. Complications of varicella herpes include encephalitis, "Chicken Pox Pneumonia, and Group A Strep.

Since I was working at the time with a health care agency, we never shut down or worked from home. A person's mother didn't heed the warnings and continued to go to church. She later died and suddenly the daughter was advising everyone to take the medical community's advice seriously. It was a sad and completely avoidable event.

dneal
November 19th, 2023, 11:53 AM
Deflection.

Did the media and the government collude to misinform you?

All those things you said I was wrong about seem to be showing up repeatedly as "hindsight".

Wait till the cancer rates hit the headlines.

Chuck Naill
November 19th, 2023, 11:56 AM
Anything that you don't want to hear is not "deflection" @dneal. ;)

dneal
November 19th, 2023, 11:58 AM
All you have is a chicken pox anecdote. There's nothing there to "hear".

It's deflection.

Chuck Naill
November 19th, 2023, 12:08 PM
Never allow the truth to get in your way of believing what you believe.

dneal
November 19th, 2023, 12:24 PM
Never allow the truth to get in your way of believing what you believe.

Yes, I noted earlier that you have a penchant for it.

Francis Collins' email to Tony Fauci is right there for you to read. That's about as blatant of a truth as there is.

You're mumbling about chicken pox.

Pendragon
November 19th, 2023, 01:10 PM
Chuck, what possible reason could there be for you to introduce "rosacea" in a post in this thread?
Mudslinging and recreational trolling. Hey, it's the Internet! It would likely not occur if the forum was moderated.

Chuck Naill
November 20th, 2023, 08:51 AM
Research as shown Ivermectin is effective is treating symptoms of rosacea. It has not been shown to be beneficial against the Covid 19 virus or subsequent strains.

kazoolaw
November 21st, 2023, 03:35 PM
Research as shown Ivermectin is effective is treating symptoms of rosacea.

News alert: Chuck agrees ivermectin isn’t just horse medicine.

Chuck Naill
November 22nd, 2023, 10:59 AM
Rosacea is caused by a parasite. Equine worms are a parasite. I figured a smart dude like you would not need to be schooled.

kazoolaw
November 23rd, 2023, 05:33 AM
I wasn’t sure you understood the difference between human and equine.
I’m thankful to have cleared that up for you.

Chuck Naill
November 23rd, 2023, 07:34 AM
Your too cute, Kaz.

kazoolaw
November 28th, 2023, 10:31 AM
Aw, shucks!

TSherbs
December 1st, 2023, 05:59 AM
This isn't exactly on misinformation: the Wa Po has an interesting article on how news outlets are moving into subreddits (and out of X). I look at Reddit occasionally, but only for fountain pen sales. Article also says that Reddit is preparing for a public stock offering (maybe that's old news, idk).

dneal
December 7th, 2023, 11:21 AM
Anyone watching the GOP debates saw that Vivek clearly ruled the stage in every one.

Legacy media sells people this narrative though. They rank Ramaswamy among the last to dead last, with Chris Christie winning this latest debate.

It's literally an alternate reality they're claiming.

Corporate Media is the Misinformation Problem

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TSherbs
January 3rd, 2024, 07:10 AM
Gateway Pundit gets scrutinized in lengthy WaPo article.

Here's to hoping that the defamed Georgia election workers get a 100 million from them, too.

dneal
January 3rd, 2024, 08:04 AM
The AP on Harvard:


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That's right. Pointing out one having done the thing that would get any student expelled, is now "conservative weapon".

And if that isn't ridiculous enough, "scalping" was a colonist practice.



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