‘Leaker of the Free World’: New York Post Cover for August 30, 2019
Posted: August 31, 2019 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Humor, U.S. News, White House | Tags: corruption, FBI, Humor, Inspector General Report, James Comey, journalism, Leaking, media, New York Post, Press Leaks Leave a comment
A Letter To Our Subscribers, From The New York Times
Posted: August 8, 2019 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: journalism, media, New York Times, NYT Leave a commentDear Valued Subscriber,
For a mere $39.99 a month, about what you pay your Guatemalan nanny, you depend on us for thought-provoking personal reassurance, award-winning arrogance, hard-hitting sycophancy, and up-to-the-minute coverage of Orange Man – who is very, very bad.
The New York Times remains the world’s most prestigious Viewpoint Validation Service because we understand the crippling emptiness permeating the wealthy liberal soul – we are that emptiness – and you entrust us to make you feel good, smart and worthy every day.
While News and Opinion whisper watered-down postgrad nothings in your ear, Style and Dining guarantee you’ll be validated on the outside, as well as inside. Style and Dining remain committed to informing you on exactly what Brooklyn thought was cool three years ago. While the city that is our namesake – and the place you’ve built your entire identity around – might be a dead, stale cultural wasteland that no one cares about anymore, our Travel section reminds you that you’re a global citizen. Times subscribers don’t have homes, they have bases.
But even the pre-eminent VVS is vulnerable to mistakes.
As some of you are aware, we failed in our commitment to ferociously guard the sanctity of your echo chamber this week. A headline appeared on our front page suggesting Orange Man spoke against racism. While the headline was factual, it was a flagrant betrayal of the service you expect us to provide and we literally stopped the presses to fix it.
We listened to our readers on how to proceed from there. The headline writer was an elderly holdover from the days when we were a newspaper. But today’s lovepaper business is different. Inspired by the Texas revolutionary Joaquin Castro, our editorial board decided to take out a full page ad in our own paper to publish his home address and pictures of his family. Then we mobilized our 52,247 interns to brigade his employer, us, with phone calls to report that we have a racist in our ranks. The writer was immediately fired. Our interns, known as …. (read more)
Source: Spectator USA, as told to Chadwick Moore
The New York Times Company Tanks 20% After Saying Ad Revenue Will Decline Next Quarter
Posted: August 8, 2019 Filed under: Business, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: media, New York Times, Newspapers Leave a comment- Shares of The New York Times Company plunged as much as 20% on Wednesday after the publisher said it expects total advertising revenue to fall next quarter.
- The newspaper publisher reported second quarter results on Wednesday that beat expectations for earnings per share but fell short of revenue estimates.
- The New York Times also said it added 197,000 new digital-only subscribers during the period, bringing the publication’s total subscriber base to 4.7 million.
- Watch The New York Times Company trade live.
The New York Time Company saw its stock tumble as much as 20% on Wednesday after the newspaper publisher said it expects advertising revenue to shrink by high-single digits in the third quarter.
[Read the full story here, at Markets Insider]
The publisher reported second quarter financial results on Wednesday. Here are the key numbers:
- Revenue: $436.25 million, compared to $439.25 million estimated by analysts
- Earnings per share: $0.17, compared to $0.15 estimated by analysts
- Operating profit: $37.9 million, down from $40 million last year
The company said it expects total ad revenue to decline in the high-single digits Read the rest of this entry »
‘A Saudi Excuse for Murder’: New York Post Cover for October 16th, 2018
Posted: October 17, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Foreign Policy, Global, Mediasphere | Tags: Embassy, media, murder, New York Post, news, NYC, Saudi Arabia, Tabloid Leave a commentSource: New York Post
John Brennan, Heroic American
Posted: August 16, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: CNN, corruption, John Brennan, media, MSNBC, National security, Obama administration, Security clearance, Trump Administration Leave a commentKarol Markowicz: The Media’s Blatant Hypocrisy — Even About Media-Bashing
Posted: August 14, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, Terrorism | Tags: Antifa, Bill de Blasio, Charlottesville, CNN, journalism, media, New York Post, NYPost, Rupert Murdoch, The Press Leave a commentOn Sunday, the Unite the Right II rally of white supremacists fizzled out. Antifa demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., who gathered to mark the anniversary of the first Unite the Right rally, threw eggs at Secret Service, were arrested for assaulting a man wearing a Make America Great Again hat, launched fireworks and smoke bombs at police and assaulted NBC reporter Cal Perry. Perry had his camera knocked out of his hands while the protester screamed profanities at him.
The story appears on various media sites, and several reporters tweeted about the attack, but the outrage was muted. Instead, nearly every outlet went out of their way to gently describe the Antifa mob. The headlines at CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post made sure to call the group “anti-hate protesters.”
[Read the full story here, at nypost.com]
After two years of constant self-applause, and furrowed-brow concern about President Trump sowing mistrust in the media as well as possibly instigating violence against its members, where is the outrage when a reporter is physically assaulted?
Had it been an alt-right member doing the attacking, is there any doubt the story would lead all news shows and make the front page of all the major newspapers?
Also on Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio sat down with Brian Stelter at CNN to continue his crybaby “News Corp is mean to me so I wish they’d disappear” tour. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Remember When Obama Did This In Response To Russian Meddling?
Posted: July 19, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Mediasphere, Russia | Tags: Cyber Attack, Cyberwarfare, Democrats, Dmitry Medvedev, media, Obama, Rush Limbaugh Leave a commentConservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was on a tear on Wednesday over the media’s response to President Trump’s widely criticized summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Limbaugh dedicated one segment of the three-hour show to providing some uncomfortable flashblacks for Trump’s Democratic critics.
Limbaugh led into the discussion by quoting a June 2018 story by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff titled, “Obama cyber chief confirms ‘stand down’ order against Russian cyberattacks in summer 2016“:
The Obama White House’s chief cyber official testified Wednesday that proposals he was developing to counter Russia’s attack on the U.S. presidential election were put on a ‘back burner’ after he was ordered to ‘stand down’ his efforts in the summer of 2016.
Here’s the video of Obama’s chief cyber official Michael Daniel revealing the “stand down” order in a Senate Intelligence Committee:
“This is the Obama administration,” said Limbaugh. “They knew the Russians were hacking. They knew Russians were engaging in cyber warfare, and the Obama White House chief cyber official testified that he was told to stand down. Read the rest of this entry »
TIME Cover, Corrected
Posted: June 22, 2018 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Illegal immigration, Illegal immigration to the United States, media, Migrants, satire, Time Leave a comment‘SEX CULT!’ New York Post Cover for April 21, 2018
Posted: April 22, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Entertainment, Mediasphere, Religion, U.S. News | Tags: Cult, media, New York, New York Post, news, Newspaper, NYC, Sex, Sexuality, Slavery, Tabloid Leave a commentSource: New York Post
‘SYRIA STRIKE’: New York Post Cover for April 14, 2018
Posted: April 14, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Foreign Policy, Guns and Gadgets, Mediasphere, Russia, U.S. News, War Room | Tags: media, New York, news, NY Post, Syria, Tabloid 1 CommentSource: New York Post
[VIDEO] MONTAGE: Zuckerberg Doesn’t Know — His ‘Team’ Will ‘Follow Up’
Posted: April 11, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Science & Technology, U.S. News | Tags: Congress, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, media, video Leave a comment
During Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before two Congressional committees, it was unclear whether the Facebook CEO knew the answer to ANYTHING. Don’t worry though, his ‘team’ will be sure to follow-up.
‘WE OWN YOU: Pay Us For Your Privacy’: New York Post Cover for April 7, 2018
Posted: April 8, 2018 Filed under: Business, Entertainment, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Advertising, Facebook, media, New York, NYC, Sheryl Sandberg, Tabloid, Zuckerberg Leave a commentSource: New York Post
[VIDEO] China’s Eye-Rolling Journalist Incident – the Aftermath
Posted: March 15, 2018 Filed under: China, Mediasphere | Tags: 13th National People's Congress, Eye-Rolling, media, video Leave a comment
A remarkable moment during a media conference of the 13th National People’s Congress has ignited a social media storm.
A female journalist attracted the attention during a live broadcast when she disapprovingly glanced at the woman next to her posing a rather long and stylized question. Everything about this controversy and its aftermath. (Turn on English subtitles if needed).
Go here for more
‘The Twilight Zone,’ from A to Z
Posted: February 19, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, History, Mediasphere | Tags: 1960s, Donald Trump, FDR, media, Paul Krugman, Ray Bradbury, Reviews, Rod Sterling, Twilight Zone Leave a commentJ.W. McCormack writes: The planet has been knocked off its elliptical orbit and overheats as it hurtles toward the sun; the night ceases to exist, oil paintings melt, the sidewalks in New York are hot enough to fry an egg on, and the weather forecast is “more of the same, only hotter.” Despite the unbearable day-to-reality of constant sweat, the total collapse of order and decency, and, above all, the scarcity of water, Norma can’t shake the feeling that one day she’ll wake up and find that this has all been a dream. And she’s right. Because the world isn’t drifting toward the sun at all, it’s drifting away from it, and the paralytic cold has put Norma into a fever dream.
[Watch how many times J.W. McCormack packs this discussion of Twilight Zone history with unrelated partisan political whining, pro-FDR, anti-GOP revisionist history, and Paul Krugmanesque drooling, navel gazing, and various unrelated anti-Trump nonsense. Is this really about the Twilight Zone? Or just another Op-Ed column?]
This is “The Midnight Sun,” my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, and one that has come to seem grimly familiar. I also wake up adrift, in a desperate and unfamiliar reality, wondering if the last year in America has been a dream—I too expect catastrophe, but it’s impossible to know from which direction it will come, whether I am right to trust my senses or if I’m merely sleepwalking while the actual danger becomes ever-more present. One thing I do know is that I’m not alone: since the election of Donald Trump, it’s become commonplace to compare the new normal to living in the Twilight Zone, as Paul Krugman did in a 2017 New York Times op-ed titled “Living in the Trump Zone,” in which he compared the President to the all-powerful child who terrorizes his Ohio hometown in “It’s a Good Life,” policing their thoughts and arbitrarily striking out at the adults. But these comparisons do The Twilight Zone a disservice. The show’s articulate underlying philosophy was never that life is topsy-turvy, things are horribly wrong, and misrule will carry the day—it is instead a belief in a cosmic order, of social justice and a benevolent irony that, in the end, will wake you from your slumber and deliver you unto the truth.

Elizabeth Allen and her mannequin double in “The After Hours,” 1960
The Twilight Zone has dwelt in the public imagination, since its cancellation in 1964, as a synecdoche for the kind of neat-twist ending exemplified by “To Serve Man” (it’s a cookbook), “The After Hours” (surprise, you’re a mannequin), and “The Eye of the Beholder” (everyone has a pig-face but you). It’s probably impossible to feel the original impact of each show-stopping revelation, as the twist ending has long since been institutionalized, clichéd, and abused in everything from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects to Twilight Zone-style anthology series like Black Mirror.Rewatching these episodes with the benefit of Steven Jay Rubin’s new 429-page book, The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia, (a bathroom book if ever I saw one), the punchlines are actually the least of the show’s enduring hold over the imagination; rather its creator Rod Serling’s rejoinders to the prevalent anti-Communist panic that gripped the decade: stories of witch-hunting paranoia tend to end badly for everyone, as in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which the population of a town turns on each other in a panic to ferret out the alien among them, or in “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” which relocates the premise to a diner in which the passengers of a bus are temporarily stranded and subject to interrogation by a pair of state troopers.

Leah Waggner and Barry Atwater in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street ,” 1960
The show’s most prevalent themes are probably best distilled as “you are not what you took yourself to be,” “you are not where you thought you were,” and “beneath the façade of mundane American society lurks a cavalcade of monsters, clones, and robots.” Serling had served as a paratrooper in the Philippines in 1945 and returned with PTSD; he and his eventual audience were indeed caught between the familiar past and an unknown future.
[Read the full story here, at The New York Review of Books]
They stood dazed in a no-longer-recognizable world, flooded with strange new technologies, vastly expansionist corporate or federal jurisdictions, and once-unfathomable ideologies. The culture was shifting from New Deal egalitarianism to the exclusionary persecution and vigilantism of McCarthyism, the “southern strategy” of Goldwater and Nixon, and the Cold War-era emphasis on mandatory civilian conformity, reinforced across the board in schools and the media. Read the rest of this entry »
Kurt Schlichter: The Liberal Media’s Slobbering Over The Norks Reminds Us Why We Have The Second Amendment
Posted: February 14, 2018 Filed under: Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Guns and Gadgets, Mediasphere, Politics, Self Defense | Tags: 2009 imprisonment of American journalists by North Korea, Appeasement, Communism, Donald Trump, journalism, Kim Jong-un, Kurt Schlichter, Marxism, media, Nork, North Korea, Second Amendment, The Black Book of Communism, The Olympics, Winter Olympics Leave a commentBesides having bad taste, our mainstream media is revealing our ruling class once again.
Kurt Schlichter writes: America’s most effective advocate of the principle of an armed populace is now officially the liberal media that usually seeks to do the ruling class’s bidding and strip us Normal Americans of that sacred right. But after the media’s bizarre display of eager tongue-bathing of the semi-human savages who run North Korea, any patriot has got to be thinking, “I best load up, because it’s pretty clear what the establishment’s desired end state is.”
The New York Times quivered: “Kim Jong-un’s Sister Turns on the Charm, Taking Pence’s Spotlight.”
Reuters tingled: “North Korea judged winner of diplomatic gold at Olympics.”
And CNN harassed airport travelers with: “Kim Jong Un’s sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.”
Let’s clarify something – this Kim Yo Jong woman, a key leader in a giant death cult that is torturing and killing people at this moment, is not cute, not figuratively and not literally. She’s not even a Pyongyang 6. Maybe at closing time. After a lot of soju.
But besides having bad taste, our mainstream media is revealing our ruling class once again. You watch the non-stop squee over these monsters and the only conclusion you can reasonably draw is that, for our worthless establishment, the North Korea murderocracy is not a cautionary example. It’s an objective.
Just think of it! The ability to simply make all those Normals who disagree with you go away – either for good or by exiling them to rural fun camps. No fuss, no muss, no more tiresome dissent by those banjo-jockies between the coasts!
“What? That’s crazy talk! How could you draw the conclusion from our giddy, giggling media lovefest that we approve of those adorable, wonderful North Koreans?”
[Read the full story here, at townhall.com]
Well, that’s fair. Maybe our elite doesn’t really dig the Great Big Leader’s vibe. Maybe our elite is just composed of morons. If the explanation for the media serfs’ tender fondling of these blood-drenched sadists is not a result of our morally illiterate elite’s desire to emulate the insane wickedness of the Juche Idea, then that leaves gross stupidity as the only other option.
Either they want us Normals dead or enslaved, or they are just idiots.
Pick one.
Spoiler: Neither option supports us giving up our guns. Read the rest of this entry »
‘FED UP: FBI Deputy Out in Clinton, Trump Probes Turmoil’: NY Post Cover for January 30, 2018
Posted: January 30, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Donald Trump, FBI, Hillary Clinton, journalism, media, New York, New York Post, news, NYC, Tabloid 1 CommentSource: New York Post
New York Times Crowdsources the Case for Trump, Embarrasses Pundit Class
Posted: January 20, 2018 Filed under: Mediasphere, White House | Tags: Crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Erik Wemple, media, New York Times, news, Pundit, The Washington Post, WaPo Leave a commentLetter writers on the paper’s editorial page make critical concessions that you don’t often hear on television.
Erik Wemple reports: There is a monotony to telling the truth about President Trump. He is as unfit for office today as he was in June 2015, in November 2016 and on Jan. 20, 2017. He has failed to school himself on the issues before him. He is incorrigible and a spewer of lies and falsehoods.
The New York Times editorial page has taken a short break from its self-assigned beat of telling these truths. It has forked over its Thursday editorial-page space to the arguments of Trump supporters across the country. “In the spirit of open debate, and in hopes of helping readers who agree with us better understand the views of those who don’t, we wanted to let Mr. Trump’s supporters make their best case for him as the first year of his presidency approaches its close,” noted an italicized message at the top of the presentation.
Any decision taken by the New York Times vis-à-vis Trump is guaranteed to land smack-dab in the middle of a great American fissure. And there’s been some criticism of the decision.
[Read the full story here, at The Washington Post]
Yet there’s a visionary aspect to the exercise, an aspect that only a committed cable-news watcher can appreciate. Big-time Trump supporters have failed over and over again at their jobs. Think back to Jeffrey Lord, the former pro-Trump CNN pundit who unspooled implausible historical “parallels” to excuse the Trump outrage of the day. Or think back to Kayleigh McEnany, the former pro-Trump CNN pundit who made even less sense fighting for Trump. (She’s now at the Republican National Committee.) Or think back to former White House aides — Sebastian Gorka and Sean Spicer, for example — who are no longer inelegantly spinning for the president from the White House grounds. Read the rest of this entry »
‘OH, CRAP!’: New York Post Cover for January 13, 2018
Posted: January 15, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Entertainment, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Donald Trump, media, New York Post, Newspaper, NYC, Porn Star, Tabloid Leave a comment‘NOPRAH! Do We Really Need Another Celeb President?’ NY Post Cover for Jan 9, 2018
Posted: January 10, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Entertainment, Mediasphere, U.S. News, White House | Tags: celebrity, Donald Trump, Golden Globes, media, New York, news, NYC, Oprah Winfrey, Tabloid Leave a commentSource: Covers | New York Post
Lee Smith: Why Can’t the American Media Cover the Protests in Iran?
Posted: December 31, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Terrorism, Think Tank, War Room | Tags: CNN, Iran protests, journalism, media, MSNBC, New York Time, propaganda, Washington Post 1 CommentBecause they have lost the ability to cover real news when it happens.
Lee Smith writes: As widespread anti-regime protests in Iran continue on into their third day, American news audiences are starting to wonder why the US media has devoted so little coverage to such dramatic—and possibly history-making—events. Ordinary people are taking their lives in their hands to voice their outrage at the crimes of an obscurantist regime that has repressed them since 1979, and which attacks and shoots dead them in the streets. So why aren’t the protests in Iran making headlines?
“The problem, of course, is that the places that have obsessively run those stories for the past year aren’t really news outfits—not anymore. They are in the aromatherapy business.”
The short answer is that the American media is incapable of covering the story, because its resources and available story-lines for Iran reporting and expertise were shaped by two powerful official forces—the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Obama White House. Without government minders providing them with story-lines and experts, American reporters are simply lost—and it shows.
It nearly goes without saying that only regime-friendly Western journalists are allowed to report from Iran, which is an authoritarian police state that routinely tortures and murders its political foes. The arrest and nearly two-year detention of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian drove this point home to American newsrooms and editors who might not have been paying attention. The fact that Rezaian was not an entirely hostile voice who showed “the human side” of the country only made the regime’s message more terrifying and effective: We can find you guilty of anything at any time, so watch your step.
The Post has understandably been reluctant to send someone back to Iran. But that’s hardly an excuse for virtually ignoring a story that threatens to turn the past eight years of conventional wisdom about Iran on its head. If the people who donned pink pussy hats to resist Donald Trump are one of the year’s big stories, surely people who are shot dead in the streets in Iran for resisting an actual murderous theocracy might also be deserving of a shout-out for their bravery.
[Read the full story here, at Tablet Magazine]
Yet the Post’s virtual news blackout on Iran was still more honorable than The New York Times, whose man in Tehran Thomas Erdbrink is a veteran regime mouthpiecewhose official government tour guide-style dispatches recall the shameful low-point of Western media truckling to dictators: The systematic white-washing of Joseph Stalin’s monstrous crimes by Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty.
Here’s the opening of Erdbrink’s latest dispatch regarding the protests:
Protests over the Iranian government’s handling of the economy spread to several cities on Friday, including Tehran, in what appeared to be a sign of unrest.
“Appeared”? Protests are by definition signs of unrest. The fact that Erdbrink appears to have ripped off the Iran’s government news agency Fars official coverage of the protests is depressing enough—but the function that these dispatches serve is even worse. What Iranians are really upset about, the messaging goes, isn’t the daily grind of living in a repressive theocratic police state run by a criminal elite that robs them blind, but a normal human desire for better living standards. Hey, let’s encourage European industry to invest more money in Iran! Didn’t the US overthrow the elected leader of Iran 70 years ago? Hands off—and let’s put more money in the regime’s pocket, so they can send the protesters home in time for a hearty dinner, and build more ballistic missiles, of course. Erdbrink is pimping for the regime, and requesting the West to wire more money, fast.
Selling the protesters short is a mistake. For 38 years Iranian crowds have been gathered by regime minders to chant “Death to America, Death to Israel.” When their chant spontaneously changes to “Down with Hezbollah” and “Death to the Dictator” as it has now, something big is happening. The protests are fundamentally political in nature, even when the slogans are about bread. But Erdbrink can hardly bring himself to report the regime’s history of depredations since his job is to obscure them. He may have been a journalist at one point in time, but now he manages the Times portfolio in Tehran. Read the rest of this entry »
Sohrab Ahmari: Iranians Shatter a New York Times Myth
Posted: December 31, 2017 Filed under: Censorship, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Mediasphere, Terrorism, Think Tank | Tags: "The Case Against the Iran Deal: How Can We Now Stop Iran from Getting Nukes?, Echo Chamber, Iran, Javad Zarif, journalism, media, Middle East, propaganda, Tehran, Thomas Erdbrink Leave a commentThe people haven’t closed ranks behind the regime.
“After years of cynicism, sneering or simply tuning out all things political,” wrote Erdbrink, “Iran’s urban middle classes have been swept up in a wave of nationalist fervor.” He went on: “Mr. Trump and the Saudis have helped the government achieve what years of repression could never accomplish: widespread public support for the hard-line view that the United States and Riyadh cannot be trusted.”
Erdbrink’s argument echoed rhetoric from Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Responding to October’s announcement of new U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Zarif tweeted: “Today, Iranians–boys, girls, men, women–are ALL IRGC.”
Or not.
NYT Only Finds the FBI Texts Newsworthy in that Republicans are ‘Seizing’ On Them
Posted: December 15, 2017 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: 2016 Presidential Campaign, Bias, Democrats, Department of Justice, DOJ, FBI, GOP Pounce Story, Hillary Clinton, media, New York Times, Peter Strzok Leave a commentThe New York Times has already moved on to the ‘Republicans pounce’ portion of the news cycle.
Becket Adams writes: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is facing a brewing scandal involving hyper-partisan texts written by his former team members, and the New York Times has already moved on to the “Republicans pounce” portion of the news cycle.
Because that’s often the modus operandi for these sorts of things.
Peter Strzok, who specializes in Russian counterintelligence, was removed from Mueller’s team this July. The decision to take Strzok off the Russia investigation came after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered he had sent and received dozens of anti-Trump texts between August 2015 and 2016 from Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer with whom Strzok was having an affair. Page was also on Mueller’s team, but only briefly. She returned to the FBI before the special counsel was made aware of the texts.
There’s really no getting around it: The texts are extremely partisan.
“I can not believe Donald Trump is likely to be an actual, serious candidate for president,” Page wrote in one note.
Strzok wrote in another note, “God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0.”
“And maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace,” Page wrote in another text. “I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps.” Read the rest of this entry »
VOUGE: HRC TEENOCALYPSE
Posted: December 14, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere | Tags: Über Fashion, fashion, Global Panic, HRC, media, Teens Leave a comment‘Perv Moore Loses in Alabama’: New York Post Cover for December 13, 2017
Posted: December 13, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Alabama, Congress, GOP, media, New York, New York Post, news, Newspaper, Roy Moore, Special Election, Steve Bannon, Tabloid Leave a commentSource: New York Post
Disinformation vs. Democracy: Authoritarians Outspending U.S.
Posted: November 28, 2017 Filed under: China, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Global, Russia, Self Defense, Think Tank | Tags: Data for Democracy, Disinformation, media, propaganda, Psychology Leave a comment
Authoritarian regimes like Russia and China are outspending the United States in the realm of soft power, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told the National Democratic Institute’s annual Democracy Dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. last night.
“Our budget is $650 million—a fraction of what our adversaries spend,” he said “Today, Russia is spending over a billion dollars on covert propaganda operations,” he added. “Russian TV, radio, and internet bots continue to push misinformation without almost no pushback from the US.”
The authoritarian threat required greater investment in non-kinetic resources for exerting influence abroad, Murphy added.
“We have more people working at military grocery stores than diplomats deployed abroad,” he said.
Facebook estimates that 10 million people saw the [Kremlin’s] paid ads and up to 150 million people saw other content from the fake accounts, which Facebook has traced to the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed troll farm, WIRED reports:
Psychologists and students of advertising say the ads were cleverly designed to look like other internet memes, and to appeal to readers’ emotions. Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology at NYU, says he was surprised at the sophistication of the campaign. “It wasn’t transparent lies. It was just pushing our buttons,” says Van Bavel. “To me, this is more pernicious. It’s not a matter of fiction that we can root out with fact-checking. It’s more about turning Americans against each other.”
“The IRA are not amateurs, they’re clearly familiarizing themselves with the kind of content that resonates with the target audiences,” says Renee DiResta, researcher with Data for Democracy, a nonprofit group that has been digging into the data on Russian-linked accounts.
The threat of disinformation and other active measures employed by the Kremlin requires adaptation and innovation from the advanced democracies, according to NATO’s Secretary General.
“Defense is no longer about just looking at a map and deciding where to place armies,” Jens Stoltenberg said this week. “It’s also about countering misinformation. Protecting infrastructure. Making our societies resilient to attack.”
“The geography of danger has shifted,” he added.
The NDI dinner honored three civil society groups on the front lines of confronting disinformation and false news – . Rappler from the Philippines, the Ukraine-based StopFake and the Oxford Internet Institute.
“When a lie is repeated 1 million times it becomes truth, especially when it’s state-sponsored hate,” said Rapplerdotcom‘s Maria Ressa. “A sock puppet network of 26 fake accounts can reach 3 million.”
Disinformation “exploits the fracture lines of society,” she said, adding that she received an average of 90 hate messages per hour.” Read the rest of this entry »
‘HUFF DADDY’: New York Post Cover for Sunday, November 21, 2017
Posted: November 21, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Al Franken, Arianna Huffington, media, New York, New York Post, news, Newspapers, Sex, Sexual Misconduct, Tabloid 1 Comment‘PERVNADO HITS ALBANY’: New York Post Cover for Sunday, November 19, 2017
Posted: November 20, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Entertainment, Mediasphere, Photography, U.S. News | Tags: David Cassidy, Governor Cuomo, media, New York, New York Post, news, Newspapers, Sex Addiction, Tabloid 1 CommentHow Not to Cover Mass Shootings
Posted: November 19, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Guns and Gadgets, Mediasphere, Terrorism, U.S. News | Tags: Gabriel Tarde, journalism, Mass Shootings, media, Psychology, The Press Leave a commentThe often sensationalistic media attention given to perpetrators is central to why massacres are happening more.
N. Schulman reports: It isn’t your imagination: Mass shootings are getting deadlier and more frequent. A recent FBI report on “active shooters” from 2000 to 2015 found that the number of incidents more than doubled from the first to the second half of the period. Four of the five deadliest shootings in American history happened in the past five years, and 2017 already far exceeds any previous year for the number of casualties.
Though we seem to be plunging ever deeper into a dark night, researchers now have a far clearer view of a key factor in the violence. A long-standing theory has matured into a body of evidence that can no longer be dismissed: The level of attention paid to mass shootings is central to why they keep happening.
The idea that some crimes might be self-spreading, like a disease, was proposed as early as 1890, when the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde labeled murders copying Jack the Ripper “suggesto-imitative assaults.” For mass shootings, the effect was well known among researchers by the early 2000s, when a wealth of information allowed forensic psychiatrist Paul E. Mullen to conclude, “These massacres are acts of mimesis, and their perpetrators are imitators.”
But the research has solidified in just the last few years. In 2015, a pair of studies analyzed databases cataloging nearly all U.S. mass shootings. They produced the first comprehensive statistical evidence that shootings occur in clusters rather than randomly across time.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ.com]
One of the studies, led by mathematician Sherry Towers of Arizona State University, used a contagion model previously applied to analyze viral videos and terrorist attacks. It found that the likelihood of a mass shooting is significantly higher when another mass shooting has recently occurred. The period of increased probability lasts, on average, for 13 days, the study found. (Notably, Dr. Towers did not find a contagion effect for shootings in which three or fewer people were killed.) The other study, conducted by Fresno State criminologist Jason Kissner, employed a different statistical modeling technique but also found an increased likelihood lasting for a similar period.
These findings are not yet conclusive. A study published in July by criminologist Adam Lankford and psychologist Sara Tomek, both of the University of Alabama, claimed that the clustering effects were not significantly different from random variation. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Sharyl Attkisson: Why No One Trusts the Mainstream Media
Posted: November 7, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, History, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: corruption, journalism, media, New York Times, news, PragerU, propaganda, Sharyl Attkisson, Trust, video Leave a comment
Trust in the media is at an all-time low. But should it be? Why do fewer and fewer Americans trust the mainstream media. Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, author of The Smear, explains.