The Southwest Airlines Crisis Illustrates our Politically Divided News Media

Look who is and who is not covering the Southwest Airlines breakdown and the potential culpability of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. At Lever News, David Sirota describes this daunting problem in his article, "The Partisan Ghost In The Media Machine":

This media dysfunction exemplifies what I’ve previously called The Algorithm: an information ecosystem in which news outlets promote or suppress facts based on whether those facts will flatter or offend their audience’s partisan impulses.

Stories that might shame Democrats are amplified by right-wing media, but effectively shadowbanned by legacy and left-of-center media that do not want to offend a liberal readership that loathes news that might shame the Democratic politicians they worship. This is why previous reporting months ago about Buttigieg’s refusal to do his job was similarly erased from the liberal discourse.

It’s the same thing on the other side: Reporting that might embarrass Republicans is touted by those legacy and left-of-center media, but never mentioned by right-wing media outlets that don’t want to offend the MAGA movement....

When journalism that embarrasses Democratic politicians is promoted by Fox News — and ghosted by MSNBC — liberals either never see the reporting, or they get to eyeroll and smugly laugh at it, insisting the verifiable facts must be false just because they happen to be amplified by Rupert Murdoch rather than by Rachel Maddow. The converse is also true: When facts embarrassing Republicans are reported by MSNBC — and ignored by Fox News — most conservatives never even see them, and those who do get to brush it off as “fake news” from “liberal media.”

This dynamic is a big part of the democracy crisis in America. It has created two throngs of zombie partisans fighting a never-ending war of attrition from behind screens that tell them only what they want to hear, and censor facts that might alter their thinking.

Fixing this nightmare requires the kind of media that Joseph Pulitzer envisioned — a media that will “never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong.”

Clearly, America doesn’t have that media — and many seem to know it, as polls show trust in media plummeting.

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Applauding Heterodox News Media

#1 is an excellent comment by Glenn Greenwald that is critical of our tribal media corporations. When I post heterodox comments or questions, the most vocal comments at FB accuse me of being a Republican, Under Russian Influence, "What's happened to you?" etc. We'll see what happens here. And no, I'm not defending Donald Trump (I didn't vote for him and I think he was massively destructive as a president). Because I think Nancy Pelosi's suspicious skyrocketing wealth should be investigated. This doesn't mean I am right-leaning (I'm not). Because I don't like Coke doesn't mean that I like Pepsi. Amen to Tucker Carlson's criticism of both Pelosi AND Mitch McConnell. We need a lot fewer people who consider thinking to be a team sport.

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David Talbot’s Deep-Dive into the Corruption of the CIA

I'm reading The Devil's Chessboard, David Talbot's 2015 page-turner about Alan Dulles and the CIA. Excerpts:

In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust....

[W]hen Allen Dulles served as the United States’ top spy in continental Europe during World War II, he blatantly ignored Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender and pursued his own strategy of secret negotiations with Nazi leaders....

Allen Dulles outmaneuvered and outlived Franklin Roosevelt. He stunned Harry Truman, who signed the CIA into existence in 1947, by turning the agency into a Cold War colossus far more powerful and lethal than anything Truman had imagined. Eisenhower gave Dulles immense license to fight the administration’s shadow war against Communism, but at the end of his presidency, Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but “a legacy of ashes.” Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office....

Dulles would serve John F. Kennedy for less than a year, but their briefly entwined stories would have monumental consequences. Clearly outmatched in the beginning by the savvy spymaster, who beguiled Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK proved a quick learner in the Washington power games. He became the first and only president who dared to strip Dulles of his formidable authority. But Dulles’s forced retirement did not last long after Kennedy jettisoned him from the CIA in November 1961. Instead of easing into his twilight years, Dulles continued to operate as if he were still America’s intelligence chief, targeting the president who had ended his illustrious career. The underground struggle between these two icons of power is nothing less than the story of the battle for American democracy....

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Twitter Files Result in Conspiracy of Silence by Legacy Media Outlets

I just finished reading "The Most Terrifying Conclusion From the Twitter Files That Everyone's Ignoring," by J.D. Rucker.  He makes these observations, with which I agree.

Government and their proxies have been censoring American citizens by ordering Big Tech companies to do it for them. This is a clear betrayal of the spirit of the 1st Amendment at the very least and is likely worthy of legal action. . . .

But while conservative media is busy discussing the ramifications of censorship and the near certainty that both the last two elections as well as the Covid "vaccine" rollout were dramatically impacted by illegal actions taken by members of our government, there's actually a far more troubling takeaway from all of this. For the various misinformation operations to have gone unreported by anyone in or out of government and media, that means an unfathomable number of people have been aware at the least. Many have been directly involved and we're just getting confirmation of it now.

Halfway through Rucker's article I did a search for the word "Twitter" at the websites of the NYT, Washington Post, MSNBC and NPR.  There is almost zero coverage of the Twitter Files at any of these outlets, with the exception of one article by the NYT. It's as if the Twitter Files were never released. This non-coverage is predictable based on the "news" covered by these outlets over the past several years, during which they have been selectively embellishing and stuffing stories mostly in unison, to push their Woke agenda and to elect democrats. These outlets want to claim that nothing interesting is going on because the Twitter Files revelations reflect so poorly on the "journalism" being produced by these media corporations. They want to act as though nothing is happening, but Rucker's article accurately describes that these things have been going on--there is enough here to convince any legitimate journalist with even low-level curiosity to write hundreds of articles:

  1. The FBI set up a command center in San Francisco in fall 2020 that forwarded censorship requests from bureau headquarters to social media platforms.

  2. The FBI succeeded frequently with social media firms when it forwarded censorship requests, including content posted by Americans.

  3. Federal agencies also partnered with contractors to ensure certain content was policed and censorship, creating a degree of separation.

  4. Homeland Security officials took part in weekly meetings with Twitter executives as the 2020 election approached.

  5. Homeland Security knew Twitter had second thoughts about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.

    6. [More . . . ]

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