“Once a government commits to the principle of silencing opposition, it has only one way to go, and that’s down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens”
- Harry Truman
Glenn Greenwald: "They don't understand the key point Taibbi's story: Twitter's "foreign govt hacking" pretext for censoring was a lie, and they knew it."
Greenwald continues: The reason these people insist Taibbi's story is trivial is they will not and cannot recognize any scandalous or improper behavior by leading Dem politicians. Ask them to name any. Any critique of leading Dems is automatically, to them, a fraud, a "nothingburger." They're Dems.... The most pitiful part of their attack is the utter lack of self-awareness. They claim Taibbi serves power.The hegemonic force in DC, Hollywood, academia, the US Security State, and corporate media is DNC liberalism: *them*. Their lives are about nothing but servitude to power....Their lives are only about serving the Dem Party. That's the only metric they know for "good journalism."
Eric Weinstein Points out a big problem for Ben Collins and others pretending to be journalists of Legacy Media Outlets:
Ben Collins protests too much:
Weinstein then inserts the dagger (click this image to let it scroll for the full effect):
Collins is such a joke, not a journalist.
I have long enjoyed listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcasts and reading his books. However, my respect for him fell precipitously after reading the words he spoke at the Recent Munk debate in Toronto [Munk Transcript] Tara Henley reports, in her article, "An astonishing Munk debate in Toronto, Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray's landslide, Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg's mendacity - and five reasons why trust in the mainstream media is so low":
At the beginning of the event, the crowd was split 48 percent to 52 percent in favour of the resolution. By night’s end, a full 67 percent agreed that the mainstream media should not be trusted and only 33 percent disagreed. This is a 39 percent vote gain.So, what exactly happened here?
Let’s unpack the specific tendencies that Gladwell and Goldberg exhibited that I believe swayed the audience — that, in fact, show up regularly in the mainstream press.
The first of these tendencies is mendacity.
The public is not stupid, and people get it when arguments are made in bad faith....
The second tendency on display is self-absorption.
While both Taibbi and Murray focused their arguments on the impacts of media failures on society as a whole, it was telling that Malcolm Gladwell largely focused his arguments on himself....
The third tendency is a demonstration of ideological capture.
The fact that Malcolm Gladwell fell back on arguments around a lack of diversity in the press — on a stage occupied by Taibbi, a Black man, a gay man, and a woman — signaled allegiance to a particular political project....
The pervasiveness of this political ideology within the press corps is a problem, and something that I hear complaints from the public about constantly.
Jeffrey Sachs, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is blessed with terrible critics. As its public profile has risen sharply in recent years, so has the volume of criticism against it. Unfortunately, those critiques are almost uniformly bad.With limited exceptions, critics of FIRE tend to rehearse the same tired arguments: that it receives right-wing money (so what?), often attacks the campus left (can you blame them?), and is uncharitable to college administrators (rightly so).