Why Liberal (and Conservative) News Media Stays in its Own lane

Tara Henley's newest article is "Meet the press: Why much of the media looks and sounds much the same." She makes some excellent points that apply to liberal news media as well as conservative media. Reporters appears to lost a sense of curiosity. Whatever happened to the childlike curiosity in these well-trained journalists? Has it been snuffed out? Unlikely, because reporters know how to attack viewpoints that threaten their world views. What they lack is motivation to examine bullshit emanating from their own tribe.

Why is this? Sometimes, editors are refusing to allow reporters to following their instincts to be curious. This is happening in many places, resulting in excellent reporters striking out on their own. This group includes Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss and Tara Henley.  There is a second less obvious reason: Many reporters feel internalized pressures to not ask certain questions. Henley offers this list of questions left-leaning reporters refuse to pursue:

Ask yourself how many liberal media pieces you’ve seen over the past two years that, say, interrogate COVID restrictions critically (especially early on, with school closures, lockdowns, and mask mandates). Or evaluate Black Lives Matter as a political movement, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. Or offer opposing viewpoints on transgender athletes in women’s sports; or mass immigration; or diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophies, trainings, or policies. Or acknowledge the excesses of #MeToo, or prejudice against the white working class. Or present critiques of identity politics. Or explore downsides of puberty blockers and gender transition surgery for teens; or delve into the growing censoriousness on social media and in education, Hollywood, the arts, and NGOs. Or probe inner city gun violence. Or reflect the positive sides of masculinity. Or talk about God. Or reference anything that’s currently deemed a conspiracy theory in non-derogatory terms (see: the lab leak theory). Or express genuine curiosity on the reasons behind the rise of independent media, whether that’s Joe Rogan or Substack.

Why are so many reporters afraid to be curious?

Often, it’s not a boss telling you what to cover, or how to cover it, but your colleagues, the mood in your newsroom, your competition, your Twitter feed, and, increasingly, your own anxieties. (And, just as important, what you are not being told. As writer Freddie deBoer has put it: “Everyone who works in the industry lives with a dim but persistent feeling that they have committed some kind of faux pas and are paying for it, but never know where, what, or why.”). Thus, consensus is manufactured in myriad small but insidious ways, and if you want to keep working you figure out the unspoken rules.

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Douglas Murray: Black Lives Matter Started with a Good Cause, Then Turned it Into a Racket

Douglas Murray, writing in the New York Post:, is concerned about the factually defective positions taken by Black Lives Matter as well as its highly questionable financials:

Like the most fraudulent pastors, the heads of BLM take advantage of good people. They present an undeniably good cause. They prey on people’s hopes and fears. After all, who in America does not believe that black lives matter? Who wouldn’t have sympathy with, or support, a group that claims to want to help people fight injustice? But BLM operates like all rackets do.

Firstly, they lie about reality. In the case of BLM, they pretend that black people in the United States in 2022 can be killed at any time by the police. They pretend that racism is a pandemic in this country and that everything and anything must be done to tackle it.

The effects of this work is there for all to see. The American public has been misled about the real state of race in this country. A poll in 2020 asked Americans how many unarmed black men they think are killed by the police in America the previous year. More than a fifth of people who described themselves as “very liberal” said they thought it was over 10,000 unarmed black people in America killed by police every year. Among self-described “liberals,” around 40% said they thought that the figure was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. The actual figure was around 10. Meaning that liberals in America were off by several orders of magnitude. They had a completely wrongheaded idea of what America is actually like.

But no wonder. For they had spent years hearing BLM pretend that black people are killed with impunity in this country.

Murray then turns to BLM's financial misdeeds, including recent revelations that BLM purchased a "purchase of a swanky new $5.8 million mansion in Southern California."

Other commentators have been highly critical of BLM, including Wilfried Riley:

Briahna Joy Gray's podcast featured Sean Campbell, who has taken flack for looking into BLM improprieties.

Here is a longer version of this same video:

Freddie DeBoer has written on the topic. His article is "White Journalists Are Terrified of Appearing to Criticize BlackLivesMatter, Obviously"

That pouring billions of dollars into an amorphous social movement could result in mismanagement and corruption is as obvious a thing as I can imagine, and so the need for a watchdog press that helps ensure that money isn’t misspent is also quite obvious. I would analogize the current moment and BLM to the Red Cross after 9/11, when a great deal of scrutiny was justly applied to that organization and its practices. But the media has spent the past year and a half saying almost nothing about BLM and where the money has gone, ceding the ground to conservative publications. It was the right-leaning New York Post that reported that one of the cofounders of the BLM Global Network Foundation had purchased four houses in a short time span, for example. The trouble is that many left-leaning people feel that they can safely disregard anything published in conservative media, and thus a badly-needed conversation hasn't happened. Anyone who has ever been part of a large protest movement understands how desperately such movements need external review for accountability, but if only Breitbart et al. are engaged in critical inquiry, the liberal donor class is not going to be moved.

Susan Woods sounded alarms about BLM's operation back in 2020:

Continue ReadingDouglas Murray: Black Lives Matter Started with a Good Cause, Then Turned it Into a Racket

Matt Orfalea’s New Mashup on the “Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory”

My faith that legacy media outlets will take journalism seriously has plummeted in recent years. Matt Orfalea's "conspiracy theory" mashup explores one issue (of many recent issues) where media coverage has been abysmal.

The news outlets kept claiming that the virus could never ever have emerged in a lab, yet they avoided this Peter Daszak video like kryptonite. Whenever they pompously trumpeted that the lab leak was a conspiracy theory, they NEVER mentioned this 2016 video featuring Peter Daszak, president of Eco-Health.

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David Sachs’ Response to “Big Tech are Private Companies” and “Go Invent Your Own Internet”

Bari Weiss recently interviewed David Sachs on Common Sense, Bari's Substack. It is an excellent discussion of issues you will not see in legacy media outlets, who would like to see alternative media competition crushed. Here's an excerpt:

BW: The criticism that I hear a ton in response to what you're saying is: David, these are private companies. If I invent YouTube and I pay for the servers of YouTube and I've set up the whole architecture of the company, why can't I do what I want? Same with Facebook. Why don't I get to decide that I don't want some kind of clickbait or fake news or whatever on my thing? I'm going to police it. Who are you to tell me I can't?

DS: I think it's a very disingenuous argument. The same people who say that these social media companies, these big tech companies, should be free to do whatever they want because they're private companies are the same people pushing six bills through Congress right now to restrict and regulate those companies because they see them as monopolies. So they don't even believe their own argument. They all start making these libertarian arguments when these big tech companies are restricting speech in a way that they like. When they agree with the outcome, they want to give these companies the freedom to produce that outcome.

We need to fundamentally understand that free speech in our society has been privatized. The town square has been privatized. When the Constitution was written, the internet didn't exist. Back then, the town square was a physical place that you could go to, and there was a multiplicity of town squares all over the country. There were thousands of them and anybody could put their soapbox down and speak, and anyone could gather around and listen. That’s why, if you look at the First Amendment, it doesn't just protect freedom of speech and of the press. It also protects the right to peaceably assemble.

Well, where do people assemble today? They assemble in these giant social networks that have these gigantic network effects. That is where speech, especially political speech, occurs. And if you are shut out of that digital town square, to what extent do you still even have a First Amendment? To what extent do you have a right to speech? Well, I don't think you do. If you were to grab your soapbox today and go on the courthouse steps, they'll think you're a lunatic. You have no free speech right in this country if you are kicked off of these social networks.

So, I don't think it's good enough to say, well, these are private actors and, therefore, they can do whatever they want. Those private actors have too much power. They have the power to decide whether you, as an American, have an effective free speech right in this country. I think that's unacceptable. I think the Founders, the Framers of the Constitution, would never have permitted that.

...

BW: What do you say to the people who argue: If you don't like the way YouTube conducts itself, if you don't like the way Facebook conducts itself, no problem. Go make another one. Why is that not an acceptable solution to this problem?

DS: This is what you heard when Twitter and Facebook banned Trump. Their argument was: Go to a different app. And then Apple and Google banned Parler, which was the different app. And then the argument was, Well, that's not censorship. Just go create a website. And then Amazon Web Services started banning websites. So, at some point, when are you going to say this is an undue imposition on free speech? What am I supposed to do? Go create my own internet? All I wanted to do was post a tweet. Let’s not be obtuse to the power of these monopolies. I think people are being selectively oblivious to the network effects.

BW: We hear that phrase a lot: network effects. What does it mean?

DS: A network-effect business is one where the value of the service increases with the number of users. So if you think about Twitter or Facebook or the phone company, the more people who are on the service, the more value it has to everybody else. The value actually increases exponentially because the number of connections that can be made increases exponentially every time someone joins the service. If you or I want to create our own Twitter clone, it'll be very, very hard to do that because nobody else will be on it. So you have this huge chicken and egg problem. This is why these social networks are so powerful. They’ve got these huge network effects based on the fact that everybody is already on them, and it gets very, very hard to try and create a competing one.

Continue ReadingDavid Sachs’ Response to “Big Tech are Private Companies” and “Go Invent Your Own Internet”

Shamed News Media Elites Refuse to Come Clean Regarding Hunter Biden’s Laptop

What more proof do we need that Left-leaning "news" media thinks that its main job is to get particular people elected? See Matt Orfalea's mashup on Hunter Biden's Laptop. Then See Matt Taibbi's new article: "The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity: A development in the infamous laptop story further proves the "Russian Disinformation" tale was itself disinformation, shaming a herd of craven media stenographers."

Now consider this excerpt from Matt Taibbi's article:

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley.

Continue ReadingShamed News Media Elites Refuse to Come Clean Regarding Hunter Biden’s Laptop