Matt Taibbi’s Patience with MSNBC Runs Out

Excerpt from Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Eat Me, MSNBC: Reviewing the last six years at the network that claims now to be concerned with integrity and accuracy":

[Corporate news outlets] could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.

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The Little Sailboat that Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline

1. Joe Biden promises he will make Nord Stream pipeline inoperable. Someone then destroys the pipeline. Biden then denies that he had anything to do with this act of war. 2. Next, Seymour Hersh publishes detailed investigative article showing how the U.S. destroyed the pipeline. 3. Germany, co-owner of the pipeline, displays what has got to be the most vivid case of Stockholm Syndrome in human history. 4. U.S. news media ignores the Hersh story. 5. The CIA cooks up an absurd alternative story that not-Joe-Biden destroyed the pipeline. The pipeline was destroyed using "Pro-Ukrainian" group that uses a 49 foot sailboat. 6. The NYT, which has now begrudgingly acknowledged Hersh's blockbuster story, laps up the CIA story. 7. Seymour Hersh destroys the NYT-CIA story with a handful of simple questions.

Excerpt from Hersh's newest story, "THE NORD STREAM GHOST SHIP: The false details in the CIA's cover story":

My initial report received coverage around the world but was ignored by the major newspapers and television networks in the United States. As the story gained traction in Europe and elsewhere abroad, the New York Times on March 7 published a report quoting US officials asserting that American intelligence had accumulated information suggesting that a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the pipelines. The story said officials who had “reviewed” the new intelligence depicted it to be “a step toward determining responsibility” for the pipeline sabotage. The Times story got worldwide attention, but nothing more has been heard since from the newspaper about who did what. In an interview for a Times podcast, one of the three authors of the article inadvertently explained why the story was dead on arrival. The writer was asked about the involvement of the alleged pro-Ukrainian group: “What makes you think that’s what happened?” He answered: “I should be very clear that we know really very little. Right?”

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About Two “So-Called” Journalists and the Corrupt Congresswoman who Attacked Them

Russell Brand, as animated as ever, showcases the corrupt history of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as he simultaneously advocates for free speech. Brand didn't appreciate that Wasserman-Schultz called Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger "so-called reporters." Got him a bit riled up. I had the same reaction when I watched the hearings live . . .

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About Being a Liberal

What does it mean to be a "Liberal"?

What follows is an excerpt from Peter Weiner's article in The Atlantic: "Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions: The psychologist shares his thoughts on the pandemic, polarization, and politics."

Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”

Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”

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Nashville Shooting is a Tale of Two Media Ecosystems

Whatever the story of the day, it will immediately hit the "go" button, causing the two corporate media tribes to roll up their sleeves to reverse-engineer what happened, turbo-charging certain convenient facts and suppressing other inconvenient facts. That is what has happened in the case of 28-year old Audrey Hale, who murdered six people at a Nashville Christian school. In a perverse way, it inspires a feeling of awe to behold the contortionist work product of the two well-oiled media machines. Oh, to be a fly in the wall in the back offices of those two teams!

As a citizen who is not naive, you might be thinking "But what actually happened? Just tell us the facts, please." Instead of becoming well-informed, however, you will be presented with an intensely processed/sterilized/lede-burying/contorted story that will give you, at best, about half of what happened. When we see this results of this process, story after story, week after week, it should challenge all of us to stop trusting any one "news" account. It should remind us that they are preaching to us, not teaching us about the real world. It should deeply insult us that they are coddling, as though we are children. They are convinced that we can't deal with the raw data, the who/what/when/where/why and how of the real world. Even worse, they are motivated by hubris; they think that they are so uniquely intelligent and courageous that only they can deal with harsh reality and that they are protecting us, commandeering the American Project to mold it into their own image and likeness. That has always been the mindset of censors. They self-appoint themselves because they convince themselves that they much smarter than the rest of us. They do this even though censorship is antithetical to free speech and even though, thoughout history, censorship has never worked.  That is the central lesson of Robert Corn-Revere's 2022 book: The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, well summarized at Reason.

The only solution is for each of us to start piecing together what happened bit by bit, from a wide variety of sources from a wide variety of perspectives. That is our plight, yet most people don't have the time to cull through this mess. We have jobs and families and for months, we have put off fixing that leaky faucet in the bathroom. Most of us thus give up in one of two ways.  A) We pick our favorite corporate news shop, assuming it to be credible, perhaps out of habit or perhaps because it is comforting to read that version of of news, thus feeding the confirmation bias.  Or B) We give up on spending time to independently figuring out what is true, thus giving up on being informed citizens, meaning that we will be blindly throwing darts on Election Day, if we vote at all. By giving up entirely, we either avoid "political discussions" or we mutter something like: "It's all a bunch of bullshit." The fact that so many Americans keep picking one of these two paths is reason to believe that the 39 long-dead signatories to the 1787 Constitutional Convention constantly spin in their graves.

Most of us feel this dysfunction with corporate media, as shown by surveys:

Where to turn? One of my favorite writers is Nellie Bowles, who publishes TGIF at The Free Press. Week after week, she does a great job of crystallizing the hypocrisy that runs through the veins of America's news corporations. She does this, writing with aplomb and more than a touch of humor. In today's TGIF, she does what she does best:

An inconvenient killer: The killer, Audrey Hale, was a biological female who identified as a man. My takeaway from this is murderous lunatics come in all shapes and sizes. And it seems likely that this person had some special animosity toward the religious school where they’d been a student.

But the mainstream media became obsessed with obscuring the situation and denying that the killer was trans.

Here’s the Reuters headline: “Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.” Hmm. Or: “CBS News is still working to confirm Hale’s gender identity.” From the NYT: “The suspect appeared to identify as a man in recent months.” Appeared to identify!According to the New Rules, followed strictly by the Times in all other cases, you’re actually not allowed to say someone “appears to identify as a woman.” The person simply is a woman. At worst, if you’re feeling heretical, you say they are a trans woman. Hale had his pronouns in hisbio, for godsake (he/him). But the NYT throws all that out, distancing the shooter from anything trans-related.

Eli Erlick, one of America’s most prominent trans activists, argued that sometimes shooters only take on a trans identity for convenience: “The Colorado shooter only temporarily took on the identity to avoid hate crime charges.” Weird to see Eli admitting that some people might take advantage of gender self-ID for their own nefarious purposes. Now, let’s talk about a 45-year-old male convict who suddenly identifies as a woman. . . wait, where are you going, Eli?

Others blamed Nashville for bringing the slaughter on themselves. Here’s New York Times contributor Benjamin Ryan on the situation: “Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, where @benshapiro & @mattwalshblog have led an ideological war against trans people.” Many deranged people online echoed this notion that Nashville had it coming. A few hours after the Nashville shooting, Arizona governor Katie Hobbs’ press secretary, Josselyn Berry, posted an image of a woman wielding two guns and wrote: “Us when we see transphobes.” She’s since resigned, though I’m sure she will pop up with a much better-paying job soon.

Anyway, the most important thing to happen in an inconvenient situation is to suppress it quickly. And that’s what has happened. Soon after the shooting, it had fallen from the top story slot. And within a day or two, it was all about gun control efforts and how Republicans were getting in the way.

Bad timing for your Day of Vengeance: It was very awkward that this week is the planned Trans Day of Vengeance. Days before the Nashville school shooting, leftist media personality Cenk Uygur had encouragedtrans people to get tons of guns: “If anyone should get guns, it should be trans Americans.”

How do we break out of these silos?  Jonathan Haidt urges us to reach out to those with whom we disagree in order to to have a more robust understanding of what is going on around us.

More . . .

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