The Story of the Modern “News” Media

This ironic 13-second video illustrates the modern news media.  "Nothing to see here . . . " whenever the facts don't fit the preconceived narrative. For instance, the constant news reports concerning the Club Q nightclub shooting hit a sudden cold snap after the shooter was announced to be "non-binary."

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The Dangers of Living in an Impoverished Ever-Malleable Present

My dog lives in the eternal present. It's OK for dogs to do so, but not OK for people. People need a sense of history to avoid the mistakes of the past.  People need a foundation of hard-earned knowledge on which to make sense of the future or else they will not ever accomplish great things.  Without a solid foundation of knowledge based on history, people will live like dogs.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell - 1984

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Round II: Matt Taibbi vs. NYT

The NYT did some significant soul-searching after being exposed for promoting the WMD lie that plunged us into war in Iraq. That's old news now. Since the NYT won't come clean about it conduct over the past few years, Matt Taibbi has decided to continue to expose the NYT for what it has become. Here's an excerpt from: "The New York Times Editorial Board's Creepy Avengers Fantasy: A brief note on a strange byline."

Editors should spend 99.9% of their time making sure they’re not green-lighting factual car-wrecks, and about six seconds a day thinking about how to run earth. The Times Board is flipping that ratio.

Trust in journalism isn’t something you can boost with a marketing campaign. It’s a tedious process of proving every day you have an institutional commitment to getting facts right while being willing to admit error. Readers paid attention when the Times held a piece questioning WMD intelligence until after the invasion of Iraq, when former CIA chief Michael Hayden bragged in a book about working with Times editors to kill stories critical of the intelligence community, and, more recently, when they refused any kind of audit with regard to failures in the Trump-Russia story.

. . . .

But no one needs newspapers to save the world. We just need them to get stuff right. Why isn’t that enough?

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