Taibbi: NYT is Obtuse and Flat-Footed Over and Over because “It is not a newspaper”

Taibbi, in his latest article: "No, New York Times, You Don't "Deserve Better" Than Donald Trump. Trump should spare us all and retire. But his antagonists' lack of self-awareness keeps giving him oxygen."

If these people were truly that far above the muck, they wouldn’t need to censor reality to prove it. Same with the Times. They penned that editorial pretending they hadn’t been outed years ago for building their whole newsroom around a phony Russia story. Slate published a transcript of a Times “town hall” in which Times editor Dean Baquet talked about his paper being caught “a tiny bit flat-footed” by the conclusion of the Mueller probe, because “our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’”

By “a tiny bit flat-footed” Baquet meant his paper was unprepared for Mueller to come up empty because it had ceased to be a news organization willing to embrace guilt, innocence, or whatever the hell the truth was, and instead became a political operation agitating on behalf of “our readers who want Donald Trump to go away.” It openly rooted for one particular outcome and ignored the other possibility, causing the paper to publish one mistaken or clearly biased story after the other.

These ranged from the infamous “Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence” story to the transparent government PR headline, “F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims” to stories proclaiming the “Nunes memo” about FBI malfeasance to be a mere partisan effort at “defending President Trump from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.” As later revealed in the report of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the Nunes memo was correct in virtually all its parts. Yet the Times didn’t investigate that story or dozens of others properly, because it was and is now a political organ, not a newspaper.

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YouTube Censors Matt Orfalea’s Completely Truthful Video

Matt Taibbi writes:

Matt Orfalea didn't lie, alter clips, or remove key context. He made edits faithful to reality and just got a strike for it. Welcome to post-Trump America, where truth is a censorable offense.
This is our New Rule: Only Democrats can deny that elections are not legitimate.

See Taibbi's entire distressing article: "Election Denial" for Me, But Not for Thee: YouTube Censors TK-Produced Videos, Again, Despite Factual Accuracy."

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The Need to Hate and Fear Censorship

We need to be more aggressive about the evil of censorship. Censorship is a blatant lie, disguised as an action. It is the false claim that there is no other side to the story. Or it's a false claim that any challenge to the prevailing narrative is bullshit before we even hear it. Censorship constitutes lies of omission. It is a technique for manipulating people by deceiving them. When used on social media, censorship is a tactic for fooling innocent users that a view is universally embraced when it is actually contested and, in fact, might be the minority view.

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How the CIA Convinces Lazy Journalists to do its Bidding

Ed Snowden: "The most important video of the year was filmed in 1983. The entire thing is much longer, but *entirely* worth the watch. The government sued Snepp in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled intelligence workers had to submit any statement for censorship, even those unrelated to secrets."

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