Questioning the NYT COVID Narrative

Glenn Greenwald offers Jeremy Beckham's look at the official NYT COVID narrative. That NYT narrative tries to make the case that COVID vaccine resistance is largely a politically partisan problem and that Trump voters are the villains. An excerpt:

The corporate media has worked very hard to propagate the liberal-pleasing narrative that COVID has become a partisan disease due to vaccine hesitancy on the right, often ignoring the inconvenient truth that large percentages of politically diverse groups, principally African-Americans and Latinos, remain resistant to vaccination. Recent reporting from The New York Times serves to further this distorted narrative, dubbing the positive correlation between support for Donald Trump and COVID death rates “Red COVID," and brandishing it as evidence of a partisan pandemic. But the Times’ report misleads readers through statistical manipulation and data games, as illustrated by this meticulous analysis, presented in an Outside Voices contribution by Jeremy Beckham . . .

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“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

Matt Taibbi explains that the modern version of "news" is religion. All honest people know this. That is why so many smart people of all political persuasions lament that there is far too much "fake news," many of them telling me that they now longer watch "the news." Taibbi's article: "The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War - When political narrative replaces faith, truth becomes heresy." Here's an excerpt:

News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

BTW, check out the video in Taibbi's article for a reminder of how networks used to report the news.

Continue Reading“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

U.S. National Security Officials: Paid to Lie

I've given up on trusting anything that U.S. National Security Officials claim. It doesn't matter what administration and it doesn't matter what the particular topic is. They are paid to lie. The immediate collapse of Afghanistan comes to mind, mere days and weeks after Joe Biden told numerous lies about how stable Afghanistan's U.S. installed government was. . And that was after 20 years of lies by the U.S. government that the military had a meaningful measurable objective in Afghanistan. Matt Taibbi pointed this out recently,

This all goes on for so long that the lies become institutionalized, believed not only by press contracted to deliver the propaganda (CBS’s David Martin this weekend saying with a straight face, “Everybody is surprised by the speed of this collapse” was typical), but even by the bureaucrats who concocted the deceptions in the first place.

The look of genuine shock on the face of Tony Blinken this weekend as he jousted with Jake Tapper about Biden’s comments from July should tell people around the world something important about the United States: in addition to all the other things about us that are dangerous, we lack self-knowledge.

Even deep inside the machine of American power, where everyone paying even a modicum of attention over the last twenty years should have known Kabul would fall in a heartbeat, they still believe their own legends. Which means this will happen again, and probably sooner rather than later.

Taibbi has also pointed out the abject corruption and theft of U.S. tax dollars. Abby Martin hit the bullseye on this topic last year on YouTube. Where has the legacy media been for most of the past 20 years? When Afghanistan suddenly collapsed, contrary to the solemn assurances of Joe Biden, there was surprise and distress and accusation. But the evidence was plain to see all along, as Abby Martin discussed it in this 2020 Youtube video.

[BTW, if you are wondering why I didn't embed Abby Martin's video (published on Youtube in June 2020), I did that in one of my prior posts in July 2020.  But it's no longer available to be shared that way by policy of Youtube.  If you embed that one year old video, you get a message from Youtube that the video is "age-restricted."

What does "Age Restricted" mean?  Click the Youtube link for "Learn More."  You'll learn this:

Age-restricted content: Sometimes content doesn't violate our policies, but it may not be appropriate for viewers under 18. In these cases, we may place an age-restriction on the video. This policy applies to videos, video descriptions, custom thumbnails, live streams, and any other YouTube product or feature.

Reading further down, you will learn that Abby's video is not allowed to be shared by embedding because of one or more of these things: Child safety, Harmful or dangerous activities, including regulated substances and drugs, Nudity and sexually suggestive content, Violent or Graphic Content or Vulgar language. In other words serious historical documentaries are not able to be shared by embedding because these things? Missing from that list of reasons is the reason that Abby's documentary forcefully exposes government lies, but maybe it would be too damned cynical to write that.  Maybe we don't want our citizens to know history anymore. Maybe it's time to ban embedding of videos showing the falsity of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq or Joe Biden's voting record on Iraq or Afghanistan.

OK, that's the end of this long side-journey.]

What else have we learned recently about our government officials lying national security?  I'll spare you dozens and dozens of big lies over the past decade. Instead, let's take a look at the "good" president, Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.  Glenn Greenwald's sharp eyes noted something interesting in a book proudly and recently written by one of Obama's senior national security advisers, Ben Rhodes.  Here's a few excerpts:

Ever since Edward Snowden received asylum from Russia in 2013, Obama officials have repeatedly maligned his motives and patriotism by citing his "choice” to take up residence there. It has long been clear that this narrative was a lie: Snowden, after meeting with journalists in Hong Kong, intended only to transit through Moscow and then Havana on his way to seek asylum in Latin America. He was purposely prevented from leaving Russia — trapped in the Moscow airport — by the very Obama officials who then cynically weaponized his presence there to imply he was a civil-liberties hypocrite for “choosing” to live in such a repressive country or, even worse, a Kremlin agent or Russian spy.

But now we have absolute, definitive proof that Snowden never intended to stay in Russia but was deliberately prevented from leaving by the same Obama officials who exploited the predicament which they created. The proof was supplied unintentionally in the memoir of one of Obama's senior national security advisers, Ben Rhodes, entitled The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. It is hard to overstate how dispositively Rhodes’ own book proves that Obama officials generally, and Rhodes specifically, lied blatantly and cavalierly to the public about what happened: a level of sustained and conscious lying that can be explained only by sociopathy.

. . . While repeatedly emphasizing how traumatic the Snowden revelations were for the Obama administrations, Rhodes boasts of the crucial role he played in preventing Snowden from leaving Russia as the NSA whistleblower was desperately attempting to do so — exactly the opposite of what people like Rhodes and Hillary Clinton were telling the public about Snowden.

It is really beyond words how willing these people are to lie. . . . . . . . Rhodes — who has spent years insinuating that Snowden is a Russian spy and traitor given his "choice” to flee to Russia — knew in real time that Snowden never planned to stay even one day in Russia. He had only flown to Moscow from Hong Kong with the intent to immediately fly from Moscow to Havana, and then on to either Ecuador or Bolivia to obtain asylum. Prior to landing in Moscow, Snowden and his representatives had secured a commitment from the Cuban government to allow him safe passage through Havana on his way to South America.

The only reason Snowden is in Russia is because of the actions of Rhodes and his fellow Obama officials to deliberately trap him there: first by invalidating his passport so that he could not board any international flights, and then by threatening the Cuban government that any chance for normalization with the U.S. would be permanently destroyed unless they withdrew their guarantee to Snowden of safe passage through Havana, which they then did. Here's Rhodes in his own words, boasting about what he regards as his success:

There was one other, more important signal. Around the time of our second meeting, Edward Snowden was stuck in the Moscow airport, trying to find someone who would take him in. Reportedly, he wanted to go to Venezuela, transiting through Havana, but I knew that if the Cubans aided Snowden, any rapprochement between our countries would prove impossible. I pulled Alejandro Castro aside and said I had a message that came from President Obama. I reminded him that the Cubans had said they wanted to give Obama “political space” so that he could take steps to improve relations. “If you take in Snowden,” I said, “that political space will be gone.” I never spoke to the Cubans about this issue again. A few days later, back in Washington, I woke up to a news report: “Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden got stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport because Havana said it would not let him fly from Russia to Cuba, a Russian newspaper reported.” I took it as a message: The Cubans were serious about improving relations
Could this admission be any clearer?

A young woman recently asked me what a "press secretary" does at the White House. I bluntly said, "Lie for the President." That answer is a bit misleading, of course, because Presidents (and candidates like Hillary Clinton) do a hell of a lot of lying all by themselves.

If I'm sounding irredeemably cynical, that's how I'm feeling. I don't foresee the situation ever getting any better. We have a deeply entrenched system in which Presidents lie and "news media" frantically spinning those words in partisan ways. Day after day, decade after decade. From Gulf of Tonkin right up to today and beyond. We the People are flying blind.

That's the way it always is with American war.  American wars come intertwined with a constant stream of big lies.  That history of war/lies was made clear in the documentary, "War Made Easy." 

Epilogue:

If only there were an industry of businesses that manufactured goods and services specifically geared to maintaining the peace. Then there would be a weighty lobby to counterbalance the military-industrial complex.

Continue ReadingU.S. National Security Officials: Paid to Lie

Matt Taibbi: NPR Cannot See What is in the Mirror

I know dozens of people who, for decades, have made it their daily habit to listen to NPR as their main source of information. Lately, I've heard from a couple of these people that NPR has changed. According to Matt Taibbi, the problem is bigger than the fact that NPR can't see the plank in its own eye. Taibbi's recent article is titled "NPR's Brilliant Self-OwnNational Public Radio complains about a media figure who tells people "what their opinions should be" and uses political "buzzwords." Here is an excerpt.

Yesterday’s NPR article, “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire,” is among the more unintentionally funny efforts at media criticism in recent times.

The piece is about Ben Shapiro, but one doesn’t have to have ever followed Shapiro, or even once read the Daily Wire, to get the joke. The essence of NPR’s complaint is that a conservative media figure not only “has more followers than The Washington Post” but outperforms mainstream outlets in the digital arena, a fact that, “experts worry,” may be “furthering polarization” in America. NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.

The piece goes on to note that “other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal” that “publish aggregated and opinion content” have also “generally been more successful… than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis.” In other words, they’re doing better than us.

Is the complaint that Shapiro peddles misinformation? No: “The articles The Daily Wire publishes don't normally include falsehoods.” Are they worried about the stoking of Trumpism, or belief that the 2020 election was stolen? No, because Shapiro “publicly denounced the alt-right and other people in Trump's orbit,” as well as “the conspiracy theory that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election.” Are they mad that the site is opinion disguised as news? No, because, “publicly the site does not purport to be a traditional news source.”

The main complaint, instead, is that:

By only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as… polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues)… readers still come away from The Daily Wire's content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation's greatest threats.

NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop. . . .

Taibbi then lists a few of NPR's recent reports:

“Billie Eilish Says She Is Sorry After TikTok Video Shows Her Mouthing A Racist Slur.” Pop star caught on tape using the word “chink” when she was “13 or 14 years old” triggers international outrage and expenditure of U.S. national media funding.

“Black TikTok Creators Are On Strike To Protest A Lack Of Credit For Their Work.” White TikTok users dance to Nicky Minaj lyrics like, “I'm a f****** Black Barbie. Pretty face, perfect body,” kicking off “a debate about cultural appropriation on the app.”

“Geocaching While Black: Outdoor Pastime Reveals Racism And Bias.” Area man who plays GPS-based treasure hunt game requiring forays into remote places and private property describes “horrifying” experience of people asking what he’s doing.

“Broadway Is Reopening This Fall, And Every New Play Is By A Black Writer.” All seven new plays being written by black writers is “a step toward progress,” but critics “will be watching Broadway's next moves” to make sure “momentum” continues.

“She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier.” It took Cold Lake First Nations member Danita Bilozaze nine whole months to change her name to reflect her Indigenous identity.

“Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Tom Hanks pushing for more widespread teaching of the Tulsa massacre doesn’t change the fact that he’s built a career playing “white men ‘doing the right thing,’” NPR complains.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: NPR Cannot See What is in the Mirror

The Presidents’ Respective Children

Here is yet more evidence that the two political parties have two separate sycophant news teams.  They cover the dysfunctional children of former President Trump and President Biden in starkly different ways.

Do you remember how the left-leaning news media hid the Hunter Biden laptop discovery? And then Twitter blocked the account of the New York Post as the election drew near? As Glenn Greenwald stated, the story was newsworthy for the corruption angle.

"Pretending that the Biden laptop story was about sex or drugs is utterly deceitful. A person's addiction struggles [and] consensual adult sex is not news. The story was (and is) about financial corruption. And there's *zero* doubt the docs were authentic," Greenwald wrote on Twitter.
Hunter Biden has never denied that it was his laptop. In this CBS interview Hunter Biden stated that it could have been his laptop.

If this laptop and big paycheck (to a person lacking any credentials to merit that kind of pay) had been about any of Trump's degenerate children, the media would have been all over it. I thought about this disparity further while watching excerpts from Russell Brand's recent interview with Glenn Greenwald.

But now there is more about Hunter, yet you will not see any of this in the NYT/NPR/WaPo side of the media:

Really and truly, people are talking about paying Hunter Biden $500K for paintings that look like this.   The NYT did comment on Biden's interest in painting, but never mentioned the big money it is anticipated he would be paid, allegedly, for his paintings. 

Some people who have been in high places are noting the stench in the air:

President Barack Obama's ethics chief on Monday slammed Hunter Biden's 'shameful and grifty' sale of his art pieces for up to $500,000 to anonymous buyers as part of an upcoming exhibition that has already sparked bribery and potential money laundering fears.

Walter Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics director, also warned that it could be a way for 'influence seekers' or foreign governments to funnel money to the Biden family.

Shaub, who last week called out Biden administration officials for hiring a slew of family members to a variety of positions, has urged Hunter and his art dealer Georges Berges to reveal the identity of the buyers so the public can see if the buyers are trying to get access to the White House.

But there is yet more Hunter Biden news that the left-leaning legacy outlets has ignored. Only a few days after his father delivered a speech on the topic of racism at Tulsa, Hunter is hurling racial slurs in texts directed to his attorney, in the context of his attorney's $88K bill for work done regarding Hunter's joint venture with a large Chinese Oil Company.  One can debate how newsworthy his foul language is, but if any of the Trump kids had written these texts, they would be all over the left-leaning media.

I don't claim to know anything substantive about these deals, including the $50K/month Hunter was being paid by Burisma. Greenwald commented on that back when the story broke in October 2020:

After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.

A few days ago, Hunter Biden is reported to have used additional slurs against Asians. 

My concern is, once again, that we have two media teams. They only report "news" that fits their narrative.  The left-leaning legacy news never hesitated to maul the philistine and despicable Trump children, but it is hands-off when it comes to Hunter Biden, even though big amounts of suspicious money are connected with his exploits.  And even though his moral character with regard to race relations conflicts sharply with the stated positions of his father, Joe Biden. On the other hand, the right wing media, such as the Daily Wire, is happy to heavily criticize Hunter Biden.

I'm convinced that many people don't actually want to be well informed. They choose their news sources so that they hear only those sorts of stories that make them feel like the world is the way they want it to be. This is true on the political left and the political right, and it doesn't seem like anything is going to change anytime soon. That said, can we at least start referring to the news media in a different way? Can we start referring to the two news teams as "news filters"? What news filter do you use? "I use the FOX news filter" or "I use the NPR/MSNBC/NYT/WaPo news filter. Doing this would make me feel 1% less bad about this rampant partisanship.

Continue ReadingThe Presidents’ Respective Children