“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.

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished . . .

From the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a story where one of the heroes goes to prison:

A year on from the FinCEN Files investigation, the United States Treasury unit at the heart of the global exposé is now “working overtime” to implement major anti-money-laundering reforms, while the whistleblower whose leaked documents sparked the investigation languishes in prison.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, BuzzFeed News and more than 100 media outlets published the FinCEN Files in September 2020, uncovering more than $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions flowing through the global financial system, passing through U.S.-based banks with relatively few impediments.

. . .

While the FinCEN Files has been widely lauded and cited over the past year as a key driver for global money-laundering reform, the former FinCEN official-turned-whistleblower who originally provided the thousands of documents at the core of the investigation reported to prison earlier in September to serve six months for sending the confidential documents to a BuzzFeed News reporter.

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards was first arrested in 2018, more than two years before the FinCEN Files was published. After pleading guilty last year to sending highly secretive suspicious activity reports from FinCEN to a reporter, she was finally sentenced in June this year.

“I’m absolutely proud of what I did,” Edwards told BuzzFeed News in an interview before reporting to a federal women’s prison in West Virginia earlier this month. “My motive was accountability, and the American people had a right to know what was occurring within Treasury and that it was a national security issue and that American lives were in jeopardy.”

Continue ReadingNo Good Deed Goes Unpunished . . .

Politico Comes Full Circle on Hunter Biden Laptop Archive: Provides Window into Massive Corruption by News Media

Now that the presidential election is over, Politico's reporter has admitted that many documents found on Hunter Biden's laptop were authentic. This finding reverses the pre-election position of Politico, and is not a mere factoid. Rather, this admission corroborates Glenn Greenwald's analysis and evidence that left-leaning media was corrupt and complicit with the deep state leading up to the election. In sum, reporters refused to do their jobs as reporters and it led to fake news. I used to hate that term, but I can no longer deny that large swathes of our "news" is concocted . . . fake (e.g., several years of hysterical fact-free reporting on alleged Trump-Russia connection). The motivation was always clear - - left-leaning legacy news outlets hated Trump and made it their mission to avoid four more years of Trump.

Do I need to repeatedly write that I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and that I find Trump deranged, incompetent and dangerous? My concern in this post is not about who would make the better president. My concern is that the news media should always do its job, publishing important facts regardless of who the evidence helps or hurts, allowing the voters to decide what is important. The opposite of that happened regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, part of a growing trend. In the new way of discussing important national issues, one denies or hides evidence that conflicts with one's preferences. Proud and arrogant confirmation bias is the way many of us make decisions now, instead of relying on Enlightenment values. These are sad days, indeed. It reminds me of how we formerly ridiculed Pravda, the official newspaper of the communist party of the USSR.

Greenwald's Tweet on the Politico reversal is the first of a long thread that makes an airtight case against the news media. I highly recommend the entire thread:

Continue ReadingPolitico Comes Full Circle on Hunter Biden Laptop Archive: Provides Window into Massive Corruption by News Media

How to Lie While Reporting the News

Do I need to start this post with a reminder that I voted for Hilary Clinton and that I consider Donald Trump a generally dispicable person with whom I rarely agree on an issue?

Michael Sussmann has been indicted. The New York Times reputed this true fact but merely indicated that it's significance was limited, explaining that Sussman falsely told the FBI that he was not representing any client when he reported that there was a covert communications channel between Donald Time and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.

Compare the above NYT version of Sussmann's indictment to Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of the meaning and ramifications of Sussmann's indictment. These two accounts are night and day. Greenwald connected the dots to demonstrate the long-term mendacity and complicity of the left-leaning legacy news media regarding the supposed Trump-Russia connection, as well as the inescapable conclusion that Hillary Clinton delivered four key lies only eight days before the election.

Greenwald's story is one that he has told repeatedly, but this is yet more evidence showing how our news media is organized into two teams tethered to our two main political parties.  Here is the link to following Greenwald's tweets on Twitter:

Greenwald has often lamented that reporters who make shit up are rarely punished. Much more often, they are promoted.

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In War, Truth is the First Victim

For decades, the U.S. government has tried to define "militant" or "terrorist" to mean any non-American person who dies when an American weapon explodes. We've seen twenty years of these lies and uncountable other lies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. When caught, the military nonchalantly "corrects the record" without apology or explanation, even though there was no basis for the initial claim. A dramatic example of this occurred when Wikileaks (see "Collateral Murder" video) exposed the killings of Reuters employees who the U.S. claimed were "terrorists." It recently happened again in a dramatic way, as CENTCOM's mendacity has been exposed. Those dead "terrorists" turn out to have been an aid worker and a family, including multiple children. In wars, truth is the first victim.

As Glenn Greenwald noted, much of the legacy news media (including the NYT and WaPo) played right along with the initial lie. This is one of those rare cases where the reporters kept digging.

One more Tweet channels my frustration:

Continue ReadingIn War, Truth is the First Victim