Left Leaning Legacy Media Belatedly and Grudgingly Acknowledge that the Steele Dossier was Fraudulent

How does it feel to now know that left-leaning legacy news media duped you for years on Trump-Russia? Drew Holden offers chapter and verse below, and there are oh so many offenders, including Rachel Maddow, her "reporter" pals at CNN and many many others. This is merely one story of many where the two media teams (the Democrat team and the Republican team) tell you only what they want you to know (and withhold what they don't want you to know). There was plenty of reason to be suspicious about the Steele Dossier before this recent indictment. This widespread journalistic malpractice re Trump-Russia went on for years.

As Glenn Greenwald notes in a related tweet: "NYT & WashPost showered themselves with Pulitzers for their monomaniacal obsession with Russiagate. Even after Mueller admitted he could find no evidence to establish the conspiracy and indicted *nobody* for it, they persisted." But there is a bigger lesson here that pertains to all of us and our failing democracy: consumers of "news" are not getting what they think they are getting. Many of them, including many who will bristle as they read this post, have been as credulous as the CNN reporters.

[[Added Nov 7, 2021]

Greenwald is correct to hammer this story over and over. The media is the only industry specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Without accurate information our Democracy is a sham, an opportunity for tyrants and their sycophants to run the U.S. without regard to the needs and desires of the People. If we are happy with that dysfunction, then we should cancel the Fourth of July because the 1776 revolt from England would be then reduced to a mere exercise in power, not the beginning of an amazing real-life experiment in democracy. One last thing for now: I entirely agree with Greenwald that if the left-leaning legacy media had a conscience, if it were serving the higher purpose that it is pretending to serve, it would prominently acknowledge the false information it published and it would publicly explain the steps it is taking to make sure that this sort of thing does not ever occur again. The worst offending media outlets are refusing to do that in the case of the Steele Dossier, which is strong evidence that it will be business as usual as we approach the next round of elections. What follows is Greenwald's most recent thread on this topic. I wish I could argue with Greenwald on the facts he notes and his conclusions, because they constitute an strong indictment that our system of government/media has largely become manipulative theater, not the ingenious and innovative system for serving the People that many of us learned in civics classes decades ago.

One more excerpt worth repeating:

One key point I omitted: no discussion of the Russiagate fraud and the media's role is complete without highlighting their key partners in all of this: the security state services (CIA/FBI/NSA/DOJ). The most under-discussed media story of this decade is how they all but merged.

Continue ReadingLeft Leaning Legacy Media Belatedly and Grudgingly Acknowledge that the Steele Dossier was Fraudulent

The Difference Between Information and Knowledge

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). It has been a very slow read for me because it is such a impressive and detailed analysis of what is ailing us today. Here is a major distinction that is largely unappreciated. Information is merely "stuff," whereas knowledge must be carefully earned through the use of intricate institutions that coordinate, test and refine human observations and conclusions. This excerpt is from page 125:

What the institutionalization of modern, fact-based journalism did was to create a system of nodes—professional newsrooms which can choose whether to accept information and pass it on. The reality-based community is a network of such nodes: publishers, peer reviewers, universities, agencies, courts, regulators, and many, many more. I like to imagine the system’s institutional nodes as filtering and pumping stations through which propositions flow. Each station acquires and evaluates propositions, compares them with stored knowledge, hunts for error, then filters out some propositions and distributes the survivors to other stations, which do the same.

Importantly, they form a network, not a hierarchy. No single gatekeeper can decide which hypotheses enter the system, and there are infinitely many pathways through it. . .

Suppose some mischievous demon were to hack into the control center one night and reverse the pumps and filters. Instead of straining out error, they pass it along. In fact, instead of slowing the dissemination of false and misleading claims, they accelerate it. Instead of marginalizing ad hominem attacks, they encourage them. Instead of privileging expertise, they favor amateurism. Instead of validating claims, they share claims. Instead of trafficking in communication, they traffic in display. Instead of identifying sources, they disguise them. Instead of rewarding people who persuade others, they reward those who publicize themselves. If that were how the filtering and pumping stations worked, the system would acquire a negative epistemic valence. It would actively disadvantage truth. It would be not an information technology but misinformation technology.

No one saw anything like that coming. We—I certainly include myself—expected digital technology to broaden and deepen the marketplace of ideas. There would be more hypotheses, more checkers, more access to expertise. How could that not be a leap forward for truth? At worst, we assumed, the digital ecosystem would be neutral. It might not necessarily tilt toward reality, but neither would it systematically tilt against reality.

Unfortunately, we forgot that staying in touch with reality depends on rules and institutions. We forgot that overcoming our cognitive and tribal biases depends on privileging those rules and institutions, not flattening them into featureless, formless “platforms.” In other words, we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can be simply emitted, but knowledge, the product of a rich social interaction, must be achieved. Converting information into knowledge requires getting some important incentives and design choices right. Unfortunately, digital media got them wrong.

Continue ReadingThe Difference Between Information and Knowledge

Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Rauch Discuss “The Constitution of Knowledge”

From Heterodox Academy, a discussion of Jonathan Rauch's excellent new book, The Constitution of Knowledge. Here's the HxA landing page for this video.

The production of knowledge thrives when universities value open inquiry, but recent trends in conformist thinking pose new threats to research, writing, and teaching. How do we combat conformist culture in our classrooms and research, while encouraging inquiry into unorthodox ideas? How can our epistemic institutions continue to seek and know truth? We were joined by HxA co-founder and Board Chair Jonathan Haidt for an in-depth discussion with Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

As Rauch states in the teaser, the system doesn't work by magic. It requires all of us to participate in good faith:

Continue ReadingJonathan Haidt and Jonathan Rauch Discuss “The Constitution of Knowledge”

Rogan Pushes Sanjay Gupta to Cough Up the Truth About Gupta’s Employer, CNN

Sanjay Gupta is one of the good guys. During the pandemic, he has provided a lot of good information regarding COVID. That said, Joe Rogan had him on the ropes as Gupta tries to defend the misconduct of CNN, Gupta's employer. Well worth watching and excellent analysis by Krystal and Saagar.

Continue ReadingRogan Pushes Sanjay Gupta to Cough Up the Truth About Gupta’s Employer, CNN

A New Well-Documented Love Story: Democrats and America’s Spy State

Two related things of note. First, Glenn Greenwald notes that Democrats are falling in love with America's Deep State:

What the fuck is happening to Democrats?  We have tons of recent evidence telling us that the deep state exists and that it comprises anti-democratic poison coursing through our country's arteries.

Matt Taibbi writes:

Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.

We found out top intelligence officials like CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and got away without perjury charges despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s systematic use of torture techniques, ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of. . . . Pre-Trump, all of this spoke to the worst nightmares of American liberalism. Millions of Boomers and Gen-Exers alike had grown up worshipping at the altar of Miranda and Mapp v. Ohio, believing the ideas of due process and transparency inviolable.  . . .

Young or not, the average commentator now is both committed to forgetting the sordid history of agencies like the CIA, and perfectly equipped mentally to keep that commitment. . . .

Then Trump arrived. Almost immediately, it was obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started talking about it. Deep state warriors like Brennan, Clapper, and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, held in near-universal disdain before as some of the world’s most loathsome people, people so morally ugly it showed on their hideous faces, became immediately respectable by rebranding themselves as Trump critics. The early Trump years, in fact, made heroes of every tumescent peeping-Tom creep and spook in the federal register, now cast in the press as democracy’s infantry, saving the world through intercepts, informants, and leaks.

In a flash, programs that terrified American liberals previously, like FISA, became weapons of Holy War, in the ongoing campaign to Oust Trump via a succession of investigations and impeachment bids. When it came out that a known FBI informant spied on presidential candidate Trump, pundits not only cheered, they refused outright to call it spying.

. . . .

The cultural memories of the coming wave of media professionals extend back a few years at most. Most have read thousands more tweets than book pages. Their opinions come mainly from the dung-pile of popular news and are in sync with most Democrats, whom polls consistently show to have strong majority favorable views of the CIA and the FBI, a dramatic turnaround from the pre-Trump years. In fact, now that the War on Terror has ostensibly been reconfigured to target gun owners, white supremacists, and “insurrectionists,” they can scarcely remember why they ever felt negatively about the NSA or the folks at Langley, which of course makes them perfect for their jobs. In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience.

If this is not enough to make you cry a river, Taibbi reminds us that the liberal news media is infested with spooks:
Now, just like any other tinpot third-world country, we get our news directly from secret agents. I made a list once:

Continue ReadingA New Well-Documented Love Story: Democrats and America’s Spy State