In an exclusive interview with CNN's Pamela Brown, FDA chief Dr. Robert Califf explains why he says the leading cause of death in the US is misinformation. https://t.co/rrsKLlLIxf pic.twitter.com/hQ0uSXa1zz
— Android Facts (@manatweets) May 9, 2022
OK, I suppose being misinformed could cause someone to make a poor choice about one’s health.
I think so, Brain … but The Narrative must shift to track with The New Word Order.
The New York Times is reporting that Hunter’s laptop isn’t Russian disinformation after all.
However, Twitter Safety was provided with the Narrative Change Notice in advance, and there is no indication that the NYT will be banned as the NYPost was in 2020.
I think so, Brain … but the actual violations causing the suspensions appears to be jokes that truthfully contradict The Narrative.
I think so, Brain … but the news keeps getting out of synch with The Narrative.
When I clicked on a link to a tweet criticizing the Xiden Administration for restricting access to monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid, I found the tweet had been tagged with this notice—
I suppose that’s better than flat out censorship.
I think so, Brain … but the fact checking seems to be done to see if they conform to The Narrative.
Glenn Greenwald has a post up on his Substack account about How Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods. It’s long, but its review of how the Main Stream Media have cooperated in selling false narratives in service of The Narrative is worth the read. Here’s the TL/DR—
But all of this highlights the real crisis in journalism, the reason public faith and trust in media institutions is in free fall. With liberal media outlets deliberately embracing a profit model of speaking overwhelmingly to partisan Democrats who use them as their primary source of news, there is zero cost to publishing false claims about people and groups hated by that liberal audience.
That audience does not care if these media outlets publish false stories as long as it is done for the Greater Good of harming their political enemies, and this ethos has contaminated newsrooms as well. Given human fallibility, reporting errors are normal and inevitable, but when they are all geared toward advancing one political agenda or faction and undermining the other, they cease to be errors and become a deliberate strategy or, at best, systemic recklessness.
But whatever else is true, it is vital to understand what news outlets mean when they claim they have “independently verified” the uncorroborated reports of other similar outlets. It means nothing of consequence. In many if not most cases — enough to make this formulation totally unreliable — it signifies nothing more than their willingness to serve as stenographers for the same anonymous political operatives who fed their competitors similar propaganda.
Yes, the folks play-acting as journalists will keep working as propagandists for The Party until it becomes too costly for them.
Until then,
Нет известия в «Правдa» и нет правда в «Известия».
There is no news [izvestia] in Pravda and no truth [pravda] in Izvestia.
We’re already beginning to see some cracks in the foundation supporting of the current media structure, and two forces are acting to further destabilize the system. First, Orange Man Bad is gone from the news cycle, and the story lines built on railing against Trump no longer have traction. Viewers aren’t tuning in as the did, and the revenue that underpins many of the media operations is shrinking. Layoffs are occurring.
Second, after years in attack mode, they’ve been unable to find good news to report to sell the new Narrative. For example, years of ranting about kids in cages has made it hard to put a positive spin on a sudden surge in minor children being detained at the border. Masks still required after vaccination, no Fourth of July, and renewed bombing in the Middle East are not an easy sell as good news. Reality keeps interfering with The Narrative, and the public is beginning to suspect that the warm fluid on our legs isn’t rain.
Alternatives to the Main Stream Media and Main Stream Social Media are popping up and some are getting traction because the compete with The Narrative rather than colluding with it. There’s a market for news and truth, and I suspect that many of the legacy media companies will be replaced by new organizations.
You can see signs of panic in the calls for censorship that are beginning appear, some from media outlets beginning to sense they are at a disadvantage competing with truthful reporting. Given the level of control The Party has over the House, Senate, White House, and corporate media/social media, the next few years probably will be stressful for the First Amendment.
Stay tuned.
From the Internet’s Newspaper of Record—
I’m so old I remember when outlets like The Babylon Bee were still satire, and satire was a form of joking.
The Narrative states that we lesser folks don’t need firearms to protect ourselves or, if we do, we should follow Joe Biden’s advice and get a shotgun instead of an AR-15.
The West Freeway Church of Christ murderer used a shotgun.
He was stopped by a good guy carrying a concealed handgun.
Of course, the facts don’t fit the Narrative, so I suspect that the Media will quickly (in the words of David Burge) cover the story. With a pillow. Until it stops breathing.
Remember Al Franken? He lost his job as a senator because a picture surfaced of his groping a woman while she slept. The #MeToo campaign spun up out of the feminists’ victory in taking down a senator.
The New Rules regarding sexual misconduct now have been in force for long enough to begin catching too many of the wrong people. That doesn’t fit The Narrative. It’s starting to hit too close to certain homes.
So we see the crowd that tried to peddle all sorts of unsubstantiated fables about Brett Kavanaugh begin a project to rehabilitate Al Franken, to sort of airbrush him back in.
The next thing you know, they’ll be telling us we have always been at war with Eastasia.
I think so, Brain … but what if History was true?
… I can remember when our betters in the Progressive elite told us that we should believe all women. It seems that The Rules have changed in Seattle. Christopher F. Rufo has a post over at City Journal about what happened when a rape didn’t fit The Narrative.
A woman was raped by a resident of a Seattle city-sponsored homeless camp. When city officials dismissed calls for measures such as warrant screening at the camp, she worked with Rufo, a documentary film maker, to create a video telling her story in her own words. When the video was posted on FaceBook, the public’s reaction was supportive.
We edited the film together and posted it to Facebook on April 22. That evening, it was the lead story on all four local Seattle news networks and had reached more than 35,000 people on social media. The public renewed its call for warrant checks at city-sanctioned encampments. Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan condemned the assault and commended “the courage of a survivor of sexual violence to speak out.”
Then the Progressive backlash hit.
Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes. Lindsey’s story should be a clarion call for everyone who cares about violence against women. But in the tortured logic of intersectionality, the story of a homeless rapist demands “context,” while the white, blonde, middle-class target of his assault is an unsympathetic victim.
Lindsey’s story reveals a fault line opening between elite opinion and public opinion. Most private citizens praised Lindsey as a heroic survivor and echoed her call for greater safety at homeless encampments. They should reflect on the likelihood that their leaders’ contempt for her extends to them, too.
Read the whole thing.
That’s a question posed by Congresscritter-elect Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) when a recently elected Democrat accused Donald Trump of undermining democracy. The Democrat was unable to cite any example of democracy being undermined. Perhaps a skeptical public should begin asking that question more often.
There was “deliberate interference” with the election in Georgia.
Like what?
[crickets]
Or …
There’s evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign during the 2016 elections.
Like what?
[crickets]
The lack of evidence to support a claim reasonably suggests that the claim might be fishy. John Adams once observed that facts are stubborn things, and that stubbornness can be a problem for some political arguments. I expect that we will see more appeals to Homer Simpson’s notion that “[f]acts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true!” Especially when those stubborn facts get in the way of The Narrative.
Seen at Instapundit—
SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “Jesus, NBC is still wallowing in the blood. The Borderline shooting is wall-to-wall, pictures of the shooter, his full name, teary next of kin of the victims. It’s like they want copycats.”
Well, of course! Back in the ’60s when I was working in broadcasting, the film crews (this was before portable video tape recorders) would get back with their evening reels, and decisions would have to be taken (choices are taken not made) about which film to develop first. Big car crashes or other disasters would always get processed ahead of the Metro Council meetings. NBC is sticking with an ancient form which has the advantage of also supporting their anti-Second-Amendment narrative.
… I remember when a “fake but accurate” story cost Dan Rather his job. Now, it’s close to the new normal. David Harsanyi writes over at The Federalist:
“Notionally accurate” sounds a lot like “fake but accurate.” Do reporters covering the White House, some of whom are about to release books about the Trump presidency, believe that notional accuracy is a standard that deserves professional deference or serious attention?
Read the whole thing.
I’d be willing to bet that Trump Derangement Syndrome can cause some “journalists” to happily violate even a notionally accurate standard if doing so advances The Narrative.
Winston Churchill once remarked:
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
That says quite a bit about the elections this year. We’ve seen more than the usual share of malicious attacks and ignorant derision, and most, but not all, of course, has come from one side. Thus far, after each outburst, the truth has wound up taking center stage in spite of significant campaigns to confuse the public. As Stacy McCain writes, the truth has been going viral.
When I was working in radio in Nashville back in the ’60s and ’70s, their were only six effective daily news outlets in town: The NBC outlet (WSM-AM/TV), the ABC outlet (WSIX-AM/TV), the two separately owned and staffed CBS outlets (WLAC-TV and WLAC-AM), the morning paper (The Tennessean), and the evening paper (The Nashville Banner). Only one, the Banner, had a conservative point-of-view. In the early ’70s, the Nashville media market began to “diversify” when WPLN joined NPR. Nashville was not unique in left-wing dominance of its news media.
The media landscape isn’t like that anymore. The cost of entry into the news business has essentially evaporated. A $300 laptop and a cup of coffee at Starbucks is all that it takes to access the world via the Interwebs. The result has brought about the left’s worst nightmare, even worse than math for President Obama. They’ve lost control of the narrative.
Chairman Mao once said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” That might have been controllable. Millions of flowers are simply too many for them.
UPDATE—Several folks roughly my age at those news operations have gone on to other things. I’ve gone from WLAC-AM to working at Goddard Space Flight Center. Oprah Winfrey moved on from WLAC-TV and Pat Sajak from WSM-TV to other work in television. And Al Gore has moved from The Tennessean to Current TV.
UPDATE 2–An excellent example of viral truth may be found here. Brava, Danielle Saul!