Archive for the 'Media' Category

It’s difficult to be patient.  It’s hard to wait and let stories develop.  It’s hard work to investigate and vet sources.  But just occasionally it’s both gratifying and amusing to be a part of things like this, albeit small on my part.

Watching the developments over the last couple of days brought a smile to my face and made me glad to be alive and able to appreciate what I’ve seen.  The MSM has absolutely self destructed, little progressive heads have exploded all over the place, and it’s wonderful to sit back and observe the festivities over something so allegedly fake and fabricated as #Pizzagate.

But first things first.  This began months ago when a journalist named Ben Swann began studying #Pizzagate, I’m sure using the sources found by the citizen investigators.  He did a fairly short presentation for CBS46 in Atlanta on Pizzagate.  By my estimation it was fairly benign and moderate, but he was certainly honest and careful.  It was a good piece of investigative journalism making use of the discoveries by the citizen investigators.  Here it is.

Queue the fireworks and exploding progressive heads.  It was the first MSM piece that didn’t claim to “debunk” Pizzagate, but rather, gave it an honest hearing.  That cannot be allowed among the rank and file.  The attacks started and will continue for some time I’m sure.

First, YouTube began suppressing search results for Ben.  Within not too many hours of the presentation, too short a time to craft anything meaningful in reply, the attacks started.  Huffington Post, Media Matters, The Daily Beast, Gizmodo and The Washington Post all jumped on Ben Swann with hit pieces like he was ending journalism as they knew it.

Further, Ben Swann articles were scrubbed from reddit, and the most interesting thing of all is that we’ve learned that CBS46 took down their post of the video.  Here is a phone call where they admit it.

A “URL problem.”  This is priceless.  Above I said that the hit pieces were crafted like Ben Swann had ended journalism as they all know it.  Of course, that isn’t what happened.  That occurred long before now at the hands of the MSM.  No one cares about them anymore, so their own “get thee to thy fainting couch” reactions over their lost credibility are wasted effort.

But ironically, if it’s ever to be rebuilt, it will have to be with people like Ben Swann.  Let me interpret for you what’s happened.  There are those true believers in the “big state,” those “journalists” who believe that the government can do no wrong, who believe that the progressives have the correct vision for the world and that a monopoly of force should and must be used to enforce that vision.  They will never believe that anything nefarious could occur.  The state is righteous by definition.

This is a point of interest for my oldest son, Joshua, who quips from time to time about how the old conservatives and liberals have swapped places.  Not the neo-cons, many of whom are in bed with the progressives, but the conservatives like me – those who believe that government must have checks and balances and that the best government is the smallest and least intrusive government.

I’m not so sure that we’ve actually swapped places like he thinks, as the hippie movement always had statism at its core, it was just that they weren’t in power and others were.  Besides, neocons aren’t really conservatives anyway.  What we’re watching now is the logical consequence and necessary outcome of the Bohemian flower child generation.  These are the children of the hippies, both literally and ideologically.

But there is a second category of “journalists” who lament Ben Swann’s presentation, and they’re are the most interesting to me.  Years ago when my son Daniel was in the Marines and I was a military blogger, I wrote a story on their operations entirely from email communications with Lt. Col. William Mullen (now Brigadier General).  I couldn’t do it any other way.  I tried to go to Iraq and report on his battalion, but I started too late and the funds weren’t there.  I added some of what I knew without my conversations with Mullen, and it turned into a decent article.  Not great, perhaps not even really good, but decent.  Decent enough to publish, and that’s about it.

A friend named Bill Ardolino, who was a legitimate combat reporter, wrote me with both congratulations and lamentations.  He liked the piece and congratulated me for getting the story.  He lamented the fact that he considered it “his story” that I scooped.  Half jokingly, but still, I could tell that he had wanted to write what I had written.

Bill went on to write a much better report from Fallujah in 2007 than I did, so I didn’t really scoop him.  But here’s the thing.  Ben Swann really did scoop the rest of the MSM put together.  They are rattling their cages, chomping at the bits, barking at the walkers, or however you want to put it, waiting for the government – there’s that notion again of government omniscience – to tell them it’s okay to write about it because charges are coming down, or investigations are underway, or court dates have been set.

The editors are holding them back.  Investigative journalism is over in America.  All of the moral preening in the “journalism” community, all of the pining away for how things used to be, all of the time spent in journalism classrooms, is all just so much flotsam and jetsam.  It’s just all irrelevant, and no one outside of their little circle of self righteous watchers cares.  The watchers have turned into talking heads and pundits who interpret official talking points for the masses, nothing more.

Citizen investigators are beating everyone to the punch, and we finally see a courageous journalist who dares to go out and speak truth to power, and lo and behold, it’s not his detractors who did the piece.  Outrage!  Ben got their scoop, and they’re pissed about it.  He was first out of the gate, and so he must be censored, even by his own station.

The MSM sucks, and it doesn’t just suck, but it sucks really, really badly.  It’s worse than totally worthless.  It has a deleterious affect on the culture.  I work around many people every day, and I’m sure readers do as well, whose initial reaction to anything the MSM writes is either to ignore it or believe exactly the opposite simply because the MSM said it – not just conservatives, but everyone.  If fake news is a problem, it begins and ends with the MSM.  I’m not sure it’s possible for the collective community to recover, but if it stands any chance, doing what they did to Ben Swann is diametrically opposed to what they should be doing.  Their instincts are so bad I’m disinclined to believe that they can ever recover.

Prior:

Pizzagate XV

Planeload of FBI Agents Sent To Iceland To Frame Julian Assange

Pizzagate XIII: Who Really Leaked The DNC And Podesta EMails To Wikileaks?

Pizzagate XII

Pizzagate XI

Pizzagate X

Pizzagate IX

Pizzagate VIII

Pizzagate VII

Pizzagate VI

Pizzagate V: Pizzagate In Theological Perspective

Pizzagate IV

Pizzagate III

Pizzagate II

Pizzagate

New York Post:

Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.

“It was like a f–ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.

“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.

A second source confirmed the fireworks.

“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

A firing squad?  Christians are being beheaded in Mesopotamia by Islamists, and you’re pissy because you were told you are liars?  Are we being a tad dramatic?

So let me get this straight.  The story of the decade is developing before your very eyes – Reddit and 4Chan are throwing the veil back on a child pedophilia, kidnapping and torture ring run right out of Washington, D.C. (Pizzagate), with patrons that go all the way to the very top of the most powerful nation on earth – the main stream media is silent on the atrocities, and you want yours?  You want to have your access?

Trump should remove your assess from the rows in the briefing room, make you stand in silence, and grant seats to Reddit and 4Chan representatives because of your malfeasance and wickedness.  Investigative journalism has become a dying art in the MSM, and it’s being done in the pseudo-darkness because people who investigate this are being killed.

You were told that you’re liars.  The truth hurts, yes?  I am going further.  You know all of this is going on.  You have folks watching Reddit/r/pizzagate, and you sit in your comfortable offices waiting until it’s time to go home, deciding to let the children scream and cry in loneliness and agony while you eat cheese and sip wine in your warm homes at night.  You disgust me.

You are a bunch of arrogant, smug, worthless bastards.  And a bunch of losers.  After the biggest story in a decade has become known to everyone (and it will), you will be the ones left out.  Wikileaks and Reddit will get the credit.  Enjoy your irrelevance as shills for the democratic party and their ring of child molesters.

See the picture here.  As you know, the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization who promotes evil things like Jihad against Christians, forcible Sharia law and female circumcision.

So ask yourself if you own a Twitter account.  Why?  Why would anyone in their right mind own an account at such an outfit as that.  Technically I do to promote my own posts, but it is inactive.  I had thought about making a number of posts to see if I can get banned, like “Twitter sucks,” “Twitter aligns with Muslim terrorists,” Twitter promotes female circumcision,” and so on.  But I won’t waste my time on them.  They’re going down the tubes anyway.

If you’re connected, disconnect immediately.  You don’t want to be on the ship when it goes down.  If not, then good.  I don’t have a Facebook account either because they suck.

The Washington Post:

When Nabanita De scrolled through her Facebook feed recently, she felt afraid. There were so many posts with competing information and accusations about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that she didn’t know how to begin deciphering the fearmongering from the reality.

The social media site has faced criticism since the presidential election for its role in disseminating fake and misleading stories that are indistinguishable from real news. Because Facebook’s algorithm is designed to determine what its individual users want to see, people often see only that which validates their existing beliefs regardless of whether the information being shared is true.

So when De, an international second-year master’s student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, attended a hackathon at Princeton University this week with a simple prompt to develop a technology project in 36 hours, she suggested to her three teammates that they try to build an algorithm that authenticates what is real and what is fake on Facebook.

And they were able to do it.

De, with Anant Goel, a freshman at Purdue University, and Mark Craft and Qinglin Chen, sophomores at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, built a Chrome browser extension that tags links in Facebook feeds as verified or not verified by taking into account factors such as the source’s credibility and cross-checking the content with other news stories. Where a post appears to be false, the plug-in will provide a summary of more credible information on the topic online.

They’ve called it FiB.

Since the students developed it in only a day and a half (and have classes and schoolwork to worry about), they’ve released it as an “open-source project,” asking anyone with development experience to help them improve it. The plugin is available for download to the public, but the demand was so great that their limited operation couldn’t handle it.

So you’ve learned absolutely nothing from this “article.”  Perhaps it ought to be relegated to the bin of fake news.  Consider for a moment what you’ve witnessed over the last several days.  Reporters are sitting in the bottom of Trump tower watching to see who enters the building and goes up the elevator.  For hours, and hours, and hours.  Perhaps they could liven it up a bit and add spice to this “news” by telling us the favorite colors of the folks riding the elevator.

What you’re witnessing is the result of the death of investigative reporting.  For the “reporters” and news “editors” out there, why don’t you go to Iraq and do some reporting on what the Muslims have done to the Christian church in Mesopotamia?  Oh, I see.  That might involve going to Mosul.  Does that frighten you?  Are you scared?  It should, and you should be.

Or why don’t you travel to Haiti to investigate why a budding anthropologist headed there to study the child kidnapping and pedophilia ring born out of Haiti and its relationship to the Clinton foundation, only to turn up dead under suspicious circumstances?  Is that scary to you?  Bless your heart.

Or why don’t you investigate why a pizzeria in Washington. D.C., owned by James Alefantis, called Comet Ping Pong, and associated with the Podesta brothers, advertised as “family friendly,” has drag shows?  Or why don’t you investigate what Wikileaks shows about the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and its corollary of massive corruption?  Is that scary to you?  Are you afraid you’ll end up like Seth Rich?

Yea, I would be too.  That’s why I carry guns.  But you progressives don’t believe in those things, so there’s that.

Look, for those who haven’t learned this yet, there is no news being reported by the MSM any more.  All investigative journalism is being done by 4Chan and Reddit.  It is a dead art within the MSM.  If you aren’t studying the results of the analysis at Reddit, you don’t know anything about the news.  For the MSM to try to tell us anything about fake news is pathetic.

As for what Wikileaks tells us, they only release raw data.  Others do the analysis.  Wikileaks has been proven accurate and above reproach for a decade.  If you’re going to try to tell us that Wikileaks is not real, you’re calling black white and white black.  You’re embarrassing yourself, and you’re possibly too stupid to know it.

In summary, I can’t say it better than Paul Joseph Watson.

This subreddit thread, while being a complicated read, full of surprises and ins and outs, with caveat, qualifier and stipulations, demonstrates that Google appears to be actively removing “spirit cooking” conversation and censoring search results.  As I said, the issue is complicated and you can study this discussion thread yourself, and to be fair, the allegation is also directed at Reddit, not just Google.

Now, I’ve always had a good working relationship with Google, and I truly hope that continues.  I have always gotten good service from you, and I have made good use of your search engine.  But I see that Google has taken steps to censor news and views based on political proclivities.

Google plans to prohibit fake-news websites from using its ad-selling software, a move that could crimp revenue at those sites.

Google said Monday that it is updating its policies to ban Google ads being placed “on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose” of the website. The policy would include sites that distribute false news, a Google spokeswoman said.

[ … ]

Google has long prohibited AdSense from being used on sites that promote hate speech or include pornography and violent content. Its policies previously didn’t include language about sites that spread false content. A spokeswoman said the change to the policy was imminent, and that it follows existing Google policies that ban advertisements that misrepresent what they are marketing.

Oh dear.  This is a bad move for Google.  Listen to me, on the outside chance that there are any Google executives or high level managers who are reading this, this is a very, very bad move on your part.  This isn’t something you want to happen.  Don’t test these waters.  This is your Bermuda triangle.

As I was reading from one commenter at one subreddit, “We are now the new underground.”  You see, the cool kids already think you guys are a bunch of gray hairs, and telling them you’re going to get into bed with the establishment will be the last straw.  You will look back and regret getting into bed with the establishment by censoring sites.

This is how it’s going to work.  You won’t really get to make this decision – the consumers will.  They will tell you by their patronage whether they approve of your behavior.  I hadn’t said anything about it, but using your tool Google Analytics, I have been fairly closely watching sources of my traffic over the last year or two.

I am beginning to get a non-trivial amount of traffic from Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.  I haven’t changed.  My coverage and commentary hasn’t changed.  Google hasn’t changed much over the last year.  What has changed is that people are beginning to use other search engines, and Facebook stock is dropping like a rock.

You would do well to consider these things.  You don’t want the “cool kids” to think of you as another arm of the fedgov.  The cool kids run things around here.

David Codrea:

Well, that was quick. At least it shows they can move when motivated. They fired me, and warned me not to show anyone the termination notice because that would violate a confidentiality agreement.  I’ll match their agreement violations over the years against mine if they want to pursue this, because I maintain this is definitely in the interests of pursuing a story about cheesy Examiner.com practices …

I think there is more to the story and told David so.  He doesn’t think so, and relates it to the silly editorial practices they have implemented.  Well, if I’m right, something has happened behind the scene they want to hide by administrative smoke.  If David is right, Examiner is very conflicted and confused.

Go read the new rules they put on him.  No new research conducted only by the writer, but no link baiting.  Use of only material that is already published by one of the large media outlets (my interpretation), but things that are only newsworthy.

I don’t think Examiner understands how this new media thing works.  If it weren’t for blogs and alternative media, the crap published by the MSM would go unchallenged except for comments.  And the comments are brutal, to be sure.  They are the best editor the MSM could get.  But I’ve used combinations of MSM links to show inconsistency, used analysis to draw larger conclusions based on both my own work and the MSM’s work, used information acquired by FOIA requests I made, done direct interviews, and so on.  It takes all of this to do good work, and Examiner is preparing itself for meaninglessness.  It was close anyway.

No one will read them, or if they do, it will be spineless and boring milquetoast.  Goodbye to Examiner.  As for David, he will survive, and he’s too good for the goobers over at Examiner.  I’m done with Examiner, and I’ll keep following David wherever he goes.  Good riddance to unnecessary baggage, and a new beginning to a friend.

I have heard it said that blogging is an exercise in pride.  Maybe, maybe not.  If you’re engaged in advocacy journalism and analysis, it makes no sense to do it without traffic to your site.

It is possible that this is a justified endeavor for cathartic purposes, but it seems to me that this effect would soon wear off.  If it doesn’t maybe you have deeper problems that blogging cannot fix.

At any rate, this only makes sense to me if you can engage in persuasion.  Persuading others to think like you do, and challenging those who don’t, is the reason I do this.

I won’t list all of the other web sites which have linked my articles over the last year because it’s too many to cite and I’m afraid that I would leave out some.  So I’ll just say thank you for your attention.

Most of all, thanks to my readers who faithfully keep coming back every day.  I especially enjoy the comments.  I read every one of them, even if I don’t respond.

Again, to all, thank you for your patronage.

ExpertClick.com:

The Supreme Court recognized our right to ownership of firearms, but didn’t specifically broach the issue of “bearing” those arms, i.e., carrying them for personal defense. The Second Amendment, as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia knows, isn’t about duck hunting, or deer hunting, or any other “sporting purpose.” The sporting purposes test imposed by the last round of onerous firearms laws, and enforced by the ATF, is entirely unconstitutional. But proliferation of this test through the judiciary (from some future decision) is cowardly because it doesn’t formally recognize the truth, and that is that the second amendment exists in order to ameliorate tyranny.

Me on Scalia:

The Supreme Court recognized our right to ownership of firearms, but didn’t specifically broach the issue of “bearing” those arms, i.e., carrying them for personal defense.

This relationship that appears to be developing between Scalia and Kagan is, I’m sure, very sweet and and all of that, but I wouldn’t count on her vote.  Furthermore, the whole issue of duck hunting concerns me.  The Second Amendment, as Scalia knows, isn’t about duck hunting, or deer hunting, or any other “sporting purpose.”  The sporting purposes test imposed by the last round of onerous firearms laws, and enforced by the ATF, is entirely unconstitutional.  I have said before that I think the test is misapplied, and that if it is a firearm, it has a sporting purpose.  But proliferation of this test through the judiciary (from some future decision) is cowardly because it doesn’t formally recognize the truth, and that is that the second amendment exists in order to ameliorate tyranny.

Look, I will quote other writers, and sometimes at length.  But what I try to do is quote (especially for my friends) in such a way that the reader wants to visit their site to finish reading their analysis.

This was cited without attribution.  Bad form.

LA Times:

There are plenty of reasons right here at home to support President Obama’s effort to reform the nation’s gun laws. But if Congress requires additional arguments, it should consider that easy access to guns is also undermining the United States’ avowed goal of combating drug trafficking and transnational gangs abroad.

The U.S. has sent nearly $2 billion in aid to Mexico since 2007, much of that as part of the Merida Initiative, a counter-narcotics program designed to provide aid and equipment for that country’s drug war. Yet that assistance has been undermined by lax U.S. gun laws, which allow members of the drug cartels and their associates to buy weapons here and smuggle them across the border. At least 68,000 of the firearms seized in Mexico between 2007 and 2011 — and probably quite a lot more — came from the United States, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The stricter gun laws proposed in recent weeks by the White House and some Democrats in Congress would help quell the flow.

This is a truly remarkable commentary.  It’s amazing how the main stream media can put on time-blinders and forget or ignore the truth and reality of the current events.  Commentaries like this are full of lies, and they know it.  But the fact that all of America knows about the ATF criminality in Fast and Furious makes the LA Times commentary all the more stupid.  Even the readers know that the Times is overreaching, and the editorial staff knows that Americans know it.  And it still doesn’t embarrass them to publish tripe like this.

The problem isn’t that there is no security on the Southern border, or that the border patrol is being bribed and corrupted, or that they have pitiful rules for the use of force, or that the ATF has sent weapons to the cartels and continue to lie to the American public about the supposed flow of weapons from civilians to Mexico.  The problem according to the Times is that Americans need more restrictive gun laws.

Again, truly remarkable.  And sad … that they would still be trying to get milage out of this debunked twaddle.  Note to the Time editorial staff: take a giant leap into the twenty first century.  It’s modern times now, and we know more than you do about current events and how to analyze them.  You’ve got to do better than this if you’re going to survive.

Glenn Reynolds calls Juan Williams a crank.  Michelle Malkin is called “just a blogger” by Juan Williams.  Glenn is just being nice.  And Michelle is the one with the class compared to the toad Juan Williams.  Here is Juan Williams on The Five.

H/T Family Security Matters.