Category: Media

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Spencer Fernando;

An absolute disaster for BuzzFeed and much of the media.
 
A so-called ‘bombshell’ story by BuzzFeed, claiming that Donald Trump ordered Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, has been directly debunked by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
 
For about 24 hours, almost the entire media were breathlessly reporting on the story, claiming that impeachment of Trump was just around the corner and an indictment was certain.
 
Turns out, the story was fake.

More: “America has never seen anything like this. All the media errors are always anti-Trump. … That’s what happens when the press stops trying to report fairly and becomes a bunch of lefty activists.”

h/t Ken (Kulak)

Who’s Your Sugar Daddy?

A nice little little post-Christmas gift for media;

A $300,000 ad campaign from the Canada Pension Plan has landed some prime-time slots on Canadian television, but has critics decrying it as a waste of taxpayer money.
 
The two-month campaign is designed to promote the work of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, using slogans like “investing today for your tomorrow” as a cover of Great Big Sea’s “Ordinary Day” plays in the background. The spots have appeared during breaks in the NFL playoffs and during the IIHF World Junior Hockey Tournament.
 
Canadians are required by law to contribute to the CPP, which has critics questioning the need to advertise something they are forced to participate in.

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

The answer is “yes”;

A listener to my program sent me a video that appears to show a deceptively edited video of President Trump’s speech from the Oval Office. We performed a side-by-side comparison of the video from our listener, apparently taken by a smart phone recording of Q13, to the raw video of Trump’s speech from CNN.
 
That comparison reveals the Q13 video creating a loop of the President licking his lips — making it seem bizarre and unbalanced — it also seems that someone distorted the President’s face and my have added an orange tone to his skin. What do you think? Was this edited to clown the President?

Related: The coordinated talking point began hours if not days before the speech even aired…

Russia! Russia! Russia!

From the paper that buried Spygate;

The “Dry Alabama” Facebook page, illustrated with stark images of car wrecks and videos of families ruined by drink, had a blunt message: Alcohol is the devil’s work, and the state should ban it entirely.
 
Along with a companion Twitter feed, the Facebook page appeared to be the work of Baptist teetotalers who supported the Republican, Roy S. Moore, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. “Pray for Roy Moore,” one tweet exhorted.
 
In fact, the Dry Alabama campaign, not previously reported, was the stealth creation of progressive Democrats who were out to defeat Mr. Moore — the second such secret effort to be unmasked. In a political bank shot made in the last two weeks of the campaign, they thought associating Mr. Moore with calls for a statewide alcohol ban would hurt him with moderate, business-oriented Republicans and assist the Democrat, Doug Jones, who won the special election by a hair-thin margin.
 
Matt Osborne, a veteran progressive activist who worked on the project, said he hoped that such deceptive tactics would someday be banned from American politics. But in the meantime, he said, he believes that Republicans are using such trickery and that Democrats cannot unilaterally give it up.
 
“If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” said Mr. Osborne, a writer and consultant who lives outside Florence, Ala. “You have a moral imperative to do this — to do whatever it takes.”
 
The discovery of Dry Alabama, the second so-called false flag operation by Democrats in the fiercely contested Alabama race, underscores how dirty tricks on social media are creeping into American politics. The New York Times reported last month on a separate project that used its own bogus conservative Facebook page and sent a horde of Russian-looking Twitter accounts to follow Mr. Moore’s to make it appear as if he enjoyed Russian support.

More at Daily Caller.

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Time, that tattered, shrunken revenant of a once-popular news magazine, continues in its endless decline to delude itself that it has either the authority or the competence to name the “Person of the Year.” Brilliantly it named journalists — “The Guardians” — as 2018’s collective heroes, with Jamal Khashoggi given pride of place on the once-iconic cover. Time neglected to check on Khashoggi and now finds that it nominated a Qatar stooge, whose columns were midwifed by officers in the Qatar government, and whose “journalistic” career was but a distracting pendant to his many more serious activities, latterly as an anti-Saudi lobbyist, nephew to the one-time world’s biggest arms dealer, and a host of other shadowy mésalliances.

Rex Murphy, with a blow torch, in the National Post.

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

The Federalist;

The Post says they were unaware of this, although Khashoggi’s Qatar connections were well known. They will have to answer for what is either incompetence in connecting these dots or simply not caring as Khashoggi’s attacks on President Trump and the Saudis fit right in with their narrative. The Qatar Foundation denies they were paying him to produce the anti-Saudi material.
 
But during Security Studies Group research for our report on the information operation after his death, we heard from reliable sources familiar with the investigation that documents showing wire transfers from Qatar were found in his apartment in Turkey. They were immediately put out of reach by Turkish security services, so they did not show the collusion between Khashoggi, Qatar, and Turkey prior to his death. We have published a new, unredacted set of findings about the case. It is damning to Qatar, Turkey, and the Washington Post.
 
Khashoggi may have been operating in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act by doing this on behalf of Qatar. This is the same law that caused both Gen. Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort legal jeopardy by not filing their attempts to influence the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign entity. The op-eds published in the very influential Washington Post certainly qualify as attempts to change U.S. policy against Saudi Arabia and in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Qatar supports in spite of its status as a terrorist organization with most other Gulf countries.

Russia! Russia! Russia!

The New York Times story is infuriating in its efforts to downplay what happened here. (Just hit the ‘esc’ key a few times as it loads to bypass the page blocker) This story would be front page, hang-the-bastards international news had it been the Trump administration.

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

More on Der Fakenewser;

In February 2017, my husband and I attended a concert at our local theater, and were sipping some wine in the lobby before the show started. Several people came up to us at separate times excitedly, and asked, “did you meet the German guy yet?!”
 
I hadn’t, but my spider senses perked up when I heard that he worked for Der Spiegel, a magazine based in Hamburg, and that he was writing about the state of rural America in the wake of Trump’s presidency.
 
[…]
 
Relotius has received accolades for his daring quest to live among us for several weeks. And yet, he reported on very little actual truth about Fergus Falls life. In 7,300 words he really only got our town’s population and average annual temperature correct, and a few other basic things, like the names of businesses and public figures, things that a child could figure out in a Google search. The rest is uninhibited fiction (even as sloppy as citing an incorrect figure of citywide 70.4% electoral support for Trump, when the actual number was 62.6%), which begs the question of why Der Spiegel even invested in Relotius’ three week trip to the U.S., whether they should demand their money back from him, and what kind of institutional breakdown led to the supposedly world-class Der Spiegel fact-checking team completely dropping the ball on this one.

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