Fake news

The Washington Post ends toxic narrative that cops are hunting black men

The Washington Post just quietly pulled the plug on its police shooting database, “Fatal Force.” Don’t expect an apology or a reckoning. Don’t even expect an explanation. Because to acknowledge the full impact of that project would be to admit this: that for nearly a decade, the nation’s premier legacy newsroom helped manufacture and perpetuate a toxic narrative – that police officers are hunting black men in the streets with impunity.Let’s be clear, the “Fatal Force” database didn’t just compile data; it crafted a storyline. It presented fatal police shootings in isolation, stripped of context and devoid of nuance. No breakdown of the circumstances. No mention of weapons. No differentiation between justified use of force and actual misconduct.

Washington Post

Bye bye, BuzzFeed News

Good riddance to BuzzFeed News. There is no other way to put it. BuzzFeed and its subsequent news division spin-off did more harm to the online journalism industry than almost any other media outfit. It placed importance on churning out content and putting twenty-something undertrained interns in charge of some of the most socially volatile news issues on the internet and in American culture. Their journalists became churnolists and the amount of content became king, not the quality of content. As media cancel culture continues to rear its ugly head and journalists still roam the countryside to make their audiences outraged about...

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A short list of people who said the lab leak theory was a conspiracy

With the Energy Department joining the lab-leak party, will the apologies ever roll in to those so thoroughly excoriated for questioning the animal-human theory of Covid's origins? Cockburn has done a little digging and would like you to join him on a trip down memory lane, to revisit the litany of enlightened elites who proclaimed the lab-leak theory a conspiracy. From scientists to media talking heads, the condemnation of the lab-leak hypothesis was pretty universal in the early months of the pandemic, even going so far as to proclaim it racist.

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No, the word of the year isn’t ‘gaslighting’

“Gaslighting” is Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year,” you say? Doesn’t sound right. Cockburn wonders who told you that? Maybe it’s just your terrible memory causing you to imagine crazy stuff… again. It’s likely you just think searches for the word “gaslighting” increased at merriam-webster.com by 1,740 percent this year, but everyone knows you tend to exaggerate things and can often be a little, shall we say, dramatic.

gaslighting

The disinformation police are the worst purveyors of disinformation

The Department of Homeland Security announced last spring that they would form a "Disinformation Governance Board" to track and combat so-called fake news. The DHS disbanded the board in May after widespread criticism of its Orwellian intentions — as well as the fact that its chosen czar was a purveyor of disinformation. Nina Jankowicz claimed that Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation," spread the false story that Trump had ties to a Russian bank and dismissed the notion that Critical Race Theory was being taught in public schools. Jankowicz was merely one example of an increasingly obvious reality: the individuals policing "disinformation" are themselves disseminating lies.

reality czar disinformation

Alejandro Mayorkas has no shame

Who is the worst cabinet secretary in Joe Biden’s administration? I know that the competition is stiff. Ponder, if your stomach can take it, secretary of state Antony Blinken, the stuffed shirt to end all stuffed shirts. Or secretary of defense Lloyd “Stand Down” Austin, the man who, with General Mark “White Rage” Milley, has transformed the US military into a racially obsessed reform school for budding transsexuals. Halloween is coming — and the Biden administration could field the entire team. But for this quarter’s top prize must surely go to Alejandro Mayorkas, the man in charge of the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security.

alejandro mayorkas

From modernism to totalitarianism

The modernist movement in the arts got underway around the start of the last century, encouraged by Ezra Pound’s exuberant exhortation to “Make it new!” Somewhat less attention was paid to making it good, as if what was new was inevitably good — better, indeed, than everything that had come before it. Barrels of printers’ ink were expended on the subject in the so-called “little magazines” of the period on both sides of the Atlantic, not all of it wasted; much of the relevant critical commentary was very intelligent and interesting indeed. Modernism as a concept and an aesthetic was less successful in music, painting, the plastic arts and architecture than in literature — though again, some of the work it inspired was very good.

modernism

Florida’s Covid numbers were obviously right all along

In the first year or so of the pandemic, the sane among us pointed to Florida as the best argument against strict lockdowns. Florida governor Ron DeSantis began the state’s first phase of reopening as early as April 2020 and declared all businesses open by September. Though critics declared him “DeathSantis” and media outlets flew drones over crowded beaches with ominous background music, Florida had some of the lowest Covid hospitalization and death rates in the entire country. Still, if you mentioned Florida's success, you would inevitably hear from some left-wing loudmouth that the numbers were cooked. It couldn't be possible to ignore the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Dr.

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facebook

Facebook should never have stifled the debate about COVID’s origins

Good news everybody — you can finally post what you always thought about how the pandemic started on Facebook without being muzzled. The Silicon Valley giant, which has around 2.85 billion users, had been banning posts that claimed COVID-19 was man-made. But now, according to a company spokesperson, ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.’ The ‘lab-leak’ theory — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — has gradually gained mainstream acceptance in the months since Trump lost the election. Nicholson Baker horrified New York magazine readers in January by bringing up the hypothesis.

Ukraine and the war for your mind

Deterrence works. Russia's nukes are the only thing keeping the US from full-out war in Ukraine just six months after retreating from Afghanistan. The unprecedented propaganda effort by Ukraine and its helpers in the American mass media to drag the US and NATO directly into the fight has failed — so far. But the struggle — the one for your mind space — is not over. To understand what follows, you have to wipe away a lot of bull being slung your way. Insanity is not the only explanation for Putin’s actions of the past few weeks.

ukraine

The ‘terrorist attack’ that wasn’t

In a tragic traffic accident at the Wilton Manors Stonewall Pride march near Fort Lauderdale, a driver lost control of his vehicle and careered into members who were marching. One person was killed and another was hospitalized. This was of course not how social media saw it, as rumors of a terrorist attack rocketed around Twitter, aided in no small part by irresponsible comments from Fort Lauderdale mayor Dean Trantalis. The mayor claimed on camera that the incident was a ‘terrorist attack against the LGBT community’. He then seemed to hint that the intended target was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: ‘Hardly an accident. It was deliberate, it was premeditated and it was targeted against a specific person.

maggie haberman wilton manors

What gives the Aspen Institute the right to preach about misinformation?

The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder will soon release their interim report with recommendations for how the United States should respond to the 'modern-day crisis of faith in key institutions.’ But the partisan nature of the commissioners on the board brings the report’s credibility into question. The commission's stated goal is to 'identify and prioritize the most critical sources and causes of information disorder and deliver a set of short-term actions and longer-term goals to help government, the private sector and civil society respond to this modern-day crisis of faith in key institutions’.

aspen institute

The Weekly World News should hire me

There is a harrowing ritual of childhood that far too many youths in our Amazon, Instacart, and Seamless-equipped world may never need to suffer (especially post-COVID): grocery shopping with your parents. Let me tell you, kiddos. This sucked. You’d get dragged around through the aisles without being allowed to play hide-and-seek, met with rejection every time you asked whether you could have the new flavor of PopTarts or your favorite heart-stoppingly sugary breakfast cereal, and if you did anything like excitedly scream ‘LOOK! DEAD SNAKE MEAT!’ you’d be hushed and told it was just spicy Italian sausage and you should be using your indoor voice anyway.

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Jussie Smollett, reigning queen of the gaslight

MAGA country’s most famous resident wants his C-list career back. And some of the most despicable cretins on the left have stepped up to help him.Perhaps you didn’t catch the news last week; that alone is telling. Muslim activist Linda Sarsour co-signed, along with other left-wing agitators, an open letter accusing the Chicago Police Department of fabricating charges against Empire actor Jussie Smollett after Smollett staged a hate crime against himself in 2019.The letter was also signed by longtime Communist party member Angela Davis and actor Danny Glover (who apparently isn’t ‘too old for this shit’.

jussie smollett

People trust the media less than Trump on COVID. Here’s why

The national media is now less trusted than President Trump to provide accurate information and analysis about COVID-19, according to a CBS poll of registered voters. Think about the sheer hubris and raw effort that must have taken! All those months of politicizing public health, downplaying the spread of the virus through protests and riots, doubting coronavirus treatments, and trying to get Anthony Fauci to bad-mouth the President, have finally paid off. Take a bow everyone. In terms of trust, the national media ranked dead last at 35 percent, behind the President, the CDC and the governors of those polled in individual states. Trump, a man who essentially suggested people go stand out in the sun for a bit to help treat a COVID infection, came in five points higher.

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The war for your mind

The romantic plans of a Kazakh bodybuilder named Yuri Tolochko have become one more casualty of the coronavirus pandemic. He was going to marry his ‘fiancée’, Margo, a silicone sex doll, in March, but they both agreed on the need to delay. ‘My baby supported me on this. We are determined and our mood is good.’ His Instagram feed depicts their domestic idyll: a bald, muscle-bound man gazes adoringly at a pneumatic blonde who, it must be said, stares back somewhat blankly. You might already know this if you get your news from Russian outlets like RT — Russia Today — or Sputnik. Their websites have an unerring eye for the human-interest stories that make for irresistible clickbait.

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The allure of child trafficking conspiracy theories

It was a frustrating weekend for the workers at the National Human Trafficking Hotline. For days, they ‘received hundreds of reports’ referring to’ a series of viral posts’, though ‘none’ were made by someone who had ‘a specific connection to any alleged missing children’. This made it ‘more difficult’ for them to ‘provide support and attention to others who are in need of help’. The subject of those reports? Wayfair.According to the Wayfair child trafficking theory, which has stewed on Reddit, Instagram and elsewhere, children are being sold across the internet through the e-commerce website Wayfair.

child trafficking conspiracy theories

If a video is viral, who cares if it’s fake?

After two months, the 'mostly peaceful' label for the riots gripping American cities is wearing a touch thin. That’s not just because it fails to satisfy conservatives and moderates, who puzzle over how 'mostly peaceful' demonstrations leave so many downtowns torched. It also fails to satisfy the actual rioters. They insist their demonstrations are very violent, courtesy of brutal tactics from the police officers they want abolished.'Proof' of such violence went viral on Wednesday. The video was first shared by Twitter user @Andy_Resist, but was swiftly magnified by a different Andy. This one bore Twitter’s hallowed blue checkmark and enough followers to populate a small city, or a few dozen 'mostly peaceful' protests. https://twitter.

fake news

Fact-checking the New Yorker fact-checkers

The most recent issue of the New Yorker includes a 5,000-word feature on the police (summary: they are racist). In it, staff writer Jill Lepore drops this frightful fact to illustrate the barbarism of America’s uniformed enforcers:'One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.'Cockburn started writing precisely to avoid ever doing math again, but even to him, this claim sounded like a howler. Two-thirds of all emergency room visits by American young adults were for police injuries?

new yorker

Yes, it’s time to defund NPR

When the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law in 1967, the stated goal was to provide public financial assistance to producers and broadcasters of educational programming. And so PBS and NPR came into existence. They enjoy public funding from taxpayers today. But should taxpayers continue to fund these enterprises, when they clearly focus less on educating the public, and more on pushing commentary and opinion, and now, even libel?Public media has long been defended. Frequently it’s pointed out that public funding for NPR is only about two percent of their federal operating budget, the same excuse we hear when Planned Parenthood pushes back against calls to defund it. Just as frequently, right-leaning outlets seek to point out a clear bias in publicly-funded coverage.

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