100 Comments
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Stewie's avatar

They gave this killer per diem, a car, closing costs on a new house, and God-only-knows-what because I can't stop screaming!!!

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Secret Squirrel's avatar

I couldn’t read the Michael Byrd thing. It wouldn’t enlarge. But I can guess what it said,

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Bandit's avatar

Haven't read the whole thing yet. May be back to add to this comment: Too bad it wasn't her neck. (So close, and yet, so far.)

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Occam's avatar

Wow, I feel dirty now.

If only there was something we could do to people who fragrantly lie to us, mislead us and advance an anti-American agenda.

And it'd be worse than writing an article about them on alt-media. Maybe something involving courts and prosecution and punishment.

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SimulationCommander's avatar

That's the big hope as we transition to this new administration -- the people who were wronged in the past will expose the rest of the malfeasance.

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Inverted Pyramid's avatar

A Journalist’s job is to report and only report, opinions are on page 8 (referring to the Editorial Page).

When I reported I was actually excited when the ledes led me to something that was unexpected, it meant that this was different than I thought and the juices started flowing. No longer was this a beat story, it had legs, it had life! This is what a real Journalist wants, if they elected not to submit the story to the Copy Editors... then that person is not a Journalist. A Journalist doesn’t reject their own piece, a Journalist will have many a story rejected and sometimes spiked but you still beat the deadline even if your 250 words are crap.

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SimulationCommander's avatar

YES!!

Like when it turns out that FTX had nothing to do with the trial that "killed" ivermectin, because their funding came later. I didn't just memory hole the entire idea.......I posted what I found.

https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/ftx-part-ii-covid-and-the-next-pandemic

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Tardigrade's avatar

And to think I used to admire Elizabeth Warren.

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Bandit's avatar

Eeeewwwwwww!

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SimulationCommander's avatar

She wasn't always so unhinged, but she followed the party down the hole.

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DE's avatar

how unhinged must a dingbat be to tell hahahavard admissions, "me heap big injun squaw"?

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Dr. Joe P.'s avatar

Great real journalism!! 👍👍👍

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LEA7's avatar

Malicious, pernicious PARSING. Better known as a LIE.

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SimulationCommander's avatar

The funniest part is they think they can still get away with it.

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Rosemary B's avatar

In 2007 Ezra Klein started a group on google called JournoList.

I am not sure if he was the first to create a hive, the internet helped, think Craigs list for

finding "crowds for Obama" etc Either case, to this day, they stay on this same page, because as single "journalists, they have no voice, and no power, Together they can lie lie lie

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Rosemary B's avatar

Klein justified excluding conservative journalists from participation as "not about fostering ideology but preventing a collapse into flame war. The emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology."

pfffff

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Mitch's avatar

Cop shoots unarmed veteran...Give that man a car! From the same people who wanted to defund the police. Hmmm.

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SimulationCommander's avatar

Weird, right?

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The Radical Individualist's avatar

What a coincidence. I've just been watching "The Plot Against the President." It's an older show about the even older Steele Dossier. Yet it is so current. The show goes into great detail on he organized collusion of Hilary Clinton, Adam Schiff, the DNC, the DOJ and the FBI to persecute Trump.

I've seen every president since JFK. But I have never seen, in this country, the third world banana republic politics that has been on display since the more-white-than-black Barak Obama took office. If anyone thinks that what is happening in Venezuela and Brazil and other corrupt countries can't happen here, wake up. It IS happening here.

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Shane Pisani's avatar

I love the title.

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Rikard's avatar

"Relentlessly push your angle."

This is not wrong - that's what you have to do to get anywhere in propaganda. Just look at Trump! Talk about relentlessly pushing your angle, for several years, to build support enough to get (back) into office.

Lying is for low-intelligence people and true believers; if you're good at dissecting (vivisecting?) thoughts and communication, you need never lie:

"Sources indicate no federal agents were present at J6 riots" isn't lying unless you know they were there. Your source may be lying, of course. But a better, intelligent journalist rather than a pure propagandist following a script would have a secondary headline to the tune of:

"Why were no federal agents in the crowds at the Capitol on J6? Did [insert agency here] drop the ball and made the riots possible through incompetence? (art. cont. on page XX)"

That way, you can sell the message that there were riots, that the current administration wasn't involved in any way ad by asking/begging the question why no agents were present CYO when it comes to impartiality and objectivity.

It never ceases to amaze me, given the several centuries of know-how about rhetoric, semantics and propaganda that is there for all to study, how people who are (allegedly) professionals at this fail and fail again in such an obvious manner. Perhaps this is a skewed or erroneous assessment on my part, but it does seem that US media are rather bad at propaganda: they can flood the zone with the message, but the actual message falls apart in a light breeze, if that makes sense?

(No, I'm not proud of EU-regime journos being better at propaganda. But: having lots and lots of different nations means if Swedish media claim one thing about an incident in Germany, I can easily look up German MSM and dissident media and compare. Given the very few hands of capitalist oligarchs controlling US media, maybe it is more difficult to do so over on your side?)

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SimulationCommander's avatar

"Perhaps this is a skewed or erroneous assessment on my part, but it does seem that US media are rather bad at propaganda: they can flood the zone with the message, but the actual message falls apart in a light breeze, if that makes sense?"

That's because they haven't arrived at their propaganda through study or logic, they just downloaded the new talking points and wrote a story. Reminds me of this:

https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/better-to-remain-silent-and-be-thought

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Rikard's avatar

That's - pardon the French - brainless of them. No wonder the likes of Kotaku et al are going belly-up when AI could do the job for them.

#Clownfishwasright, indeed.

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Tardigrade's avatar

To your last question, Yes.

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AJS's avatar

Jesse Eisinger showed he doesn't know what journalism is. Journalism is reporting what is in the public interest to know. It's in the public interest to know that officials at West Point were wrong about Pete Hegseth applying there. So as a journalist, your job is to find out:

- Why they were wrong. Did they lie intentionally to harm Hegseth's nomination?

- Whether they are incompetent.

Both of those seem like pretty important things to know about the nation's most prestigious military academy and the culture and graduates it produces.

ProPublica could also investigate itself and ask why they were only interested in this story if it meant Hegseth wasn't qualified? How many other newsworthy stories has it spiked because they didn't fit the narrative they were after?

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Barney Rubble's avatar

" Journalism is reporting what is in the public interest to know.". Has this really ever been true? My now well developed cynicism doubts it.

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AJS's avatar

I'm not sure I understand the question. Has it ever been true that journalists report what is in the public interest? That's obviously true.

Has it ever been true in the sense of it being a standard to strive for? I can tell you from experience in J-school that our ethics professor gave us a definition of journalism that is rather close to what I described. Here's a version from Tom Rosentiel, who cowrote "The Essentials of Journalism":

"The purpose of journalism is thus to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments."

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Barney Rubble's avatar

🙄

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Sue Don Nim's avatar

Anthony: Who decides what "information they (the citizens) need..."? Did your professor shed any light on that?

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AJS's avatar

Sue: I have an answer, one that won't be profound, but I think is true.

First -- I don't recall any of my professors addressing this in detail, if at all. Maybe because whatever is deemed newsworthy seems obvious.

However, I came across a brief reading paper where I looked at three authors who addressed the issue of what journalism is and how it should work. Within it, I saw a quote which I just looked up and I see it's attributed to David Brinkley: "News is what I say it is."

News organizations and individuals decide what news is, and that decision-making process is filtered through:

-- the people doing the reporting

-- the editors who assign stories

-- the newsroom culture

-- the history of what has been considered news

-- the audience for these stories

And so, however news is defined -- a commodity to appeal to an audience or information that empowers citizens to make enlightened decisions -- people and culture and organizations decide what the news is. And within the mix of opinions, we'll find consensus and disagreement about which issues and events are newsworthy.

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smallvictories's avatar

Gag. Do people really fall for such horrible acting as real scenario?! I felt physically uncomfortable watching that cnn clip.

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SimulationCommander's avatar

I couldn't believe how it somehow got MORE unbelievable....

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Brandon is not your bro's avatar

Somebody give Pocahontas a beer and make her sit in the corner

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Mitch's avatar

Please no beer, you know how her people are so prone to alcoholism.

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