Media Spectacularly Proves My Point

Examples of The Journalism

Last week I wrote about fictional reporter Eileen Fitzgerald (played by Hillary Swank) on “Alaska Daily”. Despite being held at gunpoint during a disappointing narrative-pushing episode, our hero was back at it this week — after a brief therapy session in which Eileen reveals why it’s so important for her to get to work:

Therapist: Why did you become a journalist?

Eileen: Because I care about the truth.

T: Why do you think you care about the truth?

E: Because it matters. Because people lie to abuse power and to hurt people.

Journalists are important because people lie to abuse power and to hurt people! That’s why attacks on journalism are so heinous and must be denounced every single time they happen — at least in the fake world. Last week in the real world, ABC News spectacularly failed to clear the “Eileen Fitzgerald bar of good reporting” — and it wasn’t even close.

The first obvious example of this was the network’s reaction to Tucker Carlson dropping 1/6 footage on FOX — as well as its reaction to the reaction.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: "Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “It was a mistake in my view for Fox News to depict this in a way that is completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks.”

Or, put more succinctly:

Here we have a bipartisan full-court press on a reporter, coming from literally the most powerful members of the Senate. Surely this is a prime example of attacks on the press that 'dangerously undermine truth and consensus’, or even worse are ‘an attack on American democracy’.

ABC News must be firing both barrels against this egregious assault on our deeply held American principles, right? Perhaps by demanding public release of all videos (finally)?

Not exactly.

Interestingly, when you click that link you’re immediately bombarded with video footage. Not the new footage we’ll get to in a minute, but a “roundup” of footage created for the one-year anniversary of 1/6.

When we get to the article itself, it sounds suspiciously like a Department of Justice press release. “The government says this” mindlessly repeatedly throughout most of the story.

When ABC actually gets around to talking about the new footage, its spend a couple paragraphs trying to spin what the video actually shows:

Despite this misleading section (and the irrelevant footage mentioned earlier, instead of this new, relevant footage), it IS clear what happened, as we can see from these two clips — one from outside the building, and one from inside.

Though Chansley is one of the first 10 or so people through the door, it doesn’t appear he actually “breaks in” the building — the door is clearly wide open by the time he steps inside. Obviously Chansley is on the hook from whatever charges realistically come from that — but ABC should stop being completely misleading in insinuating the video shows something that it doesn’t show. (And ABC KNOWS it doesn’t show it — that’s why they don’t have the footage attached to the article.)

And here’s something interesting — if you watch the indoor footage again, you’ll see that entering the room directly ahead of Chansley is Ashley Gilberston.

Gilberston is circled in orange, Chansley in white - timestamp 1:04

Gilberston is a photographer and was not charged with any sort of forced entry crime, despite actually entering the building before Chansley. In fact…..his 1/6 photos were part of a “History Now” exhibit at the Monroe Gallery of Photography and also feature prominently alongside a New York Times article about the day. (Helpfully hosted at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html - in case you forgot it was a coup or that it was Trump’s fault.)

To put this another way, Gilbertson was exercising his Constitutional right as a member of the press, documenting what happened that day. He committed exactly the same offenses as Chansley — who was exercising his Constitutional right to protest — as it pertains to entry into the building.

Yet only one of them is described as “breaking in” as part of a “Trump-inspired mob”. The other gets to “profit” off the “insurrection”. (Remember that for later!) And the reason for that is because ABC News — and the other major networks as well — are more committed to the political narrative than to the truth.

But amazingly it gets even worse for ABC News when we look at last week’s one-two punch of another round of The Twitter Files being released and the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government featuring two prominent Twitter Files reporters, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.

Spoiler alert: It’s exactly what it looks like

In his testimony, Taibbi outlined how government funds “public/private partnerships” that scour the internet for “misinformation” and reports it to social media companies (in this case Twitter). For people who have been following the Twitter Files drops, this comes as no surprise at all — government was using every play in the playbook to censor the legal speech of Americans, even if that speech was true:

You would think that these revelations (to our “leaders” at least) would be roundly condemned by everybody involved in the hearing………but that isn’t how it happened. Democrats immediately started attacking the reporters, with Rep. Stacey Plaskett calling them “so-called journalists” and disgraced Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who somehow still has a job after rigging the 2016 Democratic primary — accusing Taibbi of “profiting” from the Twitter files.

(Note: To these people, when you do “bad” reporting — like exposing the censorship apparatus inside government — the profit you make from your readers is dangerous. When you do you “good” reporting — like taking pictures of 1/6 — the profit you make is perfectly acceptable.)

Democrats even went so far as demanding to know the specifics of who provided the files — even after denying they were demanding to know the specifics of who provided the files.

Plaskett even went so far to say these reporters “pose a direct threat to people who oppose them” — which is a completely non-sensical way to approach the issue in the first place. Of course Taibbi poses a direct threat to government’s huge underground network of censorship — in the same way that Raid poses a direct threat to roaches. Yet here’s a government official saying (well, reading from her script) that reporters are the threat.

Surely THIS attack on the free press and journalists would spur ABC News into action, calling these actions an attack on “the American people and their Constitution”, right?

This is government officials threatening journalists and demanding their sources in an official government proceeding! It doesn’t get any more attacky than that! Roll out the cannons! Fire the torpedoes! This assault on the press cannot go unanswered!

Except, evidentially it can. I found exactly zero references on ABCNews.com to the new round of Twitter Files OR the hearing itself.

This is further proof that the blustering on “Alaska Daily” is just puffery to make viewers believe the network cares about real journalism. The truth is that ABC News only cares about “attacks on the press” when it can use those “attacks” to its advantage to advance the approved narrative. In this way, “The Journalism” is exactly like “The Science”.

Now let’s zoom out, away from media fakery and political yammering, to revisit what happened to us almost exactly 3 years ago. As we do this, it’s important to remember that government doesn’t actually HAVE any money — whatever it gets it must first either take from taxpayers or print (putting taxpayers on the hook via inflation). Therefore, when government spends money, it’s actually spending taxpayer money (our money). With that in mind:

We (the taxpayers) paid for gain-of-function research into bat-origin coronaviruses at a shoddy lab in Wuhan, China. Sometimes we even paid more than once.

We paid for exclusive tests the CDC fumbled from the start — refusing help from the private sector in the process.

We paid for CARES Act hospital bonuses.

We paid for hundreds of millions of covid tests, and millions of dollars more to futilely attempt to trace the contacts of people with positive results.

We paid for countless worthless masks, which now litter the countryside.

We paid for the ridiculous enforcement of stupid covid rules — like spying on churches and arresting paddleboarders.

We paid for trillions in other ridiculous covid spending because we shut down the economy — some of which was literally paying people not to work because we shut down the economy.

We paid millions for endless covid propaganda that badgered us constantly about how safe and effective the shots were, and the Twitter Files prove we also paid for the censorship (both public and “private”) that ensured “safe and effective” was the only allowed viewpoint.

Government paid for all these things with our money, funneling trillions of ill-gotten dollars to the well-connected in general and Big Pharma in particular. But when it turns out all that spending was for nothing and millions of people were forced into getting medical interventions they didn’t need, there’s not even a whisper of trying to make the little people whole. Instead the gravy train keeps rolling, with one hand washing the other:

Put another way:

Why isn’t ABC News interested in the fact that government directed trillions of dollars toward — and mandated via government force — a “vaccine” that it was profiting from? Where’s the desire to hold people accountable who “lie to abuse power and to hurt people”? Like “protect and serve” before it — this is just a nice-sounding motto, not an actual tenet of the organization. We pay for that, too.

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Now that the e-mail has gone out and I don’t have to worry about post length, guess who’s happy the sink is back in the bathroom?