The Fake News Depot
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CNN has finally filled the paid-pundit gaping wound left behind by Donna Brazille, who was fired when it became public via Wkikleaks that she was colluding behind the scenes with the Clinton campaign.
They just hired veteran White House Press Reporter April Ryan to fill the void.
April Ryan, you may remember, was also exposed by Wkikleaks as colluding with yeah, the same Clinton campaign.
She's also the one who who saved up her tears for CNN's cameras after Spicey viciously and without cause attacked her woman-ness and her black-ness by telling her to "Stop shaking your head" as she was giving Spicey instant editorial comments while he was giving her an answer she just knew she wasn't gonna like.
They just hired veteran White House Press Reporter April Ryan to fill the void.
April Ryan, you may remember, was also exposed by Wkikleaks as colluding with yeah, the same Clinton campaign.
She's also the one who who saved up her tears for CNN's cameras after Spicey viciously and without cause attacked her woman-ness and her black-ness by telling her to "Stop shaking your head" as she was giving Spicey instant editorial comments while he was giving her an answer she just knew she wasn't gonna like.
Many in the left media have commended her after the admonishment from Spicer. Pretty much saying: 'You go girl' and thanks for fighting for the resistance cause with such probing questions against the evil Trump regime. Oh and here is a new gig on CNN for doing so.
Oh, Susan Rice is being attacked, too, because she's black, and a woman. Not because she has a history of political sniping or political subterfuge, or even because of her history of lying. No ,No, No.
"I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies!"
13 days later....
"Well, I birthed all kinds of babies, but they wuz all routine babies, and babies mostly just birth themselves."
The press is Hell bent on turning Rice's unmasking into 'nothing to see here, move along.' Yes, the National Security Adviser has the authority to have names unmasked. No, it's not illegal to do so.
But it's damned peculiar. And is, or should be, really, really rare. It's certainly not routine. The National Security Adviser is a consumer of intelligence, not an analyst of it (National Security Agency), or an investigator of it (FBI). There are really only two reasons the National Security Adviser would want the names unmasked on intercepted communications. One, if the US citizen in the conversation is engaging in something that has national security ramifications, like, say, a CEO of a corporation who is negotiating a deal with a foreign country that could bolster or diminish national security. The only other reason is.... for political purposes.
The conversations of US citizens caught up in "incidental collection" are supposed to be deleted immediately. Like, within microseconds. Not stored for later search and retrieval. The only reason not to delete the conversations is if the conversation has national security implications, or they are the subject of a criminal investigation. Or... if CIA Director ta-da Brennan made the call to save the conversations for political purposes.
We already know that the conversations Nunes and Schiff have read had nothing to do with Russia. That leaves either a criminal investigation as the reason for keeping them and unmasking the names (the National Security Adviser does not to investigations for the FBI), or for political spying on an opposing political party.
Oh, sorry, didn't mean to distract anyone from the Trump-Russia collusion thingy.
"I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies!"
13 days later....
"Well, I birthed all kinds of babies, but they wuz all routine babies, and babies mostly just birth themselves."
The press is Hell bent on turning Rice's unmasking into 'nothing to see here, move along.' Yes, the National Security Adviser has the authority to have names unmasked. No, it's not illegal to do so.
But it's damned peculiar. And is, or should be, really, really rare. It's certainly not routine. The National Security Adviser is a consumer of intelligence, not an analyst of it (National Security Agency), or an investigator of it (FBI). There are really only two reasons the National Security Adviser would want the names unmasked on intercepted communications. One, if the US citizen in the conversation is engaging in something that has national security ramifications, like, say, a CEO of a corporation who is negotiating a deal with a foreign country that could bolster or diminish national security. The only other reason is.... for political purposes.
The conversations of US citizens caught up in "incidental collection" are supposed to be deleted immediately. Like, within microseconds. Not stored for later search and retrieval. The only reason not to delete the conversations is if the conversation has national security implications, or they are the subject of a criminal investigation. Or... if CIA Director ta-da Brennan made the call to save the conversations for political purposes.
We already know that the conversations Nunes and Schiff have read had nothing to do with Russia. That leaves either a criminal investigation as the reason for keeping them and unmasking the names (the National Security Adviser does not to investigations for the FBI), or for political spying on an opposing political party.
Oh, sorry, didn't mean to distract anyone from the Trump-Russia collusion thingy.
That's textbook conspiracy theory, where the questions themselves lend credence to, or even become evidence, that it happened.
A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy without warrant, and is generally one involving an illegal or harmful act carried out by government or other powerful actors. Conspiracy theories often produce hypotheses that contradict the prevailing understanding of history or simple facts (the Moon landings were staged in a studio, Junior Bush was the (C student) evil genius mastermind behind the 911 attacks, etc.). Conspiracy theories all rely on three basic principles: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. And, conspiracy theories almost always evolve to incorporate whatever evidence exists against them, so that they become a closed system that is unfalsifiable, becoming a matter of faith rather than proof, not at all unlike a religion.
The more questions that arise, the stronger the theory becomes. And things that are not connected in any way, if they can be viewed as being connected, then they are absolutely connected. Nearly every member of the Trump transition team met with or talked with British officials. And French officials. And German officials. And Saudi officials. And Brazilian officials. But none of those matter. The only ones that matter are the contacts with the Russian officials. If you watch and listed to the mainstream media, the only people on the planet that the Trump transition officials had contact with are Russian officials and a few token black folks.
The lack of curiosity in the media over Susan Rice is astonishing. There are all kinds of basic journalism questions that are simply being ignored on this. It's the basic Journalism 101 FIVE Ws questions that are not being asked. WHY did Rice request the unmasking? WHAT reasons did she give for the unmasking? WHO approved the unmasking? WHEN and HOW many times did she make the requests? WHAT did she do with the information? WHO did she give the transcripts to? WHY did she share it? WHAT did those she shared it with do with it?
These are questions that even a biased reporter or news organization will ask, even if those questions and answers are reported with high bias. But instead of asking these kinds of questions, they aren't asked at all, and instead CNN reports that a source close to Rice said she didn't do it. Oh, OK, thanks for clearing that up, you Crap News Network, you. Instead of biased reporting, which we can deal with, we get propaganda, agendized news.
Andrew McCarthy over at the National Review has a piece that lays out pretty well the Occam's Razor most likely way things happened, and why.
I am not a crook." - Richard Nixon
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski." - Bill Clinton
"I did not send or receive classified material on my email." Hillary Clinton
"I know nothing about this." - Susan Rice
I am not a crook." - Richard Nixon
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski." - Bill Clinton
"I did not send or receive classified material on my email." Hillary Clinton
"I know nothing about this." - Susan Rice
The latest conspiracy, the i85 collapse in Atlanta. I stumbled across it on youtube last night.
Two kids crashing a 'news' report. 
THIS KID AT THE WHITE HOUSE EASTER EGG ROLL Just Put CNN In A Body Bag [VIDEO]
THIS KID AT THE WHITE HOUSE EASTER EGG ROLL Just Put CNN In A Body Bag [VIDEO]
The left media is like falling over each other trying to report unfavorable 'news' about Trump.
They often end up looking like fools.
Why can't there just be a story about the NFL champs visiting the Whitehouse and taking a picture with the president without this other bs about comparing attendence.
They often end up looking like fools.
Why can't there just be a story about the NFL champs visiting the Whitehouse and taking a picture with the president without this other bs about comparing attendence.
A lot of criticism of "Fake News" and "mainstream media" amounts to little more than name calling and political spin. That's unfortunate. At its best, the media plays a crucial role in democracy. It brings out the truth corrupt officials would rather hide. It supports an informed citizenry so they can wisely vote. Our constitutional system of checks and balances uses the three branches of government to keep any one of them from becoming too powerful and to maintain the rule of law in our nation. A crucial part of keeping that working is the media, sometimes called the Fourth Estate, in recognition of its important role.
This article offers readers a new insight into how structural changes have produced the media we have today. While it offers no quick fix, it enables open-minded citizens to better understand the state of the Fourth Estate today.
This article offers readers a new insight into how structural changes have produced the media we have today. While it offers no quick fix, it enables open-minded citizens to better understand the state of the Fourth Estate today.
There's a lot of validity to that article, but too much of the problem is blamed on geography rather than honesty. One of the early paragraphs dismisses in a disingenuous manner one of the main problems with that bubble.
While it is true that no news organization "ignored" the Clinton emails story, and they did spend a lot of time and space covering it, most of the coverage was superficial, angled not about how serious it was, but about how the opposition might use it to their (Trump's) advantage. A lot of it was based around the classic journalism faux paux of the headline in the form of a question, with that question being "Will the emails hurt Clinton with her base?" Journalists know that a headline in the form of a question that can be answered as "no" is usually answered as "no," and that's exactly what they did.
And saying that "everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache" is laughable, because of which of those emails the media feasted on and which emails they didn't even acknowledge at all. They feasted on the catty, the petty, and the gossipy. They utterly ignored the emails that showed blatant coordination between reporters and news organizations and the Clinton campaign. Not once did CNN mention, for example, "Yes, we had reporters who met several times privately, along with reporters from other media organizations, with the Clinton campaign, on how to best frame positive coverage of the campaign to ensure a Clinton victory."
So, yes, there is definitely a media bubble, but it's not a bubble in a vacuum that be used as a deflection from the real and genuine bias of taking sides in an election. The Bubble explains how they blew the call and couldn't see Trump as being able to win, but it doesn't explain why they tossed journalism ethics to the side in order to take sides.
The problem here, is that the "knowing-bias charge" charge not only added up, it was blatantly admitted to and advocated for many times in print and on television, most famously by CNN ("We're doing all we can to help her win") on multiple occasions, and in the New York Times where they openly argued the case for setting aside objectivity due to the imminent and grave danger of a potential Trump presidency.
While it is true that no news organization "ignored" the Clinton emails story, and they did spend a lot of time and space covering it, most of the coverage was superficial, angled not about how serious it was, but about how the opposition might use it to their (Trump's) advantage. A lot of it was based around the classic journalism faux paux of the headline in the form of a question, with that question being "Will the emails hurt Clinton with her base?" Journalists know that a headline in the form of a question that can be answered as "no" is usually answered as "no," and that's exactly what they did.
And saying that "everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache" is laughable, because of which of those emails the media feasted on and which emails they didn't even acknowledge at all. They feasted on the catty, the petty, and the gossipy. They utterly ignored the emails that showed blatant coordination between reporters and news organizations and the Clinton campaign. Not once did CNN mention, for example, "Yes, we had reporters who met several times privately, along with reporters from other media organizations, with the Clinton campaign, on how to best frame positive coverage of the campaign to ensure a Clinton victory."
So, yes, there is definitely a media bubble, but it's not a bubble in a vacuum that be used as a deflection from the real and genuine bias of taking sides in an election. The Bubble explains how they blew the call and couldn't see Trump as being able to win, but it doesn't explain why they tossed journalism ethics to the side in order to take sides.
The narrative the Left (and The Press in particular) really wants to keep putting out there is that manufacturing jobs really aren't being lost to Mexico, China or anywhere else, but instead are being lost to automation. One part of the Left and The Press do so as a means to push back against the enforcement of immigration laws, and the other part does so because they are pro globalization (which necessarily requires open economic borders).
But this particular instance of furthering the narrative is just so egregious as to be insulating. Buried deep within the piece, the second-to-last paragraph, you find this paragraph:
The piece, about Rexnord thumbing their nose at Trump, written to make Trump look bad as all of Danielle Paquette's pieces are written to do, would have a fine piece of routine space-gobbling content, if she'd only left out that one paragraph. Even if she'd just left off the last sentence in that paragraph, it would have been fine.
But the linked study (authored by two famously pro-globalization economists) doesn't even say that 88 percent of manufacturing jobs lost over the last two decades have been lost to automation. It specifically attributes 13.4% of job losses directly to automation, and folds the other 86.6% into a combination of import/export demand, and in a tortured theoretical extrapolation of, "Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million.”
That's the same (Clintonian) mindset that turns a proposed budget increase of 20% that gets reduced to only 10% as being labeled as a 10% spending cut.
But where Danielle Paquette gets her sentence from is "Almost 88 percent of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth, and the long-term changes to manufacturing employment are mostly linked to the productivity of American factories." She simply took that 88 percent figure, and the word "productivity" and applied every last bit of it to robotic automation. But what they (in the study and many others who used tortured statistics to make the same case) do is, they take the production of parts from Mexico, for example, that are then shipped back into the US for auto assembly, for example, and use the total combined production level from both the US and Mexico as a measure of American factory productivity. A factory employs 400 people, and ships 200 jobs to Mexico, where parts are made and then shipped back to the US, and the total production of the company gets divided by the 200 remaining US jobs to show that the US factory has doubled its productivity.
There is certainly no question that robotic and other automation has cost people jobs, but I promise you, a company doesn't ship 200 jobs to Mexico so those 200 jobs can be performed by 200 robots.
Danielle Paquette, incidentally, is the quintessential SJW millennial journalist. A 2013 graduate of Indiana State University, from Indianapolis, she studied French, Journalism, and Human Sexuality and Gender Studies. She adores Eurotrips, sand volleyball and Blair Waldorf's caustic wit. Her first job out of college was as a reporter with the Tampa Bay Times, where she worked in the PolitiFact subsidiary as a staff writer and later as an associate editor (where, I'm sure, her vast life experience played a significant role - incidentally, the average age of the PolitiFact staff is 26). While in college writing for the college newspaper, she wrote extensively on women's issues (currently she has a decidedly love-hate relationship with Ivanka Trump) and about (the Utopian hope of) how robotics will one day make it so that nobody will have to work and every conceivable need will be provided by robots and automation.
But this particular instance of furthering the narrative is just so egregious as to be insulating. Buried deep within the piece, the second-to-last paragraph, you find this paragraph:
Danielle Paquette @The Washington comPost said:
The piece, about Rexnord thumbing their nose at Trump, written to make Trump look bad as all of Danielle Paquette's pieces are written to do, would have a fine piece of routine space-gobbling content, if she'd only left out that one paragraph. Even if she'd just left off the last sentence in that paragraph, it would have been fine.
But the linked study (authored by two famously pro-globalization economists) doesn't even say that 88 percent of manufacturing jobs lost over the last two decades have been lost to automation. It specifically attributes 13.4% of job losses directly to automation, and folds the other 86.6% into a combination of import/export demand, and in a tortured theoretical extrapolation of, "Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million.”
That's the same (Clintonian) mindset that turns a proposed budget increase of 20% that gets reduced to only 10% as being labeled as a 10% spending cut.
But where Danielle Paquette gets her sentence from is "Almost 88 percent of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth, and the long-term changes to manufacturing employment are mostly linked to the productivity of American factories." She simply took that 88 percent figure, and the word "productivity" and applied every last bit of it to robotic automation. But what they (in the study and many others who used tortured statistics to make the same case) do is, they take the production of parts from Mexico, for example, that are then shipped back into the US for auto assembly, for example, and use the total combined production level from both the US and Mexico as a measure of American factory productivity. A factory employs 400 people, and ships 200 jobs to Mexico, where parts are made and then shipped back to the US, and the total production of the company gets divided by the 200 remaining US jobs to show that the US factory has doubled its productivity.
There is certainly no question that robotic and other automation has cost people jobs, but I promise you, a company doesn't ship 200 jobs to Mexico so those 200 jobs can be performed by 200 robots.
Danielle Paquette, incidentally, is the quintessential SJW millennial journalist. A 2013 graduate of Indiana State University, from Indianapolis, she studied French, Journalism, and Human Sexuality and Gender Studies. She adores Eurotrips, sand volleyball and Blair Waldorf's caustic wit. Her first job out of college was as a reporter with the Tampa Bay Times, where she worked in the PolitiFact subsidiary as a staff writer and later as an associate editor (where, I'm sure, her vast life experience played a significant role - incidentally, the average age of the PolitiFact staff is 26). While in college writing for the college newspaper, she wrote extensively on women's issues (currently she has a decidedly love-hate relationship with Ivanka Trump) and about (the Utopian hope of) how robotics will one day make it so that nobody will have to work and every conceivable need will be provided by robots and automation.
Your fake news fix for Sunday:
Looks Like The Media Spread Another False Story About Trump
Looks Like The Media Spread Another False Story About Trump