Tag: fake news

What Would an Honest 60 Minutes Look Like?

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You know all this Scott Pelley comedy got me thinking.  What if 60 Minutes became a real honest to goodness investigative reporting show?  You know, like it’s claimed to be.  Watching the legacy media reporting on Pelley was hilarious because they all used exactly the same wording to describe just how venerable 60 Minutes is; “the gold standard of journalism,” “unbiased and non-partisan,” “acclaimed by both political parties.”  Of course, if anyone objective was within hearing of these claims, the eye-rolling was epic.

But imagine it for a moment.  What if 60 Minutes did an expose about Somalians in Minnesota running daycare scams to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars?  Or suppose they did an undercover investigation to find out which NGOs provide money, equipment and legal aid to Antifa?  Then they would really be doing something useful.  Even I would watch things like that.  Or could you imagine a detailed investigation into Gavin Newsom’s spending on high-speed rail and other boondoggles.  Or how about someone doing an audit on the “massaging” of the data used for the global warming studies?

Well, anyway, I don’t actually expect this level of honesty from legacy media but even if all they do is take a more balanced approach to interviewing political figures it would be a revelation.  Now the question remains whether a more even-handed approach to reporting would increase the market share for CBS.  Well, in my opinion, yes!  I used to watch 60 Minutes back in the ancient days before all of journalism became a leftist monolith.  Let’s say 1985 as a time when some vestigial fairness could still be found in the media.  If Bari Weiss succeeds in convincing the Right that she is willing to give respect to both sides of the country I think she can increase the audience by more than just a few percentage points.  And just as importantly if other networks see something like that it will make an impression.

Okay, that’s enough happy-happy talk.  We haven’t seen anything substantive yet.  Maybe all of this is just a way for Sky Dance to eliminate a lot of high-priced employees from their payroll.  I’m sure Scott Pelley was making eight figures and since they fired him for cause they don’t have to pay off his contract (as long as his lawyers don’t win in court).  But potentially this could be another case of the economics of angering fifty percent of the country leading to the collapse of another corporate dinosaur.  Just as Hollywood can’t both fight off new entertainment technology and also alienate more than half its audience, we may be seeing the breaking point for this crooked industry.  And isn’t it just poetic justice that it’s happening under the Trump administration.  Tonight, I saw a clip where a reporter asked Trump about Pelley and he said, “I think Scott Pelley’s got his own problems, he’s terrible. Look, Scott Pelley’s a stiff and he’s afraid, and he’s part of this, you know, gang of crooked, stupid people that don’t care about our country.”  Well, I think that sums things up admirably.  Hopefully from here it will get even funnier.

Goodbye Scott Pelley, We Hardly Knew Ye

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First Stephen Colbert and now Scott Pelley?  Has the whole of CBS gone topsy turvy?  The insufferable Pelley has been fired for cause from 60 Minutes after verbally assaulting his new boss (Executive Producer Nick Bilton) and the editor-in-chief of CBS News (Bari Weiss) at Bilton’s first staff meeting after taking over the news show.  During the meeting Pelley said to Bilton, “What qualifies you to be in this position?  …  You have slender qualifications for this job.”  He also accused Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes.

And then a day later he got the termination letter from Bilton, “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” He described Pelley’s behavior in the meeting as a “performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff.  …  Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you.”

Pelley has been making accusations that Weiss ordered him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”  He stated that “Incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc.”

Alright, suppose Pelley was my favorite journalist.  Would I then think he was right to say those things to his new boss?  Of course not!  Anyone who works for a large corporation knows that you don’t call out your boss and especially not at a staff meeting and you definitely don’t tell him he’s unqualified for the job.  You don’t do it even if he is unqualified for the job.  You can try to make your point of view known in a respectful and convincing way or you can keep quiet and send your resume out to the headhunters right after the meeting.  But calling your new boss and his boss idiots or crooks is a very, very bad strategy.  It will not only get you fired, it will get you black-balled in your industry.  I guess Pelley thought he was bullet proof.  I guess he wasn’t.  Bye Scott.

So, what does all this mean?  It sounds to me that Bari Weiss is making a decent attempt to turn CBS News into a news organization again instead of a propaganda machine for the Democrat party and the Left in general.  I’ve got to say I’m stunned!  What next?  Will Donald Trump get an honest to goodness interview without the usual “Mr. President, are you still beating your wife?” question?

Well, even if nothing more gets done this is a spectacular result.  Personally, I think they’ve been hoping to trigger Pelley into something like this because ending his contract will save them many millions of dollars and their bloated budgets are probably the real focus of Sky Dance and their efforts to make Paramount profitable.  Well, whatever the real reason my hope is it continues and accelerates.  There is no shortage of insufferable journalists at CBS and firing another dozen or two can only make life in these here United States that much better.

Jeff Bezos Eviscerates Washington Post.  photog Unconcerned

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I watched a few YouTube videos by journalists.  They were hilarious.  But they were kind of long and there was a lot of swearing.  So, I embedded a news station’s coverage which was still kind of funny but shorter and without the swearing.

Bezos is firing 33% of his staff, eliminating the sports page, the Metro Section, the Middle East bureaus and most of the foreign desk in general.  And he’s getting rid of their podcast.  Well, I’m not the biggest fan of Jeff Bezos.  I think he’s a pretentious twit.  But now he’s become one of my favorite billionaire twits.  Just thinking about the number of butt-hurt leftwing journalists and their friends who will soon be looking for new jobs in a journalism environment completely devoid of opportunities makes my mouth water.  Now you might think I’m an awful human being but I’m not.  I can tell because I’m not happy about the tradesmen working on the printing presses and the other non-journalists who are losing their jobs.  For them I feel sorrow.  But the left-wing journalists are awful people who hate individuals like me and feel superior to ordinary people who don’t believe in the social justice creed that the elites follow.

So in the words of Barack Obama’s favorite anti-white clergyman, “The chickens have come home to roost!”  Bari Weiss is gutting CBS News.  Bezos is chloroforming the Washington Post and Disney is finally getting around to eliminating the crew that did a hatchet job on Lucas Films.  But this is still just the tip of the iceberg.  All of the cable and broadcast networks are being overhauled by people tasked with restoring them to profitability, if possible, or shuttering them if not.  I’m particularly curious to see what happens at MS NOW.  Initially they unloaded complete deadwood like Joy Reid but the place is still stocked to the gills with overpaid leftist lunatics like Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Jen Psaki who each make millions of dollars.  I’m waiting for at least one of these losers to get the heave-ho in 2026.  In fact, I expect the whole shooting match to be closed down within eighteen months.

So this exercise going on at Bezos’s rag is sort of a template for the rest of the industry.  Right-sizing these journalism companies will be a herculean task that may not even be possible.  The business model for journalism was upended by the internet and literally no one knows how all of this will end up.  But currently all of the people I hate in journalism sound like a chorus of scorched cats, the schadenfreude is amped up to eleven and it feels just wonderful.

And just to make sure that things continue in the right direction, that paragon of journalistic incompetence, Don Lemon has picked this moment to become a martyr for the First Amendment (or I guess maybe against the First Amendment).  But maybe sometime in the next few years one of the new or old news outfits will get its feet back on the ground and start selling actual honest to goodness objective facts at a price people are willing to pay.  And that will be really be good news.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor

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Today was the dreaded ladder day.  I have been promising to clean out the gutters on the house and adjoining buildings for quite a while.  And because there are levels and other levels and other, other levels it took hours.   And somehow that damn ladder has gotten heavier over the years.  I mean it can’t be me.  I’m as strong, skillful, handsome and intelligent as ever.  I think it may be that the Earth’s gravitational field has increased over time.  If I’m ballparking it, I’d say it’s doubled.  For that reason, I found it necessary to use “maximum effort.”  But it didn’t help that it was in the high eighties today and high humidity.  And if I’ve learned one lesson it’s that badminton birds are very effective at plugging downspouts.  From now on badminton is a forbidden sport.  Let’s see them get a basketball stuck up there!  Well, that’s enough whining.  I didn’t manage to break my neck or go into vapor lock so let’s move on.

I saw that the same company that wasn’t willing to pay $46 million dollars in losses a year for the Late Show was willing to pay $1.5 billion dollars for five more years of South Park.  That’s got to make you pause.  I remember back in the 1990s when the pilot for that show came out on-line.  It had Jesus fighting with Santa Claus.  It looked like it had been drawn by a twelve-year-old and it seemed to have about the same emotional maturity.  And now the two doofuses who created it are going to be billionaires.  Well, only in America, I guess.  And that at least makes sense.  People want to watch their product.  It makes money.  It has value.  Stephen Colbert and NPR and PBS can’t get enough people to watch their stuff to pay for making it.

I guess the lesson here is that if you’re an equal opportunity offender (and the makers of South Park are most definitely that) then that doubles your audience and adds a level of authenticity to your story.  South Park and its creators; Trey Parker and Matt Stone have insulted and mocked every single powerful figure in one or more episodes over the course of almost thirty years.  That’s all presidents, dictators, religious leaders, billionaires, geniuses, generals, movie stars, corporate bigwigs, movie studios, nations, religions, even supernatural beings from Jesus to Satan to Mohammed.  They’ve made fun of the woke and MAGA.  They offend everyone.  And they do it disgustingly.  But people will pay to watch their stuff because it’s funny.  Disgusting, but funny.

I think that tells me everything I need to know about why the current media landscape is crumbling.  The product on display is really bad and almost no one is willing to cough up the ducats to pay for it.  And I believe that is a hopeful situation.  A lot of really crappy content will go away.  And a lot of it is stuff that annoys me; MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC.  What’s left afterward will at least be profitable.  Stay tuned.

All Things Considered, Considered

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Donald Trump has changed America.  Mr. Trump didn’t shift the Overton Window.  He put a brick through it.  His take on what’s wrong with America isn’t shocking anymore because his view has become the mainstream opinion.

So, all of that is true.  But has he changed America?  Well, yes.  On this and that he’s made changes and they are changes for the better.  His immigration policy and the results he’s getting on deportation are important.  His birthright citizenship fight is historic and if it succeeds it will change the dynamics of immigration into this country.

But how will I gauge whether Donald Trump’s second term is a success or failure?  For me success is permanently defunding PBS and NPR.  That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.  That is the litmus test.  I want David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart laid off by PBS due to lack of funding.  I want to see them on YouTube or Patreon making silly noises whenever someone pledges ten dollars for a super chat or whatever it’s called.  I want Big Bird and Elmo forced to go back to being waiters in the NYC theater district and I want that woman who runs NPR and testified before Congress that there was no bias on her watch, fired and forced to start an Only Fans channel.  Let’s face it.  As long as all of us are still paying for these people to insult and slander us on the public airwaves, we are not winning anything.  We’re just losing less.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t need NPR or PBS to cease to exist.  I absolutely want leftists to have their own echo chambers.  This is a free country (theoretically) and if they want to buy tote bags and overpriced wine from their favorite fake journalists at “All Things Considered” or the “PBS New Hour” then let them go ahead and knock themselves out.  By all means do so.  But let them pay for the damn thing themselves.  They’re always saying how public funding is only like 15% of their total funding.  If that’s the case then they won’t miss our money at all.

But everyone knows that’s not the case.  If they suddenly had to get along without the federal government they would be broke.  Brooks and Capehart wouldn’t be able to afford their bow ties and spats.  And there wouldn’t be any money to fund their hard-hitting exposes on the health benefits of attending drag queen story hour in the Tenderloin.

So that’s it.  Trump can announce that he’s winning so much that people are getting tired of winning but as long as NPR still has journalism hacks in hushed tones declaring the body count from the break up of USAID then I won’t declare him the winner.  He’s just losing slightly less hard.

But I haven’t given up hope.  There’s still a window of opportunity for the bill that defunds these stations to be passed in the Senate.  Sometime in August that bill will expire and our last best chance to kill Sesame Street and fake news will end.  So come on Donald from one kid from the Outer Boroughs to another put your shoulder behind this thing and make us both winners.

And I Think It’s Great

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I was watching a clip of Capon and Books on the PBS Snooze Hour and they were talking about how Trump’s decision to stop foreign students from attending Harvard was spite.  And you know for once I actually agreed with them.  I think Donald Trump is doing everything he can to punish Harvard for defying him.  Depriving them of the tuitions that foreign students fork over will badly hurt Harvard financially.  It’s unfair and bordering on unconstitutional.

And I think it’s great.

There’s nothing I would enjoy more than to see Harvard lose billions of dollars and come crawling back to Trump to get his forgiveness.  Listening to Booksie gush about what an important elite institution Harvard is and how he used to stand in awe of the gravitas and fame of the professors who taught there.  What a sniveling fop.  He sounded like a 1960s teenybopper adolescent girl screaming and fainting over the Beatles.  If he hasn’t already had his testicles removed, he might as well get it over with now.  There can’t be a picogram of testosterone in his entire body at this point.

As has been noted elsewhere, the same people who go to Harvard and Yale and the rest of the Ivy League are also the ones who end up working at the mainstream media, the State Department, USAID and the NGOs that are paid for by USAID.  And of course, they also work at these same colleges.  All these people have the same values and they all have the same contempt for us.  All of the damage that Trump is doing to them by shutting down USAID and running the DOGE cuts and harassing the IVY League colleges and firing the Deep State is causing all of these people great pain and confusion.

And I think it’s great.

It is my most fervent wish that he causes as much pain and disruption to these people’s lives as is humanly possible.  It would be music to my ears to hear that all of their plans are ruined and they were forced into bankruptcy and ruin.  I’d love to see Harvard closed down and sold off to the lowest bidder and turned into low-income housing for homeless drug addicts.  I would love to see all the idiot children of the managerial class forced to go back to their parents’ homes in New York and Boston and Washington and sponge off of them for years to come.

Some might think I’m being mean-spirited.  Maybe I am.  But these are the people who laughed at working class people who couldn’t get work of any kind because the elites decided to move all those jobs to China, Vietnam and Mexico.  When these poor people despaired and ended up dead of fentanyl overdose the reaction was, “Bring in the third world immigrants to take their place.  They were too lazy to cut our lawns.  They deserve to die.”  Well, the shoe is on the other foot.  Donald Trump is getting rid of the waste now.  He’s decided we can live without people researching transgender mice and intersectional race ranking.  He’s going to eliminate the nice cozy spots funded by deficit spending.  They’re going to be the ones despairing.

And I think it’s great.

Well, on with the Show

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I was watching a video of Jake Tapper talking about his hard-hitting investigative journalism about why no one knew that Joe Biden’s brain had turned into mush.  Apparently, it’s the fault of Democratic politicians and operatives in the White House and the Congress!  Astonishing.

So, when Morning Joe Scarborough said that the present Joe Biden was the best, sharpest Biden based on his long conversations with “the guy” how was the Democratic coverup responsible?  When all these reporters including Jake Tapper covered Biden as he mumbled and bumbled and stumbled his way through his term how could it be someone else covering up what we all could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears in the few instances where they allowed him out in public.  Surely, they saw a thousand times as much mumbling, bumbling and stumbling in their daily contact with the president of the United States.

Obviously, it’s laughably ridiculous to even try to pretend that they weren’t the primary agents of the coverup of Joe Biden’s precipitous mental and physical decline.  It was their job to report on what commons sense would declare a problem with Joe Biden.  And it was their job to then ferret out what exactly was going on with the Biden administration’s cabinet and why they weren’t deciding on applying the twenty-fifth amendment.

Tapper is writing this book as if he’s some great truth teller but he did nothing to prevent this country from being governed by the lower-level bureaucrats and cabinet secretaries who should have been accountable to the president of the United States but instead did whatever they wanted to.  So, the mainstream media is going through this charade; “Oh how could we have been taken in by these awful Democratic operatives?  How did they fool us when all we wanted was the TRUTH?

Well, all this shows, undeniably that the mainstream media is totally and unchangeably in the tank for the Democrats; yesterday, today and forever.  And no amount of play-acting can any longer fool anyone except the stupidest of Americans.  Oh, sure, the idiots on PBS can still go through their routine on television about how they’re non-partisan, right down the middle.  But the jig is most definitely up.

I’m sure someone will buy Jake Tapper’s book.  And he will identify some of Joe Biden’s goofier henchmen as the real villains in the case of Joe Biden’s missing brain.  But let’s be clear.  Except for Fox all the large news organizations are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat party and never write or speak a word that isn’t completely reviewed and approved by the people who run the Democrat party.

And you can confirm this by how all of these independently owned and operated corporations use the exact same wording whenever they have a response to a situation where the Democrats are in trouble.  Someone provides an approved statement that all of the puppets on the various channels parrot back word for word.

Well, on with the show!

Trump Signs EO Ending Federal Funding for NPR & PBS

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Sure, I know there will be a court injunction within the hour but still the schadenfreude and just general hilarity from this move makes it all worthwhile.  I dream of all the muppets being laid off.  Elmo, Big Bird and the other weirdos who inhabit the creepy corners of Sesame Street.

Imagine all the NPR hosts of “All Things Considered” talking in the Robert Siegel whisper until they find out they’ve been laid off and then all shrieking and cussing at the tops of their lungs.  How glorious.

But my favorite subtractions will be Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks.  These two pretentious blowhards have been the greatest sources of government funded misinformation on display.  Not having to pay for their efforts will be an enormous relief.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 30APR2025 – American Media Bubble

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I think the biggest reason that the narratives were so jarring and caused such a sense of cognitive dissonance comes down to the fact that I had spent so much time overseas. Outside of America, the media landscape stops being a constant funnel of US-centric news. This sounds obvious, but one must personally see the difference to truly understand the constant bombardment of information and narratives versus how others receive news on world events. I still chuckle to this day when an Op-Ed or headline declares how “the world is watching” what the US is doing with baited breath, as if there are villagers in far-flung East Timor or a town in Norway huddled around the TV or computer awaiting the next headline from CNN or NYT. Yes, many around the globe pay attention to current events, but not to the extent that MSM implies. The Legacy media kabuki theater is mostly for the US audience. I used to believe that finding 5-10 sources on a story was enough to put together a mostly accurate picture of what machinations were happening. Now, I try to find 2-3X that many because of the rampant misinformation displayed. It’s even worse now than it was two decades ago.

16APR2025 – Wednesday Coffee Walk Zoom Call – To Boldly Go Where No Hag Has Gone Before

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It’s always good talking to the boys.  What will be the topic for the week?  What will be the funniest or the craziest or the most annoying topic for the Left?  There were several candidates; NYC subway necrophilia, General Flynn’s call for Obama’s arrest and NY AG Leticia James’ real estate fraud scandal.  But everyone’s favorite by a lot was “Leftist Hags in Space!”  We all got a good laugh out of the likes of Gayle King, Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, washed up pop star Katy Perry and nobodies Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen squealing around on top of a comically phallic “Blue Origin” rocket that rose to an unimpressive 62 miles above Earth and then parachuted back.  The whole roundtrip took place within a ridiculously short 12 minutes.

This all female “crew” followed in the footsteps of 90+ year old fake rocket man James T Kirk, (AKA William Shatner) as he also failed to reach Earth orbit in the painfully underpowered suborbital rocket.  It was the opinion of all on the zoom call that a better effect could have been achieved if Bezos had instead equipped the ship with a female crew composed entirely of professional strippers.  There was disagreement as to whether weightlessness was a problem or a bonus from the point of performance.  Also, it was debated whether a stripper pole would be a safety hazard in the “cockpit.”

I noticed Camera Girl looking disapprovingly at me as she walked by at this point during the zoom call but free speech is a cherished right of the coffee walk tradition so I ignored the implied censorship and laughed along with the rest of the jackasses.  Ah, good times.

So, we compared the press coverage of this absurdly unimpressive publicity stunt and compared it to Space-X planning and executing a critical rescue of actual astronauts from the orbiting space station where Boeing’s failure stranded them for over half a year.  Basically, other than Fox News the rest of the media performed a virtual black out of the Space-X mission while the Bezos stunt was given 24/7 coverage by all the news stations as if it were something worthy of discussion.

And it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that Jeff Bezos has managed to make space travel uncool.  Now I’ll qualify this.  Suborbital rocket flight is not really space-travel.  It’s really just air travel of a very inconvenient and useless kind.  But he has managed to attach a taint to rocket flight which I wouldn’t have thought possible.  And I should have expected nothing less from the founder of Amazon.com.  After all, the company who has his annoying trucks delivering things at my house seemingly before I order them would obviously be able to make rocket ships annoying too.

Well, I can always hope that the next all female crew will be Democrat politicians.  Let’s say Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters.  Put all four of them in blue jumpsuits and at least for ten minutes I can hope against hope for some real excitement.  Engine, O-ring, parachute, whatever.