Tag: fake news

CNN Parent Company’s Accounting Shows Negative Value for the Cable Channel

photog Current Events ,

Warner Brothers/Discovery took a $9.1 billion write-down basically to write off the abysmal loss of value in their cable channels for which CNN is the poster child.

“Warner Bros. has eliminated more than 2,000 positions over the past year and slashed 100 jobs at CNN last month.”

I think they should cut a little deeper. Look at the names of some of the people they haven’t fired yet:

  • Jim Acosta
  • David Axelrod
  • Christiane Amanpour
  • Dana Bash
  • Wolf Blitzer
  • John Berman
  • Anderson Cooper
  • Chris Wallace
  • Jake Tapper
  • John King
  • Van Jones

Some of these people are making eight figure salaries.  But what value do you get from Anderson Cooper, David Axelrod or Van Jones?  And why would anyone pay Jim Acosta anything?  And who knew that Wolf Blitzer was even still alive?

They should probably keep the guy who sprays the roaches and cleans the toilets but that’s about it.  No one else is providing value.

Do the Right Thing

photog Current Events , , ,

The Washington Post lost $77 million last year.  Now the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos spends $77 million on having his bald head waxed every month so the amount of money is almost inconsequential.  But the fact that they lost half of their subscription base was just too embarrassing and so Bezos brought in a hatchet man as publisher and now he has given the paper’s first female executive editor; Sally Buzbee the boot.

Well, the newsroom is very unhappy.  And what is there number one worry?  Loss of diversity!

  • “I don’t think she deserved to go out this way,” the first staffer told me, noting that in conversations with their colleagues, people “don’t feel good about the fact that the first female executive editor of The Washington Post got a one paragraph goodbye note at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and that she’s being replaced by more white men we don’t know.”

 

  • “Everyone was pretty shocked with your email last night,” one reporter said at the meeting, according to a source present. The reporter suggested that “the most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” and expressed surprise at this development given Lewis’s prior commitments to diversity.

 

  • Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether “any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions,” a question that prompted applause.

Unfortunately, their boss is a little more concerned with the lack of readers wanting to read the written product produced by this much vaunted diversity:

  • At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So, I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

 

  • “Don’t we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post?” one staffer asked, to which Lewis replied, “You haven’t done it. I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”

 

  • “The fact that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership implies that he finds everyone lacking, and I think that’s kind of the most disturbing thing,” a second staffer told me.

 

So, the Washington Post is no longer selling something people want to buy, threatening the jobs of everyone working there and all the drones working there care is that the people being sent in to save their jobs are white men!

It might almost make you wonder if maybe this fixation on race and gender clouds their judgement in terms of their writing.

I guess there’s some hope in the fact that the publisher they brought in openly tells his employees that they are failing at their jobs and things have to change.  Of course, what he probably really has to do is lower his costs by reducing his staff to an absolute minimum and pay them as little as possible.  He’s probably thinking he can buy an AI that will write, “Orange Man bad” for a small fraction of what he pays his Ivy League diversity hires.

The truth is that the whole news business has been upended by the impact of Google on the advertising model and also the ubiquity of news and opinion across the internet threatens the very existence of the print news industry.  Well, some of them will make it.  Apparently, the New York Times has stabilized their subscriptions by adding digital accounts successfully so it can be done.  But maybe there’s no place for another New York Times.  Maybe the Washington Post will have to go.  As I said, Jeff Bezos can pay to keep open or close down the Washington Post without changing his profit statement even a single percent.  But what will be interesting is how the delicate snowflakes react to the news that diversity doesn’t pay the bills or give the owner a reason to keep the place going in the absence of profits.

Now Christopher Rufo has become interested in the trials and tribulations of the Washington Post’s attempt to return to profitability.  And he’s come up with a recommendation.  Fire Taylor Lorenz.  You may remember Taylor from the time she doxed the woman who runs Libs of TikTok.  Because of this she is a very unpopular with a pretty good part of the American public.  Rufo’s point is that if the Washington Post wants to increase its potential reader pool maybe they should eliminate the more ethically challenged staff members.  And that’s the real reason for me writing this post.  I just think it would be hilarious if they gave Taylor the boot.

FUD

photog Current Events , , ,

Fear, uncertainty, disinformation.  These things seem to almost define the government’s policies toward us.  Most prominent in recent years was the COVID campaign.  The use of fear and disinformation to force behavior in a population was on a previously unheard-of scale.  Most vivid was Biden’s heinous prediction that the unvaccinated would suffer a winter of severe illness and death.  Lying to their fellow citizens has now reached the ultimate stage where nothing resembling the truth is used.  Basically, we have stepped over the line and adopted the Stalinist practices described by George Orwell in his novel “1984.”  The truth has disappeared completely from the government’s communications with us.

Knowing this to be the case, it behooves each of us to become “Washington-ologists,” sort of like the Kremlinologists that the Defense Department employed to figure out Soviet nuclear strategy.  We have to parse the lies being broadcast by the government and translate them into the underlying activities that Washington is attempting to inflict upon us.

For instance, Joe Biden and his allies in the Blue States have been declaring the end of the gasoline fueled automobile.  They’ve done everything they can do to make it seem as if within five years you won’t be able to buy or use anything but a battery car.  And this produces, fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of the average person.  They think, “Can this be true?  Will I be forced to lose my investment in my automobile if I don’t unload it now and buy a battery car?”  And some people actually go ahead and buy a battery car and find out about the problems of buying into this unsatisfactory technology and the current lack of infrastructure to use it.

But once they’ve wasted the money they’re trapped into this choice and so Biden’s scare tactic succeeds.  Meanwhile based on how little has actually been done to provide power for these battery cars, there really isn’t any hope of this technology becoming dominant for the foreseeable future.  But using fear and intimidation it pushes forward the outcome that the Left desires.

I think that a wise strategy to implement when dealing with pronouncements from Washington is to assume that anything they try to scare you with is a lie and anything they tell you is for your own good is meant to hurt you.  If you use that algorithm, you probably won’t be too far from the truth.  Now the tricky part comes when you try to avoid doing what they want to force on you.  As you can see from the COVID vaccine example they’ll go pretty far to coerce behavior.  And the closer your life is enmeshed with the federal government (federal employee, contractor) the harder it will be to say no.  That right there shows you why staying out of their orbit might be the smartest thing you can do.  But even independent people have entanglements with the feds.  The IRS and government mandates applying to private corporations like the FDA and other regulatory agencies can make it difficult to just ignore the dictates of Washington.

But at least if you approach the disinformation coming out of Washington from a skeptical stance you increase your chances of avoiding harm.  Of course, your friends and family will claim you’re a conspiracy theorist but as we’ve seen many of those theories have turned out to be true.  So let the citizen beware.

But watching the recent Congressional hearings on the COVID debacle where Fauci claims that he never caused any problems or misled us about anything is comedic gold.  Listening to his side of it he’s never even heard of COVID!”

But, But, Misinformation!

photog Current Events , , ,

The New York Times says that Donald Trump and his allies have won the war to kill the Democrats’ and the Deep State’s efforts to control political speech online.

Well, okay. I hope that’s true. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Especially with people going to prison for writing memes that the Democrats don’t like.

But let’s say it’s a start.

“The arguments strike at the heart of an unsettled question in modern American political life: In a world of unlimited online communications, in which anyone can reach huge numbers of people with unverified and false information, where is the line between protecting democracy and trampling on the right to free speech?”

Apparently the NYT doesn’t understand that the 1st amendment isn’t just for their misinformation.  Funny thing is the description, “reach huge numbers of people with unverified and false information” sounds like a Joe Biden press conference.

“Even before the court rules, Mr. Trump’s allies have succeeded in paralyzing the Biden administration and the network of researchers who monitor disinformation.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department continue to monitor foreign disinformation, but the government has suspended virtually all cooperation with the social media platforms to address posts that originate in the United States.

“There’s just a chilling effect on all of this,” said Nina Jankowicz, a researcher who in 2022 briefly served as the executive director of a short-lived D.H.S. advisory board on disinformation. “Nobody wants to be caught up in it.””

Aww, what a shame! I guess we’re supposed to feel bad because Jankowicz’s Ministry of Truth got shut down.

So good. If the effort to censure free speech about the Democrats has failed let’s raise a cheer. But it’s a little early to declare victory. After all the TikTok law is being rolled out to take over any internet business they don’t like.

Joy Reid Achieves Terminal Stupid

photog Current Events , , ,

MSNBC proudly displays Joy Reid to the world like some sideshow exhibit.  She is a very strange individual in many ways.  But let’s be kind and put everything else aside.  Let’s just concentrate on her words and ideas.  She say that the United States has over 327 million people so why does it need kids?

Now maybe this is a failure of the school system where Joy was allegedly educated but does she think people live forever?   Is she unaware that the young adults procreate and then raise up the next generation and then give way to their children and the whole cycle begins again.

Or is she aware of this but thinks that the current deficit in births to native born women in the United States should be replaced with illegal aliens walking in?  Well, let’s be kind and say that’s what she means.

I wonder if she thinks that this country will stay as it is now if the demographics continue to change as drastically as the current influx of third world migrants indicates it will?  Does she assume that there will still be a need for Joy Reid on television?  Does she think there will still be a need for MSNBC?  Or for that matter will there be the where withall for cable television to still exist?

I know it’s unthinkable that we would have to get along without Joy Reid but I suspect if things go along the way they currently are Joy Reid is going to have to find a new gig.  And from what I can see and hear of her skills I think DMV clerk is gonna be a stretch.  Maybe bathroom attendant at the local high school might make more sense.  I’m sure she could figure out how a mop and ringer work.

 

Pravda is Worried.  The Proles Have Caught On.

photog Current Events , , ,

There is a fear growing.  Donald Trump has been consistently leading Joe Biden in national and state polls.  And the lead isn’t going away.  And the leads in some of the critical swing states have him ahead in some cases by almost ten points.

The fear exists because even with this lead and with people sensing this lead, the Democratic party is gearing up to use bogus absentee ballots to steal another election.  And they fear the consequences.

The January 6th protest was a result of people’s outrage that rampant voter fraud was perpetrated and approved by the political establishment.  And four years later the knowledge that the fraud happened is widespread.  And the numbers for Trump are even stronger now than they were four years ago.  The fear is that if they steal another election, it will finally snap the last threads providing any sense of legitimacy to the federal government.

You might rightly ask does it matter at all?  Ultimately, I think it does for them.  A large part of the strength of the United States as a great power derives from the consent of the governed.  Americans have been willing to fight in great wars and small because the benefits of living in a free country were self-evident.  Even the urban poor in the United States felt that they were in possession of privileges that even the rich inhabitants of other countries were denied.  We could say what we wanted.  We could move around a continent-spanning nation and find a new job and a new life just by willing it to happen.  We could start a business and make as much money as we wanted and no commissar would come down the street and take it away.  We had fair and free elections.  And if the bums we elected did a lousy job we could kick them out four years later.  We were called an exceptional nation and being an American was a special thing.  And we had found that to be true.

And now none of those things is true anymore.  Obama told us there is nothing exceptional about us.  And Biden says that third world invaders are better people than we are.  And the freedoms we were given can be taken back.  Say the wrong thing and there will be a knock on the door, or a battering ram, and away you go to the gulag.  No one is particularly proud anymore.  And precious few want to fight in their wars anymore.

And when we try to throw the bums out of office, they print up fake ballots and stay in office and tell us to mind our business, or else.

But the people running things are nervous.  The economy is not doing so good.  And the wars aren’t going so well.  And no one wants to join the military.  China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia have been using other currencies instead of the almighty dollar.  The crime-ridden cities are even starting to scare the Democrat mayors running them.

I can tell that they’re nervous because their scribes are starting to write things like this.

“In the spirit of my argument in this column, I should concede that things do get trickier when we are dealing with a deliberate lie that has been concocted and spread as a political weapon, and is now believed by a large number of people, such as the “stealing” of the 2020 election. We don’t want to legitimise disinformation. But even in these circumstances, it is important to find things to agree on. No, the election was not stolen, but yes, there were a tiny number of instances of voter fraud (just shy of 475 possible instances, according to an AP report).

If we can show we have taken all of the facts — no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient they are — into consideration, not only does it make our arguments more persuasive; it also allows us to get closer to the truth (which we often have less of a grip on than we might like to admit). And doing so makes disagreement less toxic and more productive. In my experience, when you give someone an inch, they often end up giving you an inch, too.”

You see how the writer is bending over backwards to be fair to us poor benighted proles.  Read how she admits that there were a tiny number of frauds.  The Associated Press said so!  How can it be false?  That extra week or two of counting votes?  Why what’s wrong with that?  Who ever heard of counting all the votes in one day?  Crazy talk.  So, they kicked out the Republican poll watchers?  Why shouldn’t they.  They were making the poll workers nervous by being there.  And the precincts that came in at over 100% voter turnout?  Why that’s just democracy fortified.

A few other nervous sentences in the article:

“A Monmouth poll last June found that only 21 per cent of Republicans (but 93 per cent of Democrats) believe Joe Biden won fairly.

We can see similar gulfs on all sorts of issues, from the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns in preventing the spread of coronavirus to America’s migrant crisis and the war in Gaza. We are talking, here, not just about divides in terms of what is morally wrong and right, but what is real and what is not.

The stakes are too high to continue in this splintered way. A 2022 poll found that more than two in five Americans believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade, thanks to political divisions.

And a report by the Eurasia Group in January said the upcoming US presidential election represents the biggest political risk to the world in 2024. “The United States is already the world’s most divided and dysfunctional advanced industrial democracy,” analysts wrote. “The 2024 election will exacerbate this problem no matter who wins.””

Yep, they’re nervous.  And that’s because they plan to steal 2024.  And if four years after 2020 got us to where we are today, I think they know that another stolen election is going to finish off whatever good is left in this once exceptional nation.

And how will these scribes find a Starbuck’s after the fall of the empire?

Okay, Let’s Talk About Journalism

photog Current Events , ,

So, we all laughed while Taylor Lorentz wailed about the “Slaughter of the Innocents” among the millennial generation of journalists.  Of course, we did.  Everyone on our side despises them because they are everything that is wrong about the mainstream media.

They are dishonest, stupid, lazy and almost completely unqualified to perform their primary mission; discover what is happening in the world and communicate it to the people reading, listening and watching their news outlets.  Instead, they have become the Ministry of Truth.  And thereby, they have deserved the monumental collapse in public trust in them and also the huge drops in paying audience.

Now, fair to say, a part of the lost audience is not directly related to their lack of skill and honesty.  The internet has upended the financial model that used to govern how newspapers and other forms of journalism made their money; advertising.

Google and Facebook have swallowed almost all the advertising dollars by means of their surveillance of people’s search histories and other internet activity.  So, it’s not fair to blame media’s collapsing profits completely on their lousy work.  And in fact, some countries (e.g., Australia) are now forcing Facebook to pay news sites for the content that they allow people to post on their Facebook pages.  But the new world is what it is.  News sites are struggling to keep their doors open.

Well, okay.  What that means is that news will become a subscription-based product.  People will have to pay for what they want to read or see.  And most people tend to be unwilling to pay money to be insulted.  Which means one of two approaches must be adopted by the news corporations.

The first approach is to continue with what they currently do.  They can keep up a far-left-biased version of the news which insults half of the viewing public.  And this means building their financial model based on whatever payments they calculate they can get from the left-leaning half of the country.

The second approach is to try to perform objective journalism and get money from anyone who wants to know what’s actually going on in the world.  Now this would be a wholly novel idea.  So far, it’s never been tried by any major news organization.  And for all I know maybe it would produce less income than the first approach.  But I tend to believe that providing unbiased news coverage and separating it completely from a program that featured opinion pieces from both sides of the partisan divide would serve the public better and at the same time would make more money.

And why do I think unbiased news would make more money?  Because we’ve seen what the opposite looks like.  The opposite of unbiased news is Taylor Lorentz.  And that model is crashing and burning from coast to coast.  And it will get worse.  Eventually, people will get to pay a la carte for their media.  When that happens places like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News will either have to provide the public what they want or go out of business.

And all of this is actually for the good.  We pay for the awful cable companies with our cable bill and we never get our money’s worth.  I would pay extra if none of my money went to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and certainly not MSNBC and CNN.  Of late Fox News has been barely half a step better than these.  If my internet provider would charge a fair price for access to the internet and I could choose from the media options that I preferred and paid for nothing else it would be a much better world.  Instead of five or ten large leftist media outlets there would probably be one or two at most.

And from where I stand that would be a vast improvement.  Because that would mean that about eighty percent of the obnoxious leftist journalists currently employed by these woke fake-news corporations would be driving cabs and waiting tables in New York and DC.  Sorry Taylor Lorentz, but that’s what should happen.

Schadenfreude – Taylor Lorenz Version

photog Current Events ,

You might remember this female apparatchik from her doxxing of the Libs of TikTok lady.  Well, things must be getting lonely out there for La Lorentz at the Washington Post and now she must be feeling the icy chill of an upcoming pink slip because here she moans and groans about how all we plebes will be devastated if the intrepid reporters who provide us with the truth (pravda) are forced onto the bread lines.

I’ve provided a group of right leaning pundits laughing heartily at her warning.

Oh, Taylor, Taylor.  When will you ever learn.  What goes around, comes around.

Fake News for Stupid People

photog Current Events , , ,

I’ve had a lot of fun mocking our heroic pundits on the Left.  Whether it’s Joy Reid and her completely hollow skull or Rachel Maddow and her total lack of self-awareness or Jeffrey Toobin and his missing boundaries; all these people share the circumstance that they are unqualified to act as journalists.  Granted, their employers really don’t expect or want them to perform that function.  The last thing that MSNBC or CNN want is honesty and objectivity.  Heaven forbid!

What these dullards and liars are supposed to do is mouth the talking points they are handed and pretend to be serious adults.  In some cases, this is impossible.  Joy Reid can’t even pronounce the word objectivity.  Jeffrey Toobin couldn’t forego autoerotic activities while at work.  And the Rachel Maddows and Chris Hayeses and Chris Lemons simply crawl with tics and mannerisms that announce to the world, “Here is a nut job.”

So, yeah, it’s a lot of fun and beyond easy to slap these meat puppets around whenever one of them takes to the airwaves and pontificates about Donald Trump or someone else on the Right who won’t kowtow to Barack Obama or some other creepy “lightworker” who they pull out of the woodworks.  It’s easy because they’re idiots and because the things they say have become demonstrably false.  COVID was built in a lab and the vaccine didn’t protect us from it.  Biden has let in ten million illegal aliens and they are overwhelming New York, Chicago and every sanctuary city that claims to want them.  Biden has inflated cost of everything from food to gasoline to rent until now working-class people can’t afford to live.

As I say, it’s easy to slap them around.  But that only helps if so many people demand change that even the fake election producers can’t fake the results.  And unfortunately, there are plenty of people like the Karens of the world who would rather see working class people starve to death rather than allow Donald Trump in the White House.  The Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFL’s) are perfectly happy to pretend that Joy Reid is a genius if it validates their own intelligence.

But the final laugh will be on them.  White females have finally fallen off the edge of the critical race table.  Whiteness has finally sunk them too.  There just isn’t enough room in the zero-sum game that is the Democrat coalition to allow them to keep their heads above water.  BIPoC women need their jobs and their status.  So, it’s time for them to go.  And at the same time if the Supreme Court invalidates sex based affirmative action in the workplace, then there won’t be anything at all left for them to console themselves with as they come home to their little apartments filled with boxes; wine boxes and cat litter boxes.

But one thing they’ll still have will be MSNBC.  Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid will always be there to remind them that black women and white lesbians can go on tv and tell them all the things that white people (including AWFL’s) have done to harm this world and why they need to be punished.

So, these dullards and liars have a real function.  It’s to tell fake news to stupid people.  I stand corrected.

My Favorite Iowa Moment. Send in the MSNBC Clowns

photog Current Events , , ,

As Trump was declared the winner by NBC Rachel Maddow announces that MSNBC won’t be airing Trump’s victory speech.  But it’s not spite, she says, it’s their high journalistic ethics that will not allow lies (lies!) to be broadcast on their channel.  Hah!  But luckily for us they will monitor the speech in case there is anything that needs to be conveyed (or more likely refuted).

Well, thank goodness we have MSNBC to let us know what is newsworthy.  I mean, if you can’t depend on MSNBC to provide objective reporting who can you?  Isn’t it rich.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/01/15/msnbcs_rachel_maddow_censors_trumps_iowa_victory_speech_its_not_out_of_spite.html