|
Post by the Scribe on Apr 21, 2020 8:51:03 GMT
Quote by germancanadian: It'll take the right candidate with the right policies and the right message to counteract what is basically a cult of racism and White Nationalism. But whoever is the Democratic candidate may want to avoid trying to appeal to the better angels of that cult, because there simply aren't any.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Apr 21, 2020 8:51:29 GMT
Yes, we have gone from an anti FDR conservatism 1940s until 1965 to a Dixiecrat Nixon dirty tricks racist conservatism until 1980 to a Reagan global elite anti labor Libertarian trickle down conservatism until 1996 when FOX came on the scene to begin the cult which eventually grew into the fascistic conservatism cult that we have today under Trump. There is absolutely NO talking to these people. No convincing them of anything. They are resolute, brainwashed brick walls. The best one can do is educate our own side to this reality with facts. The second thing to do is to secure our elections. Our electoral system is rigged against the majority. I just posted an article on how that happened. I think it is important to understand that first before we are able to make any changes. We should be able to outsmart the system. Some states are doing that with the winner take all concept for the presidential race. Although "their" side is close to calling for a new constitutional convention which if it happens will keep them in power forever more.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Apr 21, 2020 8:51:58 GMT
'It's blasted across America': How Fox and Sean Hannity amplified a Russia-fueled conspiracy Michael IsikoffChief Investigative Correspondent,Yahoo News•July 30, 2019 news.yahoo.com/its-blasted-across-america-how-fox-and-sean-hannity-amplified-a-russiafueled-conspiracy-100000894.html
This is the fifth part in the Yahoo News “Conspiracyland” series. Read and listen to the first four parts here: news.yahoo.com/tagged/conspiracyland
WASHINGTON — Early on the morning of May 16, 2017, the editors of the Fox News website were in a state of near panic. As they arrived at work at Fox headquarters in midtown Manhattan, they discovered that the network’s affiliate in Washington, D.C., had dropped a huge story the night before, based on the work of one of the Fox News website’s own reporters. It was a story that could turn the political world on its head — if it was actually true.
The story involved Seth Rich, the 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer who had been shot and killed the previous July in what police believed was most likely a botched robbery. Malia Zimmerman, a Los Angeles-based reporter for the Fox News website, had sent her editors in New York a wild draft of a piece claiming that the FBI had uncovered evidence that Rich — and not Russian military-intelligence hackers — had been the real source of stolen DNC emails provided to WikiLeaks. If that was the case, that botched robbery in Washington would start looking very much like a political assassination.
The Fox News web editors hadn’t had a chance to vet Zimmerman’s article. They had not drilled down on her sketchy sourcing. But, according to three Fox News sources familiar with the handling of the story, the editors were so upset that such a big exclusive had been broken by a local affiliate, rather than the network itself, that they hastily rushed the Zimmerman piece onto the Fox News website, setting off a political and media firestorm.
“Back with a Fox News alert: a brand-new bombshell in the murder of that guy right there, a DNC staffer,” proclaimed Ainsley Earhardt, co-host of “Fox & Friends,” as the cable network’s popular morning show went on the air.
“The narrative has been all along Russia, Russia, Russia,” chimed in co-host Steve Doocy. But this new story could change all of that. Doocy then read Zimmerman’s grabber of a lede: “The DNC staffer who was gunned down on July 10th on Washington, DC streets last July just steps from his home had leaked thousands of internal emails to Wikileaks, law enforcement sources have told Fox News.”
It was just the start of what would become a weeklong Fox News blitzkrieg in which the network’s biggest stars and commentators would hype the Rich story night after night. As if that weren’t enough, a wide-ranging Russian propaganda operation immediately swung into action to promote Fox News’ reporting — with a big boost from the Internet Research Agency, the shadowy St. Petersburg troll farm that specialized in social media manipulation during the 2016 campaign.
The backstory of the Fox News “exclusive” — and how it fell apart eight days later, forcing the network to erase it from its website — is the subject of “Fox News Fallout,” the new episode in Yahoo News’ “Conspiracyland” podcast, released on Tuesday.
The Fox News promotion of the Rich story provided a powerful new megaphone for a baseless conspiracy theory that — as was revealed in Episode 2 of “Conspiracyland” — had been spawned by Russian intelligence operatives just three days after Rich’s death.
At the same time, it had painful real-world impacts. “I was furious,” said Deborah Sines, then the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Rich murder investigation. The Fox News account was, she said, a “complete fabrication” based on “lies” about a supposed FBI forensic report that didn’t actually exist — but that nonetheless forced her to waste time and resources investigating.
More tragically, the Fox News blitz caused new anguish for Rich’s parents, who watched as their deceased son was recklessly portrayed as a thief and a leaker who had betrayed his DNC colleagues.
“It’s blasted across America with Fox and Hannity … All they’ve done is, quote, ‘taken it down,’ but it’s still up there on the internet,” says Mary Rich, Seth’s mother, in an emotional interview on “Conspiracyland.”
“I wish they had the chance to experience the hell we have gone through. Because this is worse than losing my son the first time. This is like losing him all over again.”
The previous episode of “Conspiracyland” reported how Ed Butowsky, a
more news.yahoo.com/its-blasted-across-america-how-fox-and-sean-hannity-amplified-a-russiafueled-conspiracy-100000894.html
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Apr 21, 2020 8:52:33 GMT
Is there any doubt there is a right wing noise machine and a conservative cult of Trump?Conservative talk show host fired mid-show after criticising TrumpHost says 'he stepped back off the Trump train' before firing Vanessa Swales www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-impeachment-radio-show-host-craig-silverman-denver-conservative-republican-a9206736.html 8 hours ago
Mr Silverman spoke of being frozen out by conservative colleagues who didn't like his views ( Getty ) Craig Silverman had clearly worn out his welcome on KNUS, a conservative talk-radio station in Denver.
Midway through his three-hour Saturday show, after a segment criticising US president Donald Trump, the station suddenly cut away to a news report, and the station’s operations manager walked into the studio and told Mr Silverman, “You’re done”.
But it was less clear which had bothered his employers more – the negative views of Mr Trump that he voiced on the air, or the fact that he had also gone on competing stations’ shows to express them.
Mr Silverman, a lawyer and former chief deputy district attorney, liked to debate and push boundaries.
His constant on-air arguments with a co-host, Dan Caplis, helped make the duo’s former show on another Denver station one of the most popular in the city.
But Mr Silverman said in an interview that he sees himself as an independent analyst, not a partisan conservative – and that may have made him increasingly unwelcome at KNUS.
The former host said the station’s owner, the Salem Media Group, which focuses on conservative and Christian programming, is “100% behind Donald Trump”. Neither Salem Media nor the operations manager at KNUS, Kelly Michaels, responded to requests for comment.
Mr Silverman said he supported Mr Trump in 2016, taking a chance that he would shake things up for the better in Washington.
But after seeing the US president's performance in office, he said, he “stepped back off the Trump train” and rebranded his show as the “Island of Independence”.
Silverman also claims that he was punished for appearing on other radio programmes (The Denver Channel)
As the investigations of Mr Trump and his associates accelerated towards an impeachment inquiry, he said, he tried to concentrate on discussing the facts objectively, “and not go down various rabbit holes or engage in any what-about-isms”.
The station management never told him what to say on the air, Mr Silverman said. But he started to notice that the other hosts on the station gradually stopped inviting him to appear on their shows.
He said he thought it was because he was the “only non-Trumpster.”
“I think it makes great radio when people can disagree,” he said. “But something about Trump and impeachment – my colleagues don’t want to discuss it, and they don’t want any disagreements.”
He said he became frustrated at feeling frozen out on KNUS. “I expressed myself on Twitter, but I was hoping to be able to express myself on my own radio station, but that wasn’t available,” Mr Silverman said. “So, other media outlets asked me on.”
He said that angered the station’s managers, who warned him last week that if he continued to speak on competing shows, his job would be jeopardy.
“I cancelled going on, and then I met with them on Thursday,” Mr Silverman said. “I explained that under my contract, I have a right to go on other media. And they said, well, we don’t want you to do it.”
In addition to dropping Mr Silverman from the air, KNUS has also apparently removed all of his content from its website, including more than five years’ worth of podcasts.
Elizabeth Skewes, a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, said that while “to some degree, Craig Silverman was doing what he was hired to do, express his opinion,” the station was well within its rights to dismiss him if it no longer wanted to put those opinions on the air. The First Amendment protects free speech only from government censorship, she said, not from private business decisions.
Even so, she said, she saw it as part of a problematic trend.
“We’ve become less tolerant of alternative viewpoints as media has become more polarised,” Ms Skewes said. “The more narrow it gets, the worse off we are as a democracy.” Others working in broadcasting have seen their careers abruptly deflected over whether they were supportive of Mr Trump.
When Jerry Bader, a conservative radio host in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was fired in 2018 after 18 years at the station, he said it was over his criticism of the president.
In October, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who had frequently aired reports critical of of the president, abruptly resigned after publicly clashing with a staunchly pro-Trump host on the network, Tucker Carlson.
And James Bunner, a reporter for KTTC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Rochester, Minnesota, was fired in October for wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat while covering a Trump rally.
The New York Times
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Apr 21, 2020 8:53:12 GMT
How a Pro-Trump Network Is Building a Fake Empire on Facebook and Getting Away with ItHundreds of fake account admins and 1,929 Facebook advertising violations only begin to tell the story of the Epoch Times-linked, pro-Trump empire known as The BL. ALEX KASPRAK JORDAN LILES PUBLISHED 12 NOVEMBER 2019 UPDATED 20 NOVEMBER 2019 www.snopes.com/news/2019/11/12/bl-fake-profiles/Last month, Snopes exposed a media outlet named The BL — short for “The Beauty of Life” — as being directly connected to the controversial Falun Gong-linked newspaper The Epoch Times. The Epoch Times, which has effectively served as an arm of the Donald Trump campaign since 2016, has been banned from buying Facebook ads since August 2019 as a result of violations of the platform’s advertising policy. The BL’s pages stopped running ads then, as well. Despite our reporting that linked the two organizations, which included as just one piece of evidence a YouTube video of the exact office listed as The BL’s operation center in which two people who have written for the Epoch Times are introduced, The BL continues to deny any link whatsoever.
After this story was originally published, Epoch Times publisher Stephen Gregory disputed our characterization of links between The BL and The Epoch Times, telling us “no current Epoch Times staff member works for the BL, nor does Epoch Times have any business affiliation or business communications with the BL.”
In this investigation, we report that The BL’s haphazard brand of deception is not limited to its undisclosed links to existing media companies. Instead, its Facebook empire appears to be built on unambiguously inauthentic or fraudulent tactics, including the mass creation of fake American Facebook profiles and the creation of faux “pro-America” groups — all of which are run by The BL without disclosure, and many of which have their origins in Vietnam or other foreign countries. These activities, we show, are part of a coordinated strategy that serves to amplify the reach of The BL’s own content and inflate the perceived size of their audience, all while avoiding the burdensome rules associated with advertising.
A cornerstone of both The Epoch Times’ and The BL’s Facebook strategy had been to purchase massive numbers of Facebook ads that ostensibly promoted their organizations but were largely indistinguishable from Trump campaign ads. Our previous report showed that at least 1,929 ads created by The BL, representing around a half million dollars in money paid to Facebook, were removed for violating Facebook’s ad policies. The combination of advertising-policy violations and clearly inauthentic behavior — on top of The BL’s unwillingness to admit its connection to The Epoch Times — raises a serious question: What does it take for Facebook to consider a “media company” a bad actor on its platform?
We reached out to Facebook with a detailed list of questions regarding The BL and its tactics. A Facebook spokesperson did not answer any of those questions, instead telling us: “We are reviewing this information, and, as always, we will take action if we find violating activity.”
The BL’s M.O.: Vague Groups and Fake Administrators In our original story, we reported that The BL Facebook pages, as well as accounts tied to The BL’s staff members, appeared to be gaining control of and/or creating several pages and groups with no obvious link to The BL, gaining control of their followers, and in some cases adding links to a BL website. Additional reporting from Sarah Thompson, a social media influence researcher and blogger, independently confirmed this widespread practice in a Nov. 1, 2019, post on the website SecJuice, documenting “275 profiles … used for spamming [The BL’s] content and administration of their groups.” Here, we describe our identification of over 300 fake personal Facebook accounts, many that are running — or have run — these BL-linked groups or pages and list those accounts, and most of which appear to have been created between June 2019 and October 2019:
Database: Fake Facebook Profiles Tied to The BL
The groups “administered” by these fake profiles appear geared toward attracting conservative Americans who would be receptive to The BL’s explicitly pro-Trump editorial strategy. Those running the groups employ tactics that seek to increase engagement on their pages. As an example, many pages have a pinned post with a picture of Ivanka Trump or other Trump figures and an exhortation to type the word “beautiful” below it, something that improves engagement numbers for the group. Representative group names include “Make America Great Again – PRESIDENT TRUMP”; “PRESIDENT TRUMP MAGA #2020”; “Support President Trump KAG 2020”; “USA for President Trump 2020”; and “WE SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP #KAG 2020.” Whatever the group name, though, the content is the same: pro-Trump memes and links to TheBL.com.
two examples of BL groups asking readers to respond to a post
By following groups linked to official BL pages, tracking administrators shared between multiple BL-linked groups, and using Facebook’s own recommended groups algorithm, we have now identified at least 102 groups linked to The BL. Here, we present those groups and associated pages:
Database: Groups and Pages Linked to The BL
The BL’s modus operandi appears to go something like this: create a group using one of the over 300 fake accounts or over 73 pages at The BL’s disposal and fill it with a large number of fake BL profiles. Operators of the scheme then shift that group around the BL network, pairing it at times with other official BL pages in order to catch new members. The BL’s Best Videos Facebook page, for example, has served as an admin in at least 25 pro-Trump Facebook Groups, right alongside other BL employees who also act as admins. Ultimately, the group-growing game is one of attrition. Not all of the groups thrive, but the ones that do are usually cut off from having any obvious link to The BL — left to roam free in a meme-polluted wasteland while serving as a broadcast antenna for The BL, their content, prompts to sign up for text-message alerts, and their political agenda.
To feed The BL’s insatiable need for groups, and presumably to make it slightly harder for Facebook to detect the coordination, The BL requires what appears to be actual, unique humans to administer those groups. Faced perhaps with a dearth of actual humans interested in that role, The BL seems to have adopted several strategies to create fake profiles. The BL’s strategies in this regard appear neither subtle nor clearly thought-through. The primary approaches seem to include either acquiring and converting defunct foreign accounts and/or using stock photos of celebrities to create profiles of Americans.****************************************************************************
The BL Guide to Making Easily Detectable Fake Facebook Profiles www.snopes.com/news/2019/11/12/bl-fake-profiles/
Do: Use Repurposed Foreign Profiles
As discussed in our earlier reporting, The BL has myriad ties to Vietnamese branches of the Falun Gong media empire, a diffuse group of related entities that includes The Epoch Times. The BL’s founder and director, Trung Vu, was once the CEO of the Vietnamese edition of The Epoch Times and later worked for NTD TV, another Falun Gong-associated property. One of the many items linking The BL to The Epoch Times is the fact that an IP server used by The BL is actually registered to Epoch Times Vietnam.
This Vietnamese influence can also be seen in many of the fake profiles controlled by The BL. We suspect at least some of these profiles stem from the purchase or acquisition of existing pages in Vietnam that are then altered to become the profiles of fake Americans. Many profiles that now have American-sounding names have as their profile URL completely unrelated Vietnamese-appearing names.
A Facebook profile currently named “Robert Henry” has “duc.liem.77” as the name contained within the URL, likely a reference to the actual name used when the account was created. A profile named “Madison Elijah,” as another example, appears to have once belonged to someone named Parmar Jayanti. A profile for “James Roscoe”, which still lists as its interests primarily Vietnam-specific items, has the name “luc.van.18294053” in its url.
Do: Use (And Reuse) Stock Images
Speaking of James Roscoe, that profile picture is a stock image from the free photo website Unsplash.com (a recurring theme in many of the fake profiles is the repeated use of photographs found on that website). Occasionally, operators at The BL appear to use the same photo for different Facebook profiles with different names. Roscoe’s fake visage also happens to be used for another fake BL profile, this one bearing the name “James Anderson”:
In another example, alleged Los Angeles resident “David Strong” and alleged real human “Anthony Vu” both use the same stock photo as their profile picture. The profile of Vu, as was the case in other repurposed Facebook pages described above, still retains references to Vietnamese popular culture:
examples of fake profiles
Do: Use Celebrities As Profile Images
Though we can think of no strategic benefit to using easily recognizable public figures as the profile photos of what are meant to be covert fake Facebook profiles, this is a tactic that The BL has employed on multiple occasions. Purported administrators of BL-linked groups have used the images of actors Glenn Close, Helen Mirren, and Julie Walters as their Facebook profile pictures, for example:
examples of celebrities in fake profiles
All three alleged celebrity doppelgängers, at the time of this reporting, are administrators in the BL-linked group “WE SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP # MAGA.” among others:
Don’t: Put Too Much Thought or Effort into the Profile’s Details
An abnormally high number of the fake BL profiles list their locations as towns that sound like something a coffee-starved intern with a limited knowledge of United States geography might come up with: Texas City, Texas, and California City, California, for example. These are indeed real towns, but the abnormally high concentration of BL-associated profiles in these low-population areas is suspect. In some cases, other details are even harder to swallow.
Take the aforementioned stock photo profile of James Anderson. An alleged resident of Texas City, Texas, he lists his employer as the Texas Rangers baseball team, an Arlington-based organization five hours from Texas City, Texas. Another profile of an alleged Los Angeles resident named Anderson Charles lists the more geographically-plausible Los Angeles Lakers basketball team on his Facebook ‘About’ page. Unfortunately for that profile’s credibility, though, it lists the Lakers as a school, not as an employer:
Is The BL Actually Responsible for this Activity? While many of the BL-linked administrators of these myriad pro-Trump groups come from the fake profiles discussed above, these groups often start off being explicitly administered by the actual profiles of real staff members of The BL. By tracking the formation and evolution of several BL groups from their inception, we observed a recurring pattern. BL staffers in general, and The BL’s on-camera host Matt Tullar in particular, are sometimes among the first individuals to join these groups after their formation but prior to their being filled with a flood of fake profiles. After those staff members join these groups, they often soon afterwards become administrators of them:
Tullar, as discussed in our previous investigation, lists his current job on LinkedIn as sales and marketing director for the Orange County edition of The Epoch Times. Gregory, the Epoch Times publisher, told us “Tullar stopped working for The Epoch Times in October 2016. The Orange County edition of The Epoch Times closed years ago.”
He is now a video personality for The BL. His videos, among other things, espouse climate change denial, amplify anti-vaccine rhetoric, and push racist tropes. In one video, Tullar argued that Michael Brown, the unarmed black teen whose death launched nationwide protests, was “likely justifiably shot” by a Ferguson police officer. Tullar described Brown as an “extremely aggressive, 6ft 4in, 295 pound 18-year-old.” In that same video, he suggested in thinly-veiled language that black people have a higher propensity toward violence: “We are not all the same and we do not all have the same propensity for criminal behavior,” Tullar argued, while discussing “black-on-black crime.”
In addition to writing and hosting these videos, Tullar also appears to be integral to the The BL’s group-creation scheme. As a recent example, Tullar’s profile was among the first who joined a series of groups created on Oct. 13, 2019: “TRUMP TRAIN 2020 – 2024!”; “PRESIDENT TRUMP 2020-2024!”; “WE SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP #KAG 2020”; and “WE STAND WITH TRUMP & PENCE!” Tullar is not the only BL staff member who seems to be a founding member of many BL-linked groups, either. A Facebook account bearing the same name as The BL’s managing editor, Orysia McCabe, also appears in these several of these groups directly following their formation.
This recurring pattern — in which a group is formed, followed soon afterwards in several cases by BL staff joining and becoming administrators of it, and then filling it with fake profiles — may have multiple operations underlying the process. These would include the acquisition of old Facebook profiles, the creation of fake profiles and vague groups, and the messaging and social media manipulation taking place inside those groups. The BL itself is run out of Middletown, New York — the location Tullar lists as his home. Based on some of the geographic or spelling gaffes and leftover details found in the fake profiles or group names, it seems that portions of the operation are likely based abroad.
Recently, we messaged a BL-associated profile — one that has made several appearances in multiple BL groups and pages — to ask what region it was from. Despite a profile that claimed to belong an Arizona resident, the person operating the profile replied that it was in India:
Later, this user contacted us again to change the answer to Kenya:
He then told us that he has five Facebook profiles. One of them said he lives in Thailand.
Facebook “Will Take Action” If They “Find Violating Activity” Though Facebook did not respond to questions asking if it had banned The BL from purchasing ads as it did with The Epoch Times, the social media company appears to be at least tolerant of The BL’s activity on Facebook in general. The BL’s official, branded pages, for example, are and remain Facebook-verified. It’s hard to make any rational argument, though, that The BL and its social media practices are compliant with Facebook’s own descriptions of terms of service.
For one thing, an unambiguous record of Facebook violations — 1,929 of them — already exists. That’s how many BL ads, based on Facebook’s own ad-transparency tool, ended up being removed for violating Facebook’s advertising policy. Far from being a media outlet with a sterling Facebook reputation, The BL is already — even without reference to anything discussed in our investigation — a literal repeat offender of Facebook’s advertising policies. Nevertheless, advertising violations are not the only Facebook rule The BL, as a media organization, is violating.
No matter how you examine it, The BL is practicing what Facebook describes as inauthentic behavior. According to Facebook’s community guidelines, Facebook does not “allow people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook, use fake accounts, artificially boost the popularity of content, or engage in behaviors designed to enable other violations under our Community Standards.” The BL is engaged in every one of those behaviors that Facebook claims violates their guidelines.
The BL misrepresents itself in many ways. As our earlier reporting demonstrated, it misrepresents its independence from The Epoch Times. And as this report shows, by not disclosing that these spammy groups are built to benefit a media outlet, each of The BL’s generically-named groups is a misrepresentation as well. That misrepresentation is enabled, in no small part, by the use of fake accounts — another unambiguous Facebook violation. Finally, the constant creation of groups whose role is to spam members with BL-specific content is a practice designed to, as Facebook describes, “artificially boost the popularity of content.”
The BL is far from the first outlet to find ways to game Facebook to inflate the popularity of its content. Facebook recently came under fire when reporter Judd Legum demonstrated that The Daily Wire, a conservative outlet founded by Ben Shaprio which consistently ranks as the most-shared media outlet on the platform, had been creating undisclosed pages whose primary purpose was sharing Daily Wire content. Facebook, in that case, took no action against The Daily Wire.
It remains to be seen what action, if any, Facebook will take against The BL’s clearly inauthentic Facebook empire. Taking down fake profiles, something that appears to have been occurring during the time we have observed The BL, is less than a slap on the wrist for an outlet that seems to have a disposable inventory of fake profiles and the ability to create more in minutes if need be. Facebook groups similarly seem to be another tricky area for Facebook regulation.
Based on our previous reporting, Facebook appears less eager to take any action on a group (as opposed to a page). In our original report on The BL, we identified 69 Facebook pages, of which 22 with small followings were subsequently taken down following our publication. Conversely, our original reporting identified 91 Facebook groups, but all 91 of the groups we identified in that report are still active at the time of this reporting. Similarly, a separate investigation by Snopes in October 2019 identified several “American” pages run out of Ukraine. Facebook removed the pages we identified, but in at least one case a group administered by one of those removed pages remains online.
“We Do Not Allow Posts Shared From Other Facebook Pages or Groups” Still, perhaps something Facebook is doing is getting in the way of The BL’s strategy. On Nov. 6, 2019, a Facebook profile with the name “Josephson Magnolia,” populated with a stock photo from Unsplash.com, informed members of the BL-Linked group “Trump For America’s President” that “due to Facebook’s escalation of fake news control [and] to ensure the smooth operation of our group.” members were not allowed to share posts from other Facebook pages except those belonging to The BL:
On the other hand, controlling Facebook groups that share links only to The BL’s content appears to have been the vision of this whole operation from the start.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on May 8, 2020 18:42:17 GMT
The Top Five Times A Fox Guest Debunked Fox
mediamatters4america 59.3K subscribers Every once in a while, the truth sneaks through on Fox. For more, visit mediamatters.org
Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro Owned by On-Air Caller | NowThis
NowThis News 714K subscribers
'I’m really tired of this anti-immigrant, anti-people with brown skin rhetoric.’ — A C-SPAN caller put Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and Trump on blast for their racist rhetoric.
Fox News books wrong guest, she slams Trump
CNN 9.56M subscribers Producers for the Fox News morning show, "Fox & Friends First" meant to book Arizona congressional candidate Ann Kirkpatrick to discuss her pro-ICE views. Mid-interview, the show realized that the woman speaking on camera was Massachusetts congressional candidate Barbara L'Italien.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on May 10, 2020 17:29:17 GMT
This is what happens when the inmates are in charge of the prison. An orchestrated right wing campaign does NOT make one innocent. He admitted to guilt but this is all about adding to Trump and his right wing conservative victimhood that they continually play ad nauseam.How Right-Wing Media Helped Pave The Way To Michael Flynn's Freedomwww.yahoo.com/huffpost/michael-flynn-trump-media-fox-news-230415543.html Nick Robins-Early and Ryan J. Reilly HuffPostMay 8, 2020, 4:04 PM MST
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, accompanied by his then-new lawyer Sidney Powell, leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse on June 24, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alex Wroblewski via Getty Images)
The Trump administration’s decision on Thursday to drop a felony charge against a former White House national security adviser — who twice admitted in federal court to lying to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador — has garnered criticism from an array of legal experts, Democratic lawmakers, former federal prosecutors and former FBI officials. www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-flynn-charges-dropped_n_5eb4538cc5b684306e8d0b9b
There has been no such debate in right-wing media, however, which celebrated the news of the Department of Justice dropping the case against retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as supposed proof of their longstanding claims that the entire investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 election was a politically motivated conspiracy against President Donald Trump. To understand how Trump’s DOJ came to make its latest move, you have to understand how right-wing media built an alternate reality around Flynn and the Russia investigation over the past several years. www.huffpost.com/news/topic/michael-flynn
Fox News pundits and Trump defenders have touted the Justice Department’s move as vindication not only of Flynn but of their own coverage. They’ve demanded that FBI officials suffer consequences for the federal probe.
“This is deep state, the puzzle is complete! They hated the president and they used every opportunity to take him down,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on colleague Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show. Carlson said “there shouldn’t be a debate” about the Flynn case, referring to it as a “setup.” Fox News contributor Sara Carter called the entire investigation a “conspiracy” perpetrated “against the American people,” saying “this is seditious and it’s treasonous and people need to be held accountable.”
Many veteran members of law enforcement don’t see it this way. Greg Brower, the FBI’s former top liaison to Congress who previously served in the Nevada state Senate as a Republican, thinks DOJ’s latest action is “incredibly unusual” and “unprecedented” and said he hadn’t heard of any FBI or DOJ veterans who could think of a similar case. Brower is disappointed that conservative media has pushed the idea that Flynn ― despite twice admitting that he lied to the FBI ― was somehow railroaded.
“They helped create this narrative that was false from its inception, that Flynn was somehow set up and framed by an FBI and then DOJ that deviated from the usual rules and guidelines and had some kind of goal of getting Flynn, and that was never accurate,” Brower told HuffPost. He said the goal of right-wing media “seemed to have been to justify a presidential pardon” for Flynn.
“The real casualty here is truth,” Brower said. “For many, you know, the truth doesn’t seem to matter. These conspiracy theories kind of take on a life of their own and, for many people, become reality and become truth, even though the facts don’t support it. That’s the reality we’re living in right now.”
When Flynn first pleaded guilty back in December 2017, he was represented by well-respected attorneys from the law firm of Covington & Burling. Matters began to shift last summer when Flynn fired those lawyers and hired Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who had worked cases on the Texas-Mexico border before becoming a defense attorney. She represented executives in the Enron scandal and came to believe that prosecutorial misconduct was a widespread problem at the Justice Department, self-publishing a 2014 book called “Licensed to Lie” that focused on corruption by federal prosecutors. www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-flynn-charged-russia_n_5a2163f8e4b03c44072d042c
Powell leaned into a media strategy that painted Flynn as the victim of a plot by the deep state. She sold T-shirts featuring cartoons of various DOJ and FBI officials that labeled them “creeps on a mission.” She appeared regularly in conservative media outlets and campaigned against the Justice Department on Twitter, all while raising cash for Flynn’s legal defense fund. www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/17/maga-lawyer-behind-michael-flynn-legal-strategy-098712
The Justice Department, no doubt, has a problem being transparent about how it punishes prosecutorial misconduct. Decisions about attorney discipline are handled by a secretive internal office that one former federal prosecutor called a “roach motel.” The DOJ inspector general’s office, which has a more public-facing role, isn’t allowed to investigate instances of prosecutorial misconduct, and DOJ has long resisted calls from its inspectors general to change that practice. www.huffpost.com/entry/doj-prosecutorial-misconduct_n_5235876
The FBI and the Justice Department also made mistakes in the Russia investigation, as laid out in an inspector general report last year. Anti-Trump text messages exchanged by two FBI employees who worked on both the Hillary Clinton investigation and the Russia probe damaged the FBI’s reputation. www.huffpost.com/entry/doj-ig-report-trump-campaign-crossfire-hurricane_n_5dee589be4b00563b854e971 www.huffpost.com/entry/fbi-text-message-leaks-trump-clinton_n_5a58d593e4b0720dc4c69677
But the supposed justification for dropping the charges against Flynn ― namely, that internal FBI notes that ponder whether the “goal” of interviewing Flynn was “Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” ― don’t exonerate the former national security adviser. DOJ now contends that it can’t prove his lies were material to the investigation, despite the fact that Flynn conceded they were material when he pleaded guilty. It’s all quite unusual ― federal prosecutors are rarely eager to help admitted felons get their charges tossed. www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/michael-flynns-defense-claims-fbi-notes-show-agents-tried-to-entrap-the-former-national-security-adviser/2020/04/29/fbbe0f30-8a67-11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html
Right-wing media has long tried to make a martyr out of Flynn. Taking a cue from Trump’s continued support of him during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, pro-Trump outlets reached for any information they could find to potentially vindicate him or at least obscure the facts around his guilty plea. Flynn, along with his son Michael Flynn Jr., had also promoted far-right conspiracy theorists on social media during the 2016 campaign and many of them championed his cause during the investigation. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/michael-flynn-general-chaos
The FBI documents made public late last month reinvigorated both the Flynn-friendly coverage and appeals for Trump to pardon him. Pro-Trump pundits and allies framed the one particular note as a bombshell revelation that completely exonerated Flynn ― again ignoring that he’d admitted to wrongdoing. www.huffpost.com/entry/doj-ig-report-trump-campaign-crossfire-hurricane_n_5dee589be4b00563b854e971 www.huffpost.com/entry/fbi-text-message-leaks-trump-clinton_n_5a58d593e4b0720dc4c69677
“Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is, has always been, an innocent man,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said last week, accusing “deep state bureaucrats” of framing him.
On pro-Trump television network Newsmax, host Greg Kelly and the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani condemned the case against Flynn as a “sham” and a “travesty.” Right-wing activist Tom Fitton appeared on Fox Business host Lou Dobbs’ show to say that the “abuse of Trump, people like Gen. Flynn and others” was arguably “the worst corruption in the FBI’s history.” Tucker Carlson, who is also an informal Trump adviser, characterized the FBI’s investigation of Flynn as “how the secret police operate in third world dictatorships.”
Now that Flynn’s case is over, many of those same voices have moved on to demanding consequences for officials who oversaw the Russia investigation and for Obama-era figures who have long been targets of conservative media. Pro-Trump pundits have led a relentless attack on FBI Director Christopher Wray ― who was picked for that job by the president ― calling for him to resign or be fired. Others have suggested some broader conspiracy, with radio host Mark Levin telling Hannity that “this is a massive cover-up of the greatest scandal in American history” and demanding that former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden be questioned.
On Friday, Fox News host Ed Henry said he’d been “tipped off” that Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, was bringing a briefcase of documents to Attorney General William Barr and claimed there were “people around this case suggesting” that those documents would somehow implicate Obama in the Flynn investigation.
As Henry spoke, Fox News rolled ominous footage they’d taken of Grenell walking into the Justice Department.
Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on May 11, 2020 1:24:40 GMT
What If Fox News Covered Trump the Way It Covered Obama? | NowThis
If you haven't figured it out all of these talking heads are talking about President Obama. What hypocrisy, huh?
How Fox News Covered Michelle Obama vs. Melania Trump | NowThis
NowThis News 721K subscribers
Does Fox News have a double standard when it comes to the First Lady of the United States? Here's how Fox News' coverage of former First Lady Michelle Obama compares to their coverage of current FLOTUS Melania Trump.
Can you imagine if Michelle Obama had also been a porn star like Melania what FOX would have been saying? Oh wait, in FOX world a porn queen conservative is called a "MODEL."
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on May 14, 2020 19:18:28 GMT
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 5, 2020 7:54:49 GMT
What Trump Really Means When He Cries ‘Fake News!’www.alternet.org/2018/04/what-trump-really-means-when-he-cries-fake-news/ Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 29, 2018
Excerpted with permission from “Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself” by Amanda Marcotte. Copyright 2018 by Hot Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. www.amazon.com/Troll-Nation-Trump-Worshipping-Monsters-Liberals/dp/1510737456/?tag=saloncom08-20
One of the distinguishing traits of the troll-style politics that dominates Trump-era conservatism is the utter disregard for any values outside of winning at all costs and, perhaps even more importantly, defeating liberals. Decency, political norms and truth itself are all treated as acceptable casualties in the endless quest to fuck with the left.
But while many of the excesses of the right seem new, the reality is that the Trumpian right is just the outgrowth from roots laid years, even decades ago, in the American right. The racism and sexism, the conspiracy theories, the harping about political correctness? All of it goes back decades and is only exploding out of control now because the right wing political infrastructure has let these foul ideologies and stupid ideas flourish for so long.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to Donald Trump’s war on the media. All his lies and outrageous accusations can be traced directly back to decades of right-wing pundits and politicians encouraging conservative voters to believe that mainstream media sources have a “liberal bias” and are not to be trusted. Trump simply takes it to the next level, dispensing with the notion that truth and facts themselves are relevant and insisting that the validity of a news report depends entirely on how flattering he finds it. “Fake news” started as a banal term, invented by Buzzfeed reporters, to describe fabricated stories that were being passed off by hoaxsters as real news reports. Soon, however, Trump, whose ego was bruised by hearing that fake news had helped elect him, started aggressively using the term “fake news” to demonize any news he disapproves of. Soon, the usage was picked up across the right, and now the term is almost exclusively used to mean news that is actually true, but which conservatives reject for ideological reasons.
It’s particularly disconcerting to witness the way conservatives yell “fake news” at every unfavorable news story with an unmitigated glee. They know that cavalierly dismissing obviously factual stories as “fake” really aggravates liberals, and trolling the left is, for right-wingers circa 2018, an activity more pleasurable than sex.
Calling obviously true news “fake news” is gaslighting, a form of manipulation where the manipulator tells blatant lies to the victim and, when called out, stands by the lies, often blaming the target’s supposed mental damage if the target insists that the truth is true.
Gaslighting people, especially women, by calling them “crazy” for rejecting his lies is a favorite practice of Trump’s. He’s questioned the sanity of Mika Brzezinski, Megyn Kelly, Maureen Dowd and Bernie Sanders, among others, for the high crime of saying things about him that happened to be true.
“In authoritarian governments,” Brian Klaas writes in "The Despot’s Apprentice," gaslighting “aims to force citizens to question their own sanity, rather than the government’s narrative. Winston’s experience in '1984' was an example of systematic gaslighting.”
Most authoritarian governments go about gaslighting with the utmost seriousness, using the power of the state and social pressure to get citizens to agree, like Winston in "1984," that 2+2=5. The “fake news” gambit, however, is something different and possibly new. Rather than trying to induce insanity by making liberals question reality itself, conservatives are trying to make liberals go crazy by trolling them. All conservatives need to do is keep a straight face while insisting that they believe that 2+2=5, and liberals will exhaust all their mental and emotional reserves trying to explain that no, really, 2+2=4. Eventually, conservatives will point to the frazzled, distraught state of liberals begging people to believe that 2+2=4 and laugh and say, “What a nutjob!”
What are conservatives thinking when they call something “fake news”? What is Trump thinking? It’s hard to imagine conservatives literally believe that the media is making stories up about the Trump-Russia investigation or that Trump had smaller inauguration crowds than Obama. Instead, the Republican war on media needs to be understood more as a rejection of truth as a value. To call something “fake news” isn’t to say that it’s real or not real, but a way of indicating that truth itself doesn’t matter — that the only thing that matters is loyalty to Trump and the right-wing tribe. Telling lies, in fact, is recast as a fun, sporting way to annoy liberals, and to punish liberals for their goody-two-shoes politically correct insistence that facts matter.
Dan Kahan, a Yale professor of law and psychology, runs the Cultural Cognition Project, a research project dedicated to studying how things like identity and social values shape people’s understanding of facts. When I interviewed him in 2016 about the tendency of Trump supporters to proudly declare their allegiance to false, often plainly ridiculous beliefs, he explained that, for many conservatives, saying these kinds of things is a “kind of middle finger” to liberals and less an expression of their real-world understanding of empirical fact. For instance, a 2014 study published in Public Opinion Quarterly found that a conservative’s answer to questions about Obama’s birthplace was heavily shaped by what he thought the purpose of the question was. If the researchers presented the question as a quiz about how knowledgeable the subjects were of political facts, and the subjects felt they were being judged based on the accuracy of the answers, conservatives were more likely to give the correct answer (Hawaii). But when, the researchers wrote, the question was framed in political terms, more conservatives saw it as “an opportunity to express anti-Obama sentiment by challenging the legitimacy of his presidency.”
Claiming Obama was born in Kenya isn’t experienced by a lot of conservatives as a direct statement of belief about the material facts. It’s that espousing birtherism satisfies the emotional desire to undermine a black man’s legitimate claim to the Oval Office, without having to come out and plainly state that the birther doesn’t believe black people should be eligible to hold office.
“People have a stake in some position being true,” Kahan told me, “because the status of their group or their standing in it depends on that answer.”
“Part of the reason they might be doing it is because they know it’s really going to get an aversive response from people who have an alternative identity and who know that’s the true answer,” he added.
In other words, they’re trolling.
Everyone does this, it must be said, to some degree. We all, liberal or conservative, sometimes say things because that’s what’s expected of us and not because it’s what we really think or believe. But the gap between left and right has widened dramatically in recent years, to the point where conservatives, particularly Trump loyalists, flatly reject the idea that truth even matters.
“If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia,” one Trump supporter told CNN a year after the election, “I would tell him, ‘Hold on a second. I need to check with the President if it’s true.’”
Of course, your average secularist liberal might quibble with the idea that Jesus Christ has some special access to the empirical truth, but let’s just glide past that to look at what this man’s metaphor is conveying: He’s basically admitting that he values Trump’s instructions on what to believe over what a god who is forbidden to lie is telling him. His expression is a fanciful way of saying that he simply doesn’t care what is true. All he cares about is believing what Trump tells him to believe. Reading the quote on the page is one thing, but watching the video really shows how clever this man thought this line was. It felt like a practiced line, a joke he trotted out for the knowing chuckles of his fellow Trump lovers. The anchor who asked the question hadn’t even mentioned Russia, but the Trump supporter just knew he had this killer line and goddammit, he was going to say it on live TV. It worked as hoped on his fellow panelists, most of whom smiled in shared satisfaction.
And why shouldn’t they? Liberals were bound to hear that line and go absolutely bonkers. Every time a liberal works himself into an outrage, right-wingers count that as a win, even if the cost of provoking that reaction is playing a chucklehead on national television.
Against this backdrop, mainstream media doesn’t even have a chance. Journalists can carefully double check all their facts and gather multiple reliable sources for any report, but if the story is ideologically inconvenient for conservatives, it will be dismissed as “fake news.” Truth is something those liberals care about, and refusing to care about anything liberals care about is a point of pride for troll nation.
The utter shamelessness of conservatives on this front can be breathtaking, but this contempt for truth was not a trait that was formed overnight. Instead, it took years of careful propaganda, geared at provoking conservative insecurities and resentments, to get right-wingers to the point where they care less about facts than they care about sticking it to those liberals. Complaints about mainstream media bias against conservatives have been aired on the right for decades. Historian Nicole Hemmer traced the narrative back to the 1940s, when a nascent conservative media emerged in publishing and radio, fueled by arguments that it was necessary to have this right wing media to balance against a mainstream media hopelessly distorted by liberal bias.
In the 1960s, Hemmer argued in the Atlantic, conservatives decided, in addition to having a media of their own, they “would also have to discredit existing media.”
At stake was the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC adopted in 1949 to encourage political debate on TV and radio. The rule was fairly straightforward: If a show or station had a conservative viewpoint, equal time was to be offered to a liberal viewpoint. (Or vice versa.) But, as Hemmer explained, conservatives “viewed objectivity as a mask concealing entrenched liberal bias, hiding the slanted reporting that dominated American media. Because of this, the right believed fairness did not require a response to conservative broadcasts; conservative broadcasts were the response.”
This belief, that any view not explicitly conservative must be liberal, has become the first station of the right wing cross of victimhood. Mainstream media sources have, in the decades since, bent over backwards to assure conservative audiences that it isn’t true, to no avail. Trying to convince the right that mainstream media isn’t biased towards the left has often reached levels of absurdity. The New York Times repeatedly fell into this trap during the 2016 campaign, running stories on Hillary Clinton that were poorly sourced, speculative or based on rumor — usually pitched to them by right wing sources. Shoddy stories about her health, her emails and the Clinton Foundation that would have never passed the pitch meeting if they were about a Republican instead of a Democratic candidate routinely made it to the front page of the New York Times.
It’s likely not because the newspaper is secretly conservative, but because The New York Times editors are so overeager to disprove accusations of liberal bias that they give conservative-friendly stories a handicap that would never be given to any other kind of story.
Fox News, still the country’s most popular propaganda outlet, built its entire brand on this notion that any media that doesn’t have an explicitly conservative viewpoint is inherently liberal. The network’s motto for decades, “fair and balanced,” intrinsically accused other media sources of being anything but fair and balanced.
It was a nifty little trick. A motto like that not only demonizes more even-handed media sources, but it implies that there’s something more trustworthy about the information Fox News is handing out. Repeated studies, however, show that Fox News viewers are less informed about the news than other news consumers. A 2016 study from Fairleigh Dickinson University actually demonstrated that people who took in no news at all were better informed about current events than Fox News viewers. (NPR listeners were the best informed.)
Fox News works primarily as a propaganda outlet whose viewers have an almost cult-like loyalty. Anyone who has conservative friends or relatives over the age of 50 has probably witnessed the way that Fox News has become the wallpaper of red state life, turned on all day to pipe out a steady stream of balderdash. The ratings bear this impression out. For 16 years now, Fox News has been the number one cable news network.
But Fox News does more than indoctrinate elderly white people day in and out. Even though it’s dropped it’s provocative “fair and balanced” slogan, the existence of the channel helps feed this narrative that all other media is hopelessly biased towards the left. That narrative, in turn, is used to guilt-trip mainstream media into publishing or broadcasting conservative misinformation in a fruitless bid to seem more fair and balanced themselves.
And yet, the fact that the Trump coalition (Fox News included) has no real views beyond wanting to damage liberals doesn’t mean they don’t present a very serious threat. It’s clear that it’s led the country to this point where our free press is being regularly threatened by the president and his supporters, who have convinced themselves that responsible journalism is just one more annoying liberal affectation that needs to be destroyed. Their anger is ridiculous, but they still have the power to turn their silly bigotries into real life attacks on the journalistic institutions that protect our democracy.
|
|
|
Post by the Scribe on Jun 5, 2020 21:51:58 GMT
Joe Walsh warns that Americans listening to Fox News are lied to daily CNN 9.96M subscribers During an interview with CNN's Brian Stelter, 2020 Republican presidential hopeful Joe Walsh slammed Fox News and conservative talk radio for their coverage of the impeachment probe of President Donald Trump.
|
|