Are you ever tempted to give the mainstream media the benefit of the doubt? After all, in many areas of life cockup is more probable than conspiracy. I can sympathise with a journalist who is told to get 500 words out about an unfamiliar subject in twenty minutes and then gets it wrong or omits important details. One must also bear in mind that many Guardian journalists, for instance, still get their news from the Guardian. Similar naivety famously led the Independent and many other newspapers worldwide to claim on the day that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted that the three men he shot were black. As pointed out by Glenn Greenwald in that tweet, all these people had “reporting on current events” in their job description, but had evidently never even glanced at the TV footage of a trial watched by millions. However they were almost certainly deceived rather than deceiving. They would not have chosen to look so stupid.
See, I am capable of sympathy. Then along comes something to remind me that though many in the MSM are merely gullible and lazy, many others put a lot of conscious, careful effort into what they do.
Here is a Guardian report by Gloria Oladipo about a church shooting in the US: “Shooter at Joel Osteen church bought weapon legally despite history of mental illness”
And here is a Wayback Machine screenshot of the same Guardian report: https://web.archive.org/web/20240216025845/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/13/texas-lakewood-church-shooter-weapon-legal-purchase
The article starts,
The shooter who opened fire in a Texas megachurch on Sunday had legally purchased the firearm despite having a past criminal record and a history of mental illness.
Police identified the shooter as Genesse Ivonne Moreno, the Associated Press reported. The Houston police chief, Troy Finner, said Moreno had a “mental health history that is documented”, the New York Times reported. Moreno had previously been placed under an emergency detention for a mental health emergency in 2016, according to the AP.
Moreno’s mother-in-law said Moreno had been taking medication for schizophrenia, according to a Facebook post.
Although Moreno had also been arrested several times since 2005, including on misdemeanor weapons charges in 2022, in December 2023 Moreno was still able to legally purchase the AR-15 rifle that was used in Sunday’s shooting.
Moreno also carried a .22 caliber rifle but did not use it in the shooting. It is not clear where Moreno purchased the firearms.
Moreno was shot dead at the scene by off-duty police officers.
The rest continues in the same vein. There are several details about the perpetrator that this report omits. Ms Oladipo found time to describe the clothes Moreno was wearing – a trench coat – but not to mention the “Palestine” sticker on her gun. According to the rather better article in the Independent, the Houston Police Department has recovered anti-semitic writings by Moreno. There are also claims that she was an illegal immigrant who had nevertheless voted in the 2020 U.S. election.
The contrast between the avidity with which the mainstream media reports the motive of a mass killer if he is white and right wing and its lack of curiosity when it comes to mass killers who are non-white and/or left wing probably leads many people to overestimate the prevalence of such killings by non-whites: they assume that if no colour is mentioned, the perpetrator must be black. Censorship almost always works well for the censors at first but against them in the long term: many Western visitors to the Soviet Union described how people there thought that the descriptions in Pravda and Izvestia of the oppression suffered by black South Africans under apartheid were just more lies.
But, of course, the main way in which the Guardian‘s account of Genesse Moreno’s crime is dishonest is that it leaves out the fact that Genesse Moreno also went by the name of Jeffrey Escalante and intermittently described herself as male. Don’t tell me that fact is not newsworthy. This AP “Explainer” by Sophia Tulp says,
Moments after the assailant who killed six people at a Nashville private school was identified as transgender, a baseless narrative emerged: that there has been an incredible rise in transgender or nonbinary mass shooters in recent years.
The assailant mentioned was Aiden Hale, who was born Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender man. This line in Sophia Tulp’s explainer did not impress me:
Mass casualty shootings perpetrated by someone identifying as trans or nonbinary are rare, and in fact, those groups are far more likely to be the victims of violence.
Both facts are irrelevant to the question of whether the number of transgender and/or non-binary people among mass killers is larger than their prevalence in the general population and to the question of whether there has been a rise in that number.
Poor though it was, that explainer did at least discuss the issue openly. In contrast the only way that Gloria Oladipo’s Guardian article allowed one to guess that something might be up was by the arrhythmic repetitions of Moreno’s name in places where normal English would put a pronoun:
Moreno’s mother-in-law said Moreno had been taking medication for schizophrenia, according to a Facebook post.
Although Moreno had also been arrested several times since 2005, including on misdemeanor weapons charges in 2022, in December 2023 Moreno was still able to legally purchase the AR-15 rifle that was used in Sunday’s shooting.
Moreno also carried a .22 caliber rifle but did not use it in the shooting. It is not clear where Moreno purchased the firearms.
Moreno, Moreno, Moreno. Many have argued that we should deny mass shooters the publicity they crave and not mention their names. Having heard it so often, I’ll probably remember Moreno’s for years. The Guardian don’t even follow their own principles consistently: given that Moreno latterly identified as female, by their own rules they should have referred to her as female. Rather than use someone’s preferred pronouns Gloria Oladipo worked very hard not to use any pronouns at all. That took effort.
And like all such obfuscations, it increases public suspicion of the group it tries to protect. It’s all so unnecessary. I have known for decades that men, cisgender men, commit the vast majority of mass killings of strangers, and indeed of killings of all types. I do not therefore conclude that every man I meet is out to get me. We all want fewer murders. Perhaps knowing more about the prevalence of murders by both M-to-F and F-to-M transgender people relative to both cisgender men and women might help us learn more about the interaction of masculinity and propensity to violence, and help reduce the numbers across all categories.
And, the real elephant in the room, the one that nobody wants to talk about?
Note the common denominators for all of these “mass shooters”: One of them is that they’ve been prescribed psychotropic medications, sometimes quite heavily. And, they’ve then been released into the public spaces of our world, without heed, monitoring, or warning.
The pharma industry has a lot to answer for, and one of the many things they need to be brought to heel about is the way that these drugs are so casually prescribed and allowed to be administered.
I’ve watched many people go from being “troubled-yet-stable” to outright dangerously volatile and deranged while under care of a “mental health professional”. I don’t know what the ratio is, between “Helped by psychotropics” and “Driven to violence by psychotropics”, but then again, neither does the industry or the doctors. It is my belief that these drugs should never be administered outside of a clinical environment where the patient is under full-time observation by trained professionals. The manner in which I’ve seen these things actually prescribed and administered is flatly criminal: “OK, here’s 5mg of this… Try it for a week, get back to me…”, followed by the “mental health professional” then using the patients purely subjective report as a guide to dosage or use. Often, the patient isn’t even aware of the changes in their behavior that are noticed by everyone around them… The whole thing is a travesty of what should be actual medical care. You don’t want me to go over the number of lives I’ve observed being ruined by all this unprofessionalism in conducting what amounts to open-air experimentation on the mentally ill and everyone around them.
We didn’t have these “mass shooting” events until the advent of all this “mental health” intervention via drugs. It is my contention that these things are tightly related, and that the drug companies along with their “mental health professional” minions ought to be sued into the ground… Which should then be salted and used as weapons testing ranges.
It doesn’t require any effort at all, because there are no consequences for being caught lying.
The “reporters” admit thy don’t know how Moreno acquired the guns, and yet they claim she purchased them legally as if it were an established fact. They are, effectively, screaming to the world “we’re just making shit up here”.
Did anyone suffer any consequences at all for falsely claiming that the individuals who attempted to murder Rittenhouse, and who he shot in self-defense, were back? They might have, if they had phrased it that way.
The Rittenhouse thing is just a perfect insight into the mindset of the liberal left. I don’t think they lied, they just assumed. In their minds, Rittenhouse was a Trump supporter, and therefore racist. So he must have shot blacks, because racist. They didn’t need to check, because they just knew.
Natalie opened with this:
When I wore a younger man’s clothes I was a member of a jury for a murder trial. Right on day one the judge said the press would be covering the trial but that we were to avoid tv news and newspaper accounts of the trial, if for no other reason than the press gets it wrong. The trial ended, the defendant went to prison for the rest of his days, and I decided to go back and look at the newspaper articles. Sure enough, the reporter got it wrong. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember thinking that the reporter, who I had seen in the gallery, had to have been ignoring what was actually being said or was an idiot or something.
If a local reporter covering a local story can’t even get “Joe said X but the evidence proves Joe was lying” right, what chance is there of the press getting big stories right, even before we factor in political slants?
Nothing wrong with private news organisations failing to mention relevant facts when reporting a story.
That’s free speech.
The problem is when a state funded news agency does it.
What a bizarre statement. There is absolutely something wrong with lying & deceiving. Just because a statement is legal that does not automatically mean it is ok. A crock of shit is still a crock of shit.
My US-centric view: But, as Scalia told us, a crock of shit that does not violate the Constitution is still a constitutional crock of shit. Free speech. (He may have phrased it differently.)
(There are so many financial entanglements between our state and our media that, if one had too much money, it might be fun to try another “state action”-based lawsuit, especially if you have a media entity that took PPP or the more basic media-welfare funds.)
@george m weinberg
My thoughts exactly.
pete and bobby b,
I don’t see anyone here denying that the Guardian has the legal and political right to behave dishonestly. I’ll go on defending that right until my dying day.
But to say that there is “nothing wrong” with the Guardian lying to its readers by omission would imply that the only standard of ethics is legality.
For most of human history most people believed that men could and should be made virtuous by force of law. For the last couple of centuries some of the world has managed to partly throw off this cruel delusion and push the scope of law back to forbidding actual crimes. But the idea that the absence of a law against something means an absence of any obligation to behave ethically regarding that thing sounds like a child’s understanding of libertarianism, or a malicious caricature of it, or the sort of belief that someone suddenly converts to because they want to cheat on their wife.
I honestly think that there ought to be a legal principle such that you could be found generally liable for “libeling the truth” as though the abstract “truth” were a person. In other words, spread lies? You get your ass sued into oblivion.
Not sure how the hell that would square with the right to free speech, but there is this to consider: Every right has its equivalent responsibility. Like it or not, that’s the reality.
Right now, our media has full freedom to say anything. It does not have accountability or responsibility to match; that’s why they’ve been lying their asses off and studiously ignoring a bunch of stuff that was their duty to cover. This needs to be fixed, and while I don’t see any way of holding someone accountable for lies of omission, I can damn sure say “You’ve lied…”, and then hold them liable for that. The way I see it, “the truth” really ought to be considered as an actual entity, and when you lie as a newsman, you ought to be chargeable with libel against it. Consider “Truth” to be an anthropomorphic personification, if you must, in order to hold these assholes accountable.
Like I’ve always said, there’s two sides to the coin of “rights”. You want to assert them, you have to pay attention to the dull obverse from the shiny side you like. Freedom of speech has responsibilities, not the least to that abstract of telling the truth when you use it. Lie often enough, and hard enough? It’ll be just like the “Little Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf!!'”, and people will take that right to say what you like away from you. One way or another… It might just evaporate because you can no longer sell your BS, because nobody believes you anymore, or it might be something else. The “evaporation” thing is happening right now, to various major media outlets. And, they did it to themselves.
Kirk writes, “I honestly think that there ought to be a legal principle such that you could be found generally liable for “libeling the truth” as though the abstract “truth” were a person.”
Every government in the West would pass a law making “climate crisis denial” a crime the next morning. You in the U.S. would wake up to find “election denial” a crime the morning after that.
’Rather than use someone’s preferred pronouns Gloria Oladipo worked very hard not to use any pronouns at all. That took effort.
And like all such obfuscations, it increases public suspicion of the group it tries to protect.’
There’s an element of ‘the lady doth protest too much’ with a lot of organisational PR these days. Witness the kerfuffle over the announcement of the new BTP top cop who was subjected to the unfiltered opinions of the public on Twitter (I refuse to call it ‘X’). The establishment came out swinging at the very idea that she was a diversity hire. Thus cementing in everyone’s minds that indeed, she was just that.
Getting back to pete’s “nothing wrong” comment, I can see why people with beliefs close to mine end up saying that sort of thing. After I’ve had to argue against the idea that some type of nasty behaviour should be illegal a million times I sometimes end up falling into the trap of saying “there’s nothing wrong with X” as a kind of shorthand for “there should be no law against X”. But it is an inaccurate shorthand.
Must have read it wrong. I thought that pete was addressing legalities. Or I assumed it, which is just how I think. I’m a legality kind of guy. 😉
When it comes to the prestitutes, I always follow Auron MacIntyre’s advice.
Whether they are lying or spreading the lies of others, the result is the same – lies are spread.
Millions believe, for example, that Mr George Floyd was murdered – when, in fact, he died of the drugs he willingly consumed.
Vast numbers of people think that Mr Kyle Ritterhouse went “hunting black people” – when, in fact, he was being hunted by white Marxists – some of whom had firearms and had used them.
As for people who think it is O.K. for privately owned media to tell lies or cover up the truth – I disagree with you.
Moreno, Moreno, Moreno.
I’d actually prefer apronounism (a word I made up, it’s like atheism) to be a thing, if not for totally screwing the pronoun police.
Preferred pronouns: none, don’t ever use pronouns to refer to me, ever.
Can’t wait to see this on a form, after all. it nearly worked for Jedi.
Paging Mr Gell-Mann – Mr Murray Gell-Mann to the white courtesy phone, please.
As to making ‘libelling the truth’ a crime – Absolutely Not. Natalie Solent gives the exact reasons why. Give that sort of power to the state, and the time that will pass before it is employed against the state’s opponents will be measurable with an egg timer. To her excellent examples, I would add – covid information. Leaders around the world declared that they were the sole possessors of The Truth and The Science – remember? Only 3 years later, their lies and deceptions are too manifold to count. You want that as the basis for a criminal charge? Not Bloody Likely.
llater,
llamas
Once again i am stupefied by the assumption from the Non-Left that the Left have the same scale of values. By definition they are not. The Activist-Journalists are there to builda narrative with picked up facts or outright lies. Stupidity for a Marxist only exists if it damages the end game. Stupidity is not the same thing for both sides.
That is like saying that there is nothing wrong with a car that malfunctions…
I am always surprised by some libertarians that make affirmations of this sort, it seems they don’t understand basics. Liberty is not being free of critique.
Isn’t the propose of free speech to be possible to also have free critique? Critique implies a judgement of value isn’t it?
lucklucky : Once again I am stupefied by the assumption from the Non-Left that the Left have the same scale of values. By definition they are not.
And once upon a time they said so openly and without embarrassment :
“When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.”
Lenin
As a year with national elections in more than half the world, the big Media organisations have ganged up to announce they will crack down on online misinformation – their definition of misinformation, of course.
Natalie Solent said:
Like they’re not already doing this? I think Mark Steyn might want to have a word with you, along with the vast majority of the January 6th people.
I don’t know what the hell you do, in order to fix this. I’m throwing up using the libel laws and their supporting concepts in order to hold the media accountable and impose some responsibility. The market is doing that, albeit so slowly that the lessons of “lying BAD” aren’t connecting. The laid-off media types have experienced such a delay in between their lies and the effects (bankruptcy, mostly…) that they do not see the two things as cause and effect. They’re able to write it off as those nasty old conservatives conspiring against them, along with them being (yet again…) able to say that it is the vast unwashed who’re at fault for not wanting to pay for their lies.
One of the problems we’ve got in our civilization is that there’s nobody out there looking out for these “cultural commons” things, and no mechanism by which to discourage the asshole idjit class from coming in and strip-mining them for short-term profits. Any thinking person could have told you that there were limitations on how much lying you could do before people quit listening to you, but nobody in the media ever looked at “credibility” as a line-item on their budget spreadsheets; no value assigned, no concern for it at all.
Were you in danger of getting your ass sued for lying to the public? There’d be a line item expressing that, and people would pay attention to it.
This is a problem akin to the “chickenshit” problem in the military: Unit commanders do not have to “pay” for their personnel time in any way, so they simply don’t care about using that time responsibly or wisely. Were they to be on a damn budget? Oh, you’d better believe they’d be watching that clock like a hawk, and making damn sure that they’d gotten all their ducks in a row, coordination-wise. If a company commander had to pay for every man-hour he used, then there’d be no more of this “Yeah, hey… Just have the guys hang around until seven or so, in case the boss calls with something short-notice…” Which, believe it or not, is actually a thing in some badly-run units.
Right now, truth and credibility aren’t line items. There needs to be a way to remove them from the abstract, and make them actually pertinent to the media business, and that’s why I throw out libel against a conceptualized version of “the Truth”.
I’m sure other, more creative people, could come up with something better than we currently have. Hell, maybe an assassin’s guild for the really egregious cases…? The way these lying bastards annoy me every time I’m forced to watch the news, I’m almost ready to sign up for something like that.
Biggest thing taking our civilization down is that a lot of what it actually relies on to work isn’t thought of as having any value or given anything other than pretentious lip-service. If you got sued for making general lies…? Maybe that could be a start towards bringing accountability to the whole thing. Walter Duranty and the New York Slimes should have been sued out of existence for what they did back during the Holodomor.
llamas said:
And, who the hell said anything at all about “giving that power to the state”? Last time I looked, the “state” is unable to sue for libel, as a corporate entity. It’s already got the power to go after people, and does so with outrageous effect. What I am suggesting, on the other hand, is making the media accountable. Some Ukrainian expat should have been able to bring suit against Walter Duranty and the New York Times for lying about the Holodomor; otherwise, how do you propose to fix this problem?
The state is already going after people with impunity. See what’s happening to Donald Trump, or any of his supporters? And, ohbytheway, the unaccountable and irresponsible media are one of the key enablers for doing so with impunity. They lied their asses off about the “Russian Collusion” thing, and Hunter’s laptop; why the hell can’t someone sue them for that? Take the lies away, and there goes a major tool of the establishment.
Ain’t saying that libel laws are the way to go, either… Just that there needs to be a mechanism in place to enforce accountability and responsibility. Right now, the media are much like that “boy who cried wolf”, and we’re edging up to the solution that the villagers found… Which is going to be just as much a problem, only in a different direction.
At the moment, the “freedom of the press” ideal is demonstrating exactly what I’ve always said about the recognition of rights by any society: If you abuse those rights and fail to observe the responsibilities that are implied by them, then society will band together either formally or informally, and those rights will no longer be exercised. By anyone. The more lies that the media tells and gets away with? The more likely it is that people will be willing to sign off on shutting down that “freedom of the press”.
And, hell… Given the BS they’ve inflicted on all of us since about Nixon? I’m about ready to say “Yeah, hang ’em high…”
Because, in the final analysis, what has “freedom of the press” gotten us in the last few years? Did it prevent the FBI-run coup against Nixon? Did they tell us the truth about “Russian Collusion”? How about Hunter’s laptop? No, “freedom of the press” did not find it worth covering these things honestly, so here we are with a senile half-wit lifelong corruptocrat running the country with a communistic anti-American lurking in the background pulling his strings in the White House. Why bother with freedom of the press, again…?
Thinking about it…
Analyze our civilization as a clockwork mechanism, with regulators and gears turning to ensure it stays operational.
For every function, there has to be some regulatory feedback feature that tells the vast mechanism “This far; no further”, or else the whole thing spins out of control and into ruin.
Much of what is going wrong in our civilization is due to key regulatory mechanisms (not in the sense of written regulations, either…) not doing their damn jobs. Instead of cheerleading for the various assholes driving these things like unregulated migration, the media ought to be pointing out the issues and realities; they will not, because they’re entirely on-board with the ideology behind it, never mind the damage being done to the society they’re supposed to be serving.
And, there’s no function in our clockwork chaos to either ensure honest media or punish the lies. Without that, they literally get away with murder…
What other things do we have that are not being regulated, kept in time? Where are the blind spots, where the feedback loop is invisible?
I’ll lay out for you one other location: There’s nothing feeding back into academia from “the real world”, telling it that it isn’t serving its proper function. There’s something coming down the pike, which is academia rendering itself irrelevant, but there’s nothing currently in place as a reality check for the product that academia has been churning out. The idle theorists have long since taken the institutions over, and the feedback loop that’s in place, that of natural extinction, is too damn long for it to have had any corrective effect.
I think there are a bunch of other fissures in civilization that badly need filling. What’s been going on since at least Wilson’s time is equivalent to some hacker examining a system for flaws that can be exploited, and then doing so in order to crash it and take it over… There should be preventatives in place, a civilizational immune system, but where the hell is it, and what good is it when what has served in the past gets taken over and co-opted by the nefarious with ill intent?
The real problem we face is that the very institutions that are supposed to serve as an immune system for the intellectual commons have been suborned, and are currently churning out contagion instead of cultural lymphocytes. We’ve been infected, and the immune system is compromised.
@Kirk
At what point does something you own and created become a “cultural common”? I do not see why the New York Times any more a “cultural common” than any other private business.
Under anarcho-capitalism, I suppose this “accountability” would be imposed by private organization, but under our current system it is clearly imposed by the state. If you sue someone and win, then the state enforces that. So by making it so that people can sue others for “libeling the truth”, you give the state the power to punish people for doing so.
You have mentioned several times the fable of the boy who cried “wolf”. How was the problem dealt with then? Did it require the state to be able to punish people who cried “wolf” too frequently? Not at all. People simply stopped listening to him. They did not have to sue him or involve the state at all. It is clear that this also applies to the media. People can choose not to listen to it, or they can listen to alternate sources of information.
This does not mean that this is how it ought to be. In fact, as the examples you gave show, this is clearly not the case. I don’t really see why this is an argument for why the state should be able to impose penalties on libelers of the truth.
I assume you include private regulation in this. If so, the market seems to fulfill that function quite well in this case. There does not seem to be any need for government intervention to distort ordinary market forces. Of course, in the real world there is already some distortion by the government, but it seems like one should argue against that as opposed to arguing for more.
This seems to be confused. The media is composed of private individuals. No more. The media is supposed to be serving society in the same way that any person is. If you want the media’s speech to be restricted for the service of society, you must accept corresponding restrictions on individuals. A group of individuals does not magically take on special obligations once it becomes a “media organization”. It seems like it would in fact be hard to find a hard distinction between individuals and media organizations at the margin.
I don’t know. How many actions do you take that aren’t regulated?
I laughed and I’m not sorry.
There’s nothing feeding back into academia from “the real world”, telling it that it isn’t serving its proper function.
Eventually it will happen. For almost a decade I’ve worked with people with 40+grand debts who have been brainwashed into getting a degree in order to get a job doing “IT labouring”. The 21st century equivalent of keeping the pencils in the stock room.
Eventually, there will be sufficient mass for some sort of blowback – but I expect that rather than killing off superflous academe it will massed demands for government to wipe out debts and increased pay to count pencils. Look at the already existing screams at any suggestion that students should directly feel the value of their degree through more lower-paid graduates directly feeling the price of it.
You’re either being deliberately obtuse, Colli or you are ignoring the point that made when I said “not in the sense of written regulations, either…”
There aren’t any laws governing the state of my bowels; those are regulated by a complex set of interactions between my body, what I eat, and the microbiome of my gut. It’s not formal, yet it is regulated; if I eat something unwise, I’ll suffer the consequence and then avoid it. Thus, my bowels are brought into regulation with the environment… Feedback, see?
There isn’t anything acting at all quickly enough on the various media outlets of the West, to do the same. It’s as if they’ve contracted a diarrhea of the untruths and distortions. There aren’t any correctives acting to prevent the egregious failures like Nixon’s FBI coup, or the lies about “Russian Collusion” coming out of the campaign of the biggest colluder, ever.
There are other things… The current mania for transgenderism has a lot in common with the idiocy about Satanic cults and day-care child abuse back in the 1980s. All of which came out of the sensationalism and desire for notoriety of the media, by the way. It’s the same thing; we look back at things like the McMartin Preschool case, and can make a clear determination that those prosecutions were the product of collective insanity, abetted by the media. Was anything ever done to those “good people” of the media, were any punishments ever levied? Did they pay a price, of any sort, for lying their asses off?
No, they did not. Even today, you’ll find people who “truly believe” that the McMartin children were exposed to animal sex encounters, and that caregivers flew.
There aren’t any effective checks on this crap, which is why it keeps right on happening. You can tell these tall tales in the media, because “freedom of the press”, and never suffer a single consequence for the spectacular lies you tell to increase circulation. It’s taken damn near 150 years, but the bills are finally coming due for things like the Hearst work to bring about the Spanish-American War. That’s far too long a time scale to be effective.
The press is supposed to serve as something of an intellectual immune system, calling the powerful to account. Instead, the press has joined with the coteries running things, and are steadily engaged in lying their asses off on their behalf.
Which is most of the problem we have with our society. Were the press doing its job, and actually serving as the information immune system it is supposed to, in order to earn that idealized freedom of the press, they’d have told the public the truth about much of what the government and others have been doing… And, done so impartially.
I’ve got very limited sympathy for these cretins. They thought that they’d never be held accountable, and while it has taken a lot longer than it should have, all those lovely lay-offs are happening for a reason: People don’t buy the BS, any more.
This isn’t a good thing, either. But, there it is: Had the press had some sort of corrective mechanism other than economic bankruptcy, they might not have gone down this path, which is detrimental to us all. You need a functioning press, just as you need actual opposing parties in politics; when they get together and collude to offer no effective differences in policy, well… You get what we have, which is not working.
The government, including the courts, is morally corrupted.
The Corporations, including the media Corporations, are also morally corrupted.
And the government and the Corporations are joined at the hip – by government contracts, regulations (crushing competitors), taxes (also crushing competitors), and, above all, by fiat money – “fiat” as in “order”, “edict”.
When money itself is corrupted, when it becomes just the whims of the powerful, everything else (including the courts) will eventually be corrupted.
This is the rotten heart of the Corporate State.
Truth – Michael Mann lied.
The jury in Washington D.C. knew the truth – and sided with lies, they punished Mark Steyn for condemning the lies of Michael Mann. The jury in the Mark Steyn case did what they did because they hate truth and they hate justice.
The Washington D.C. jury did that for the same reason that the New York juries sided with lies in the “he sexually assaulted me” case against President Trump, the jury knew (they knew) that was a lie – they supported it BECAUSE it was a lie. And the New York jury who sent a man to prison for the “Vote by Text” meme (a meme invented by Hillary Clinton supporters) also knew they were doing evil – the jury acted as they did BECAUSE they knew for them to do this was evil.
They might as well have gone down to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (and it was packed – this was no fridge event) to worship an Argentine man, an illegal immigrant, who the assembled people called (these were their own words) “The Mother of all Whores” and “Saint Cecilia” – and the people there did worship this man, whose assumed name they substituted for the Virgin Mary in their prayers.
The deceased man and his associates are being called “atheists” – but I do not think that is correct as, at least, the associates clearly had supernatural beliefs.
It was NOT just about “housing” (socialist housing schemes) and “gender affirming health care” (castrating men and cutting the breasts off women) there was clearly also a profound faith in “our father below” as some call the being.
This is what the “Justice” Department would call a “jury of your peers”.
The Wall Street crowd think this is all very funny, a big joke, till they find themselves before a jury drawn from people with these beliefs (people who “make evil their good”) – and they will, yes they will.
By the way – the Cathedral was NOT invaded, this was an officially approved event. And a priest was there and did nothing to stop it – the priest has been called a “hero” by Cardinal Dolan for (supposedly) not staying to the very end of the event (although he did take part – there is film showing this – and showing the priest laughing and making jokes).
The claim that the clerical authorities did not know who the deceased person was is an obvious lie – it is not an easy thing to get a funeral service in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Random people can not just book one.
John Adams argued that the Republic would last as long as ordinary people were basically moral – more good than bad (everyone is a mixture – the conflict between good and evil is in every human being every day).
The time when most ordinary people were more good than bad is ending – at least in the Progressive cities. Hence holding trials in these cities – in order to (with the deliberate intention to) get unjust verdicts from evil (the word is well deserved) juries.
It has taken a long time and much hard work, by the education system and the media (including the entertainment media), to produce such a population in certain places – indeed it has taken generations of hard work to so corrupt the Res Publica.
@Kirk
I assumed that by unwritten regulations, you meant taboos or market forces. If you meant physical restrictions on actions, then obviously the NYT and other media organizations are “regulated” as well. There are only so many words per minute journalists can type, only so many articles they can write, only so many articles they can publish and so forth. So if you consider having a bad reaction to oysters “regulation”, then media organizations are “regulated” in the same way. They aren’t regulated in the particular way you want – i.e. they can’t be sued for “libeling” the truth – but neither are you. So either the media and you are both regulated, and so the answer your question about what is not regulated is “nothing”, or both are not, in which case the answer is “a whole lot”.
On the other hand, they might have been forced further down the path regardless of the economic implications. When you want the the state (composed of powerful people) to punish people for libeling the truth and to determine whether someone has done so, de facto the state will decide what “libeling the truth” is. In other words, you will have powerful people determining whether or not to punish news organizations for ambiguous reasons. I somehow feel that this is not what you were aiming for.
Colli the “mainstream” media do not “just” leave out facts – they LIE, they deliberately lie, again and again and again. And they award themselves prizes for their lies.
And this is not some recent thing – it was not invented with the media lies about Donald John Trump. The “mainstream” media have been lying for many decades.
Take the example of the New York Times:
It lied about the murder of millions of people in the Marxist Soviet Union in the 1930s – pretending that it was not happening.
It lied about China in the 1940s – lies designed to lead to the victory of Mao by, first, getting the American government to issue insane “advise” (really orders) to the Republic of China government – such as to call off the 1946 Manchurian Offensive (which was succeeding – the traitors in the Washington bureaucracy insisted the offensive be called off BECAUSE it was succeeding against the Communists), and then later, at a key point, cutting off American aid to Republic of China forces.
First get forces dependent on American aid – then cut if off at a key moment, that is a tactic that has been used again-and-again in various parts of the world (remember the Republic of Vietnam and Cambodia).
The New York Times also lied in the 1950s – pretending that the Castro brothers were not Marxists, this helped lead (and the lies were designed to lead) to the American sanctions against Batista that led to the Communist victory in Cuba.
The New York Times lied about IndoChina and Central America, and about American DOMESTIC matters – it has lied and lied and lied. Year after year, decade after decade.
And the New York Times is the centre of the “mainstream” media.
Have people been asleep in recent years?
The “mainstream” media launched a tidal wave of lies about Mr George Floyd – pretending, from the start, that he had been “murdered” by “racist cops” (he died of drugs he had willingly consumed – and the policemen on the scene were NOT racists).
The “mainstream” media lied about the “mostly peaceful” riots – pretending that BLM was not Marxist and trying to cover up the killings in the riots.
The “mainstream” media lied (again and again) about the United States Presidential election of 2020 – pretending it was not rigged (which it was) and savagely attacking anyone who told the truth.
The “mainstream” media also lied about Covid – attacking anyone who told the truth that it came from the Chinese lab, smearing Early Treatments that could have saved the people who died, pushing the international “lockdowns” that were designed to smash the economy (and undermine society) and had nothing to do with “saving lives” (something the establishment had no interest in – see their smearing of Early Treatments), and pushing the Covid “vaccines” which were not “effective” and were certainly not “safe” – indeed they have killed many people.
No one, after Covid, should trust anything the “mainstream” media (government or Corporate) says.
Their lies go back many decades – but over the last four years the lies of the “mainstream” media have become a tidel wave, blatant and obvious.