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Mainstream media corporations spark ‘fake news’ battle turning on each other

Thanks to CNN and BuzzFeed, a war now rages among corporate media outlets, a true study in irony, as the New York Times and Guardian hurl accusations the two outlets are guilty of publishing Fake News — the same Fake News all of the aforementioned have cited in unabashed attempts to discredit legitimate alternative media. (RELATED: Read more accounts of mainstream media fake news at NewsFakes.com)

(Article by Claire Bernish from thedailysheeple.com)

CNN first published an article citing without including information ostensibly ruinous to President-elect Donald Trump’s political career — but BuzzFeed took that ball and ran — publishing documents believed to have originated from an unnamed British intelligence officer and admittedly unsubstantiated and unverified.

Careless reporting by the mainstream press, in other words, has reached critical mass — and known publishers of Fake News are now calling each other to task for egregiously vapid journalism.

“BuzzFeed Posts Unverified Claims on Trump, Igniting a Debate,” the Timesheadline asserts, while — going a step farther — the Guardian’s article is entitled, “BuzzFeed publishes unsubstantiated Trump report, raising ethics questions.”

CNN first reported on the dossier allegedly obtained from the unnamed British intelligence official, but left out the more lurid and revealing details from the 35-pages BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith later decided were fair game for publication — despite “serious reason to doubt the allegations.”

BuzzFeed reported Tuesday, “The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. BuzzFeed News reporters in the US and Europe have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Obama and Trump.”

Mainstream outlets scrambled over each other to ride the viral wave when BuzzFeed’s article garnered over one million views in short succession — and 3.5 million less than 24 hours later — but none of those organizations bothered to restrain themselves in the interest of investigating the dossier further.

Incidentally, the Times was among them — and in its scathing critique, curiously notes.

“The reports by CNN and Buzzfeed sent other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, scrambling to publish their own articles, some of which included generalized descriptions of the unverified allegations about Mr. Trump. By late Tuesday, though, only BuzzFeed had published the full document.”

As if reporting on unsubstantiated claims without providing the documents you’re citing somehow excuses the Times’ capricious abandonment of journalistic due diligence. Nevertheless, the article contends.

“BuzzFeed’s decision, besides its immediate political ramifications for a president-elect who is to be inaugurated in 10 days, was sure to accelerate a roiling debate about the role and credibility of the traditional media in today’s frenetic, polarized information age.

“Of particular interest was the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources, a practice that fueled some of the so-called fake news — false rumors passed off as legitimate journalism — that proliferated during the presidential election.”

Again, the Times reported on the exact information BuzzFeed did — but didn’t provide the contentious document for the public to evaluate — so, in essence, it’s accusing itself in the mix.

According to each outlet — either parroting another or making its own assertion — the 35 pages had been passed around behind the scenes in both the media and intelligence communities. That fact alone, if indeed true — which would be hard to glean from this imprudent crowd — raises questions on the decision to publish so close to inauguration day.

In addition, that intel officials have indeed had possession of the dossier but have yet to verify its contents sufficiently to provide comment to the press intimates the striking potential the documents are inauthentic — or the information isn’t accurate. CNN might have held back from publishing those pages, but its article contained the equally dubious claims.

“Some of the memos were circulating as far back as last summer. What has changed since then is that US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect a few days ago.”

BuzzFeed, in what might come to be an act of journalistic suicide, said to hell with it — took CNN’s report as a cue, and ran the laughably flawed document — admitting at the time that by doing so it was essentially publishing Fake News.

And now the New York Times and other corporate press seem to believe eschewing the blame for contributing to the mess — under the pretense of plausible deniability for refusing to publish the actual dossier to back their allegations — is as simple as publicly castigating the original outlets they copied.

Glenn Greenwald adroitly summarized this media shit show, writing for The Intercept.

“All of these toxic ingredients were on full display yesterday as the Deep State unleashed its tawdriest and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting credibility in and then causing the public disclosure of a completely unvetted and unverified document, compiled by a paid, anonymous operative while he was working for both GOP and Democratic opponents of Trump, accusing Trump of a wide range of crimes, corrupt acts and salacious private conduct. The reaction to all of this illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers, so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts to undermine it.”

Hell bent on pinning blame for its own journalistic failures throughout the election cycle, corporate media began targeting alternative outlets as Fake News and Russian propaganda for its stellar reporting on the contents of leaked documents deleterious to Hillary Clinton.

But because the mainstream press constitutes little more than a mouthpiece for the U.S. political establishment, independent journalists — aware of this nonsense — have continually called out the errant and viral reports from outlets like the Times, CNN, and Washington Post.

Indeed, the backlash over falsely labeling independent reporting Fake News has been so intense, the outlet that championed and initiated the use of that term — the Post — came forward this week to pompously declare its retirement.

Indisputably, however — and particularly as the American public watches this unseemly and mortifying abandonment of journalistic integrity play out — mainstream media is now little more than a picked-over carcass of its former self.

To believe anything a corporate press this errant and devoid of the standards, principles, and rectitude its roots were founded on — unless purely for entertainment’s sake — would plainly be foolhardy. Garnering reliable information from mainstream presstitutes is like agreeing to play Russian roulette with facts.

It’s time to admit the patently obvious — mainstream media is dead.

Read more at: thedailysheeple.com

Photo of a bunch of One Dollar Bills on a white background

Americans will soon lose all anonymity as businesses ban cash and insist on electronic payment

Though American currency is supposed to be considered legal tender for all debts, public and private, fast approaching is the day when cash will no longer be considered king – and another large chunk of your liberty will be gone.

That’s because the world is moving towards a cashless society, and the United States is helping to lead the way.

Already the country of Sweden is essentially cashless, reports CBS News. There, businesses require most customers to pay with their mobile phones, debit cards, or credit cards.

The United States is certainly trending that way. Every month, more and most businesses are snubbing the dollar and requiring customers to pay in cashless fashion. One merchant that refuses cash is SweetGreen, a salad chain. Employees inform customers when it comes time to pay to keep their cash stashed and whip out a cell phone or a piece of plastic.

That is also trending among vending machines. Many now do not accept any form of cash but instead take only plastic cards or mobile wallets.

It used to be that businesses could not refuse legal tender to settle debts and required payments. But the U.S. Treasury has given private businesses permission to establish their own forms of payment.

“What we’ve seen is a push toward electric payments because of convenience, especially for Generations X and Y and onward,” Greg Burch, vice president of strategic initiatives as Ingenico Group, a firm that makes payment systems for merchants, told CBS News. “The phone has become more personal than the wallet has.”

But perhaps the worst thing is the loss of privacy. Every electronic transaction is, of course, traceable, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. Like electronic communications – cell calls, text and instant messages and so forth – now every single thing you buy will be tracked, traced and, eventually, stowed in some government database somewhere, or a corporate IT center so you can be inundated with unwanted sales pitches.

Believe it or not, there is one state that has blocked businesses from banning cash: Massachusetts, which is not really known for its stance in support of constitutional liberties (like gun rights).

There is another reason why cashless economics is a bad thing. As noted by Zero Hedge, forcing everyone to keep their funds in banks as electronic assets, financial institutions could turn around and coerce people into spending rather than saving by imposing negative interest rates and other financial vehicles that make deposits more expensive.

But Scott A. Shay, chairman of Signature Bank, says the biggest threat is to our freedoms. Writing for CNBC, Shay says “econgularity” – a term describing an approaching moment when technological snooping capabilities, ease of manipulating big data and the cashless society all converge – will “permit governments to exercise incredibly powerful control over all human behavior.”

Still, there are those who are celebrating – and pushing for – the cashless society to happen. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, researchers from Tufts University said the faster the U.S. could move toward a cashless society, the better – so the government can save $200 billion a year in costs to maintain currency.

At least now, Americans know the price of complete control and servitude.

Sources for this story include:

CNBC.com

ZeroHedge.com

CBSNews.com

HBR.org

Rip-Destroy-Us-Constitution

Justice Department says parents have no ‘right’ to homeschool their children

If you don’t believe that the United States government is growing closer and closer to complete and total tyranny, this bit of news will hopefully change your mind.

Three years ago, Natural News reported on a German family that was fined $10,000 and had their children forcibly removed from their home. What kind of terrible crime did the parents, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, commit? The crime of Homeschooling.  

That’s right; the Romeike family was fined $10,000 and lost their five children because they had chosen to homeschool them. You see, the Romeikes felt that the public school system was undermining their religious beliefs, and so began to homeschool their children in 2006. Though it was illegal, do you think that such an extreme punishment was really necessary?

After getting their children back, the Romeikes relocated to the United States, and were granted asylum upon their arrival in Tennessee. A federal judge felt that the family had reasonable fear of persecution for their personal beliefs, and expressed disapproval of the German policy. All was well and good for the Romeike family, until the Obama administration got involved.

At the time, the Attorney General Eric Holder publicly denounced the original federal court ruling, and instead supported the rather oppressive policy enforced by the German government. Holder actually pleaded that this family instead be denied their asylum.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t the United States largely created by people who were escaping persecution for their beliefs? Or is that not important anymore?

As Natural News reported, Eric Holder believed that governments actually have the right to use their authority and power to dictate parental compliance with government-sanctioned schools. A nation that was once a shining beacon of liberty has now become a dull reminder of what once was, and now is not.

The German government’s policy essentially states that while parents have a natural right to the upbringing of their children, it is the government’s job to “oversee” them fulfill this right. The law also states that, “The entire school system shall be under the supervision of the state.”

Here in America we have the Fourteenth Amendment, which secures homeschooling as a fundamental liberty and parental right. The Constitution also gives individual states the ability to regulate homeschooling in their own way.

Is this fundamental right under attack too? The previous Attorney General’s call to revoke the Romeike family’s already-granted asylum surely tells all. The government doesn’t care about your rights or your freedom; it only cares about your compliance.

The new Attorney General Loretta Lynch is only continuing the legacy of taking rights away from the American people. What is next?

Sources:

NaturalNews.com

Blog.Acton.org