ArchiveArchive

How mainstream media gets away with distributing propaganda masquerading as legitimate journalism

January 14, 2017 by Don Wrightman Leave a Comment

The free press is supposed to protect the people from the political class, but these days it seems they operate in a manner meant to protect the political class from public scrutiny. The mainstream media betrays their purpose while undermining democracy. Power for the elite and corrupt is gained through the mainstream media, by eliminating skepticism and not holding politicians accountable for their lies. (RELATED: Read more news about propaganda schemes at Propaganda.news)

The mainstream media is an enemy to America, complicit in undermining our republic. The free press should serve as a check and balance against political corruption at the highest levels of government; they should be asking tough questions that will make politicians uncomfortable. The mainstream media essentially takes on the role of public relations rather than real journalism. They have been in cahoots with the Obama administration by excusing his agenda and refusing to hold him accountable. Obamacare promises were merely calculated lies used to impose a tax on the American people.

There are still reporters who do real investigations and ask tough questions, but not in the mainstream media. You will not see the mainstream media exposing the truth about corruption in Washington; only the independent media serves that function these days. Take WikiLeaks for example: they expose information that the government doesn’t want released. The independent media are the only real sources of free press who are willing to take risks and challenge the status quo.

The mainstream media is all out theatrics at its best, acting as the regime’s network of puppets. They are engaged in systematically dismantling America one issue at a time. The mainstream media attacks opposition to government corruption, the independent media, honest candidates and history. The ideas of unbiased journalism and objective reporting have long since been abandoned by the mainstream media, who feed us a constant stream of disinformation that ignores what we need to know, and only highlights what they want us to believe. It’s not news – it’s a tool used to serve corporate and government interests. (See coverage of fake news hoaxes at Hoax.news)

There are plenty of personalities in the independent media who express their diverse beliefs, but they are subject to censorship from internet gatekeepers like Google, Facebook and Twitter. The censorship shuts down opposing views to the state controlled media’s false narratives, allowing them to manipulate the minds of Americans. Journalists and reporters working for the mainstream all report what they are told, according to the memo or teleprompter, sometimes even word for word across each outlet.

The independent media is still a valid tool for information where journalists still ask questions and provide a different perspective on things. You should never believe any of the scripts from the sold-out mainstream – they have been ordered to forget their role as journalists.

Be sure to find real news at the popular headline aggregation website Censored.news.

Sources:

YouTube.com

NaturalNews.com

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

January 13, 2017 by News Editors Leave a Comment

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 Times’ headline 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.

The ‘mainstream media’ complains about ‘fake news’ but as Trump coverage proves, it either creates it or falls for it ALL the time

January 9, 2017 by JD Heyes Leave a Comment

Facebook, Google and other media giants have pledged to root out “fake news” from now on, having allowed themselves to be convinced by the dishonest ‘mainstream media’ that a bevy of Russia-planted “propaganda” in hundreds of legitimate alternative media sites during the recent presidential campaign are what led to the loss of their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton.

That phony narrative has since been wholly discredited, but no matter: Facebook has announced it will partner with some shady “fact-checker” websites like Snopes.com and Politifact.com, as well as news media like ABC News and The Associated Press—all of whom have credibility issues themselves—in order to prevent “fake news” from showing up on their sites.

Of course, all of this nonsense is really just an effort to make official their previous censoring of real media facts they simply do not agree with, because such truth doesn’t fit their narratives, especially when it comes to their attempts at undermining and de-legitimizing the incoming President-elect Trump. In order to create a narrative and make it stick, you have to be able to shut out or shout down any competing information, no matter how factual it is, and that will require 1) outspending your competition; and 2) giving yourself the aura of legitimacy by surrounding yourself with so-called ‘reliable’ sources.

But the reality is, of course, that the mainstream media are the creators of false narratives and the perpetrators of fake news, not the alternative media, which has been consistently accurate in its reporting this campaign season. In fact, here is a list of made-up narratives and phony-baloney reporting this year by the mainstream press as it pertained to Trump, which could not help piling on and serving as an echo chamber for each discredited story:

— ‘The Russians did it’: One of the most recent examples is the Washington Post’s claim that Russia, in a massive psyops operation, flooded hundreds of alternative news and information sites with fake news—“propaganda” aimed at helping Trump defeat Clinton. The paper relied on a single dubious ‘source’ for its report, a shady, never-before-heard-of organization of “experts” who claimed to have some scientific data ‘proving’ that Moscow was behind this effort. But as it was revealed in follow-up reporting by The Intercept and other news outlets, even rudimentary questioning by the Post’s reporter and its editors would have discovered severe discrepancies with the organization—PropOrNot—and the claims it was making.

“[T]he article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics. It was not surprising to learn that, as BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel noted, ‘a lot of reporters passed on this story.’ Its huge flaws are self-evident. But the Post gleefully ran with it and then promoted it aggressively, led by its Executive Editor Marty Baron.”

— A ‘Trump supporter’ burned down a black church: Late in the campaign a story broke claiming that a “Trump supporter” or supporters intentionally torched and burned down a black church in Mississippi. Following the initial report a number of ‘mainstream’ media outlets—all wanting to believe it was true because they already believed that Trump himself is a racist—rushed to concur and summarily condemn the GOP nominee (as did Trump’s rival, Clinton, who tweeted that “this kind of hate has no place in America”—which, of course, is true).

What got the media hooked into this story is that the perpetrator(s) spray-painted, “Vote Trump” on the side of the burned out church. But lacking any evidence other than that very circumstantial phrase, the media went with the “Trump supporters are obviously racists” narrative anyway.

The Atlantic, under the headline, “A Black Church Burned in the Name of Trump,” reported that the arson attack was being investigated as a “hate crime,” attempted to tie the incident to rising racism, and claimed that the motivation was for someone to leave “a calling card about politics.”

Reliably Left-wing Vox went all out to pin the blame on Trump supporters. Victoria M. Massie wrote in her piece, “Black churches have always been about more than spirituality. For generations, black churches have served as sources of refuge from and resistance to the racism pervading America’s Christian pulpits.” Uh, okay.

She further claimed that though the perpetrator(s) had yet to be identified, “Trump’s supporters” were “welcoming the confrontation” with minorities, and that the burning was “the latest symbol of some of the country’s worst fears about the spread of violence looming over this year’s presidential election” (violence that, of course, was generated primarily by Left-wing Clinton supporters).

Not to be outdone, the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center, which has never met a Republican or a conservative it liked or thought highly of, immediately posted news of the incident on their “Hate Watch” site, though again, there wasn’t one shred of evidence or proof that a Trump supporter was responsible. The group even claimed that the burning was an attempt at “voter intimidation.”

And finally, The Daily Beast complained that even a “burned down black church” proves that a “President Trump wouldn’t condemn his own terrorists” (yes, he used the “T” word). “…[W]hen it came to the burning of a black church in his own name, Trump’s little fingers didn’t touch his favorite means of reaching millions of supporters, Twitter. Instead, his campaign issued a boilerplate statement.”

Well, that’s because in the end, as Breitbart news reported, a black member of that very church—Andrew McClinton—was arrested by police and is suspected of being responsible for torching it, all in an effort to feed the false narrative and stereotype created by the real purveyors of “fake news” that Trump and his supporters are racist.

None of these media outlets or the SPLC has apologized or retracted their stories.

— The bisexual girl who was not being ‘harassed by Trump supporters’: Taylor Volk, a DeKalb University senior who has stated publicly she is bisexual, complained in November that she was singled out by a hateful note she said was taped to her door that read, “Back to Hell,” and “#Trump”. She also said she received a pair of anonymous emails that said essentially the same thing, so she “went public” about them on her Facebook page, Chicago’s NBC affiliate reported.

“This is a countrywide epidemic all of a sudden,” Volk said.

“The fact that somebody reached out to do this to her specifically is shocking,” Kelsey Stevens, a North Park senior, added. “I think those who have those feelings have been emboldened by this election.”

But after a short investigation of Volk’s claims, the university’s own president himself found them to be a hoax, as The Daily Wire reported. Again, no retraction.

— Phony slurs, attacks, on more college campuses: We know that Left-wing academics have convinced students they need “safe spaces” on campuses, because…conservatives and Trump. So there have been no shortage of false complaints that racial and homophobic slurs have allegedly been committed by a host of Trump supporters.

Except they haven’t been.

As Campus Reform reported in mid-November, a young Muslim woman told school officials at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette that two white males wearing “Donald Trump clothing” assaulted her and stole her hijab.

“The ACLU of Louisiana is outraged at the news of a young Muslim woman being assaulted and robbed of her hijab in Lafayette yesterday morning,” the organization said, adding that “the report that her attackers also shouted slurs and wore Donald Trump clothing is especially troubling in light of Mr. Trump’s frequent use of anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign trail.”

But it never happened. Within hours, university police determined the entire incident was a hoax.

There have been other reports and other hoaxes as well, such as the student at Villanova University who claimed she was attacked by Trump supporters, but turns out she declined to press charges.

Then again, some Left-wing academics are actually calling for Trump supporters to be expelled from their campuses, citing a plethora of stereotypical reasons while offering no evidence at all that they are making problems or threatening other students.

There is no question that the recently-ended presidential campaign was one of the most contentious in recent history. But what is also true is that one nominee—Trump—was savaged and lied about repeatedly by false reports that the discredited mainstream media leapt to cover, without checking sources, facts and details.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for Natural News and News Target, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

Tour de FARCE: US Intel report on Russian “interference” a hilarious parade of paranoia politics… zero evidence… just rehashed delusional conspiracy theories

January 6, 2017 by Mike Adams Leave a Comment

We really have reached the point where everything that’s run by the political left has devolved into a parade of delusional paranoia. Whether it’s man-made “climate change,” the purely imagined “KKK hate crimes” epidemic, or the hilarious delusional conspiracy theory about Russians “hacking the election,” everything the left has come up with in recent memory is rooted in sheer fiction (if not slobbering mental illness).

The latest laughable attempt at creating a Russian boogeyman to scare all the little leftist snowflake children has arrived in the form of a US intel report released Friday. Titled, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the report is so laughably devoid of a single shred of credible evidence that actual journalists all across the world are rolling on the floor with hysterical laughter.

“Every time IC repackages its same assertions in a new form, media acts like it’s been proven, even though it – again – includes no evidence,” Tweeted one of the few remaining independent journalists on the planet, Glenn Greenwald.

Every time IC repackages its same assertions in a new form, media acts like it's been proven, even though it – again – includes no evidence: https://t.co/C5yRsZsJbS

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 6, 2017

In another tweet, Greenwald followed up with, “It’s shocking how much this report was hyped and how literally no effort was made to include *any* evidence at all.”

In response, left-wing trolls on Twitter accused Greenwald himself of “working for the Russians.” (That’s now the excuse the everything the left doesn’t like. Must be the Russians!)

A circle jerk of rehashed left-wing paranoia

In essence, a tiny number of Obama puppets inside the CIA and FBI just “made s##t up” and then tried to pass it off as legitimate intelligence. The laughably hysterical document — widely and blindly repeated everywhere in the obedient but mindless left-wing media — is nothing more than a circle jerk rehash of delusional conspiracy theories.

Notably, there isn’t a single piece of actual evidence found in the entire report.

The report spends much of its time covering RT, a media organization funded by the Kremlin: “RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism,” says the report.

In other words, anyone who was critical of Hillary Clinton was obviously working with the Russians, right? Never mind that she was an unlikable, deeply corrupt, criminal-minded mob boss with an obvious neurological disorder who pre-sold the White House to foreign interests.

Opponents of fracking are also working for the Russians, you see

It gets even better. The report also implies that environmentalists and opponents of fracking are working for the Russians, too. (Yes, I know. It’s just beyond hilarious.)

“RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health.”

Noooooo! Say it isn’t so! You mean to tell me that people who are concerned about the environmental impact of fracking are really working for the Russians? For the record, that’s about 90% of all leftists, by the way. Apparently, not only are all the people on the right working for the Russians (because they hate Hillary), but also all the people on the left are working for the Russians, too (because they hate fracking).

According to the CIA, then, everyone is working for the Russians. Except, not Hillary Clinton, we’re told, even though she was the U.S. Secretary of State who approved the Russian takeover of U.S. strategic uranium mines… a convenient fact the lying left-wing media refuses to report.

A Tour de Farce of intelligence bullsh#ttery

If you can stop laughing, consider the fact that the left-wing media takes this bogus intelligence report as “fact” even though it is completely devoid of any evidence. The entire thing is nothing more than Obama sycophants ginning up scary bedtime stories to tell each other, then labeling it all “intelligence.”

In truth, there’s no intelligence to be found in the report at all. It’s so devoid of facts, evidence and sources — but rife with opinions, conclusions and “analysis” of opinions — that the whole thing should probably be renamed Tour de Farce: The CIA’s Drug-Induced Assessment of Make-Believe Threats to the Kingdom of F##ktardia.

In conclusion, the report wildly discredits the CIA, FBI and NSA with its cringe-worthy (and obviously politically biased) “analysis” that reads more like twisted, drug-induced paranoid delusions than meaningful intelligence. The very first thing President Trump should do after being sworn in, obviously, is to drain the swamp at the CIA and remove every single analyst churning out this paranoid hogwash.