Media

The disconnect between real world events and the beliefs and statements of “respectable” mainstream media is wider than at any time in living memory. Our grandparents who grew up on the “big three” channels-ABC, CBS, NBC-would not recognize what passes for news reporting today. There was never a golden era when everything the newspapers and TV anchors said was the whole truth, but there was a stronger anchor to reality reflected in the news coverage that began in the mid-20th century and continued through at least the year 2000. 

Not anymore. All the broadcast stations (with the partial exception of Fox News), and all the cable news networks appear to have no actual understanding of the real world. It’s impossible to say whether the beat reporters, correspondents, and anchors actually believe what they say, or whether they are consciously lying. But what they appear to believe, and what they’re trying to get you to believe, bears no relationship to observable events in the real world. 

This is most apparent in coverage of the so-called riots that took place at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. What nearly every news source has called a “violent insurrection” for years was not an insurrection at all. It’s certainly not the case that a total of 1,538 people committed acts of violence or threatened police – yet that is how many protestors have been put through the court system or sent to jail. 

All along, the media, the White House, and Democratic politicians have lied to make the event seem darker and more sinister than it really was. They lied and said Donald Trump encouraged a “violent insurrection,” when in fact he addressed the public and told them to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” Even the compromised Associated Press had to admit it. 

Politicians and the media accused rioters of killing police officers, yet no police officers were killed. They claimed that rioters had bashed capitol police officer Brian Sicknick over the head with a fire extinguisher, killing him. That never happened. Sicknick died of a stroke the day after the non-riot.  

It’s been four years, and the media is still either lying, or is somehow so disconnected from the real world that an impartial observer would legitimately question if there’s a form of mental illness at play among the media elite. While it does appear that some rioters did physically assault Capitol officers, none of them were killed. The media does not seem to care at all about the person who was killed: veteran Ashli Babbitt. She doesn’t rate, you see, because she was MAGA, which for leftists is code for “disposable subhuman scum.” 

Ashli Babbitt’s death didn’t even rate a mention from this pool of reporters asking questions of incoming President Donald Trump when he was asked about Jan 6 pardons Watch this exchange below – the reporter asked Donald Trump if he planned to pardon any of the rioters who attacked police officers. Trump turned it around and replied, “The only one that  was killed was a beautiful young lady named Ashli Babbitt.” He went on to remind the press pool that there were never any charges of “insurrection” against anyone, because no insurrection occurred. 

Response from X/Twitter users was mixed, but most appeared to side with Trump’s approach: 

It’s rare today to see a major media outlet have anything critical to say of anything, anyone, or any practice in the media itself. While the news business has always been clubby, it did not used to march in absolute political lockstep. But it has done so most obviously since at least 2016 with the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency. 

The New York Post has started off the year with a bang in a long overdue excoriation of the craven lying of basically all of the press regarding President Joe Biden’s obvious senility. It’s not surprising that it’s the Post taking the issue on, as that paper has every reason to be critical of its colleagues and competitors. The New York Post is America’s oldest newspaper, and it was the paper that broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. 

Hunter, the president’s son, abandoned a laptop at a computer repair shop in Maryland. Predictably, the contents leaked, and what contents they were. There was evidence that Hunter and his father Joe were engaged in unsavory, unethical, and possibly illegal dealings with Ukrainian businesses like the energy company Burisma. Not only that, but the computer was full of prurient photos depicting Hunter Biden smoking hard drugs and consorting with what appeared to be prostitutes. 

The All-Democrat-All-The-Time mainstream media either ignored the story, or accused the Post of making the whole thing up. Under its pre-Elon-Musk ownership, Twitter banned the New York Post’s account entirely, preventing it from posting anything on the platform. All this was a far cry from the heroic narrative about the hard-hitting independent press that has lingered on since the days of the Watergate scandal depicted in All the President’s Men. 

Now the Post strikes back. In a blistering editorial, the editorial board accuses its media colleagues of exactly what they did: “President-elect Donald Trump is forcing the Democratic politicians who spent years lying about President Biden’s senility to take their bitter medicine, but we’re more concerned about the toady media who played along . . . Every last [Democrat who covered it up] deserves scorn, but so do the journalists who not only let these fantastical fibs go unchallenged, but even parroted the lies: Biden was showing no signs of mental decline, they insisted — and it was offensive, ignorant and borderline bigoted to even suggest otherwise.”

What’s so infuriating about the press trying to hide Biden’s senility was that everyone could see it. Despite what your Democrat aunt might claim, and despite what talking heads on television claimed, no adult American of ordinary intelligence could not see that Joe Biden has been in dementia for years. 

The New York Post points out, “The entire idea that Biden was anything but healthy — virile, even — was treated as a right-wing, tin-foil-hat talking point.The public wasn’t buying it: Back in February, 86% of Americans thought Biden was too old to serve a second term because they had watched his decline happen in real time, and over the course of several years.”

It’s hard to recollect a time in living memory when the entire press apparatus lied about the most obvious deficiencies in the leader of the free world, and tried to tell sane Americans that it was they who were losing their minds for noticing the truth. 

The public is beyond fed up. Here’s a sampling from X/Twitter under a Fox News post about the topic. Fox framed it as the media “being in denial,” and the public isn’t letting them get away with it. 

Billionaire George Soros’ controlling interest in 227 radio stations — a quarter of the radio stations in the country — appears to be on track, but for the watchful eye of incoming Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr.  Soros, and a conglomeration of companies under his control, received unprecedented approval from the FCC for the acquisition of Audacy in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy filing this year. But approval for the leftist billionaire’s purchase of the radio stations, which span 45 media markets reaching 165 million Americans, wasn’t just fast-tracked.

The FCC’s move broke with precedent by skirting a rule that protects U.S. communications channels from foreign influence. The FCC’s expeditious approval of the deal sidestepped the fact that the Soros-controlled Audacy will be more than 25% foreign-owned, which requires additional scrutiny the FCC withheld from the process.  Meanwhile, Audacy, presumably under Soros’ auspices, has re-upped a deal with Bloomberg to distribute news content across the syndicate’s news/talk markets. 

Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the role, criticized the decision back in September, and told Fox News before Thanksgiving he intends to give the authorization a second look. Incoming FCC Chair Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the role, criticized the anomalous decision back in September, and told Fox News before Thanksgiving he intends to give the authorization a second look.

Read the Full Story at The Midwesterner 

The Germans have a word for every emotion, don’t they? Today’s article is brought to you by the word “schadenfreude.” It’s the delicious sensation of enjoying the misfortune of others. It’s a bit close to the concept of sadism, but schadenfreude need not be that wicked; it’s generally something you feel when someone gets the comeuppance they deserve. 

That belated comeuppance has made an appearance in the MSNBC newsroom. After losing a shocking and actually unprecedented number of viewers after Trump’s election—MSNBC lost about half its audience, had only 17,000 viewers in the key demographic—the uber-liberal cable offshoot of the big peacock is finally letting some of the consequences roll downhill onto its overpaid anchors. 

Take Rachel Maddow, who went from normal high school student to angry lesbian in just a few short years. Her show lost 43 percent of its audience overnight after the presidential election November 5. As a result, network bosses took a look at their bottom line and decided to cut her pay from $30 million to $25 million. She isn’t going to starve on that salary, of course. But her high rate of pay is odd to begin with: Maddow now only does one hour on MSNBC per week. Nice if you can get it. 

It doesn’t stop with Maddow. Prolific Twitter/X news purveyor Collin Rugg reports that queen of wigs Joy Reid will have to agree to a pay cut if she wants to keep working for the network.

Right now Reid is making $3 million a year to lie about Trump and castigate white people every evening from her studio chair. 

What do the people say? 

This guy says he has the details. 

One can tell a lot about a person, or a culture, by observing how that person or culture relates to humor. Do they have a sense of humor? Do they like to cut up? Can they roll with banter and friendly mockery, taking it and dishing it out? Or, do they scowl and take offense at words that everyone else finds amusing? 

Who knows if there’s any research behind the idea, but it seems pretty clear to a lot of people that authoritarian and totalitarian ways of thinking don’t make room for humor. Authoritarian personalities hate being mocked, and totalitarian regimes take deep—and often violent—offense at humor’s close cousin, satire, as author Salman Rushdie has learned painfully and repeatedly. 

Since the election of Donald Trump this time around, it’s been quite clear that the left has zero sense of humor. Or more nearly, they have no sense of humor about themselves even as they allow their side to indulge in “humor” that’s not-even-thinly disguised wishes of violence on anyone to the right of center. One suspects that part of what makes the left so angry is the fact that, like him or not, Donald Trump is naturally charismatic and funny, and he does it on his toes.

MSNBC’s wig mistress in chief Joy Reid is having none of it, thank you very much. You can tell just by the look on her face.

What turned Reid’s smile upside down recently was a quip from Trump to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The light-loafered “former” drama teacher made a trip to Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago recently in an apparent attempt to dissuade the president-elect from enacting a 25 percent tariff on imported Canadian goods. According to Joy Reid, Trump “threatened” Trudeau and Canada. 

With what? An off-the-cuff (and funny) retort that if Canada didn’t like the tariff, maybe they should just become the 51st U.S. state. While the exchange was not recorded, and the joke was relayed to Fox second-hand by unnamed sources, Trump probably did jokingly “threaten” to annex Canada – and we can all picture him doing just that.

Yet, Joyless Reid can’t see the humor in it.  

Come on. Is Joy Reid truly that literal-minded, or is it all a pretense? It’s hard to say, but easy to see that the vast majority of sane adults would recognize Trump’s remark as verbal play (key word: sane). The idea of the United States forcibly invading Canada is even more laughable than the liberal media’s apparent belief that Trump meant to threaten a ground war on our northern cousins. 

Fortunately X/Twitter users have a healthier funny bone than our MSNBC hostess.