JOHN RACHEL—With the nation divided into red and blue states, the news robots now have the solemn and putatively critical duty to keep us up to date on any shifting of allegiances and rebalancing of the color scheme, milking any incremental addition of a splotch of blue or dash of red for whatever drama they can generate, before cutting to a commercial break. What has this got to do with the mounting crises we find ourselves in?
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JIMMY DORE—Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson recently talked about what he learned during his career in media during an appearance on the “Full Send” podcast, lighting into his corporate media colleagues (and former self) for lying at the behest of the establishment and expressing regret over his past defense of the Iraq War.
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The establishment’s liberaloid media—of which Yahoo! News and Rolling Stone are card-carrying members, despite the latter’s pretension to boutique radicalism—is enraged by Tucker Carlson’s and Mat Taibbi’s revelations, and the uniformity of their response, down to the identical smears being used is proof of that. Even the holy Ken Burns has joined the righteous mob to cast his own stones.
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MATT TAIBBI—We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded. A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”
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RON UNZ—As a result, Hersh’s Democracy Now! segment can no longer be viewed anywhere except on the Youtube site itself, and then only after clicking through two layers of warnings. The obvious intent was to drastically reduce Hersh’s potential audience and this will surely succeed. I assume that these restrictions have been combined with the most severe sort of shadow-banning. So a segment that would have probably been seen by many millions will only get a small fraction of that total.
