273

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/BluthX/status/1175101856655138816

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/1168193369446727681

 

At 50:59 Unger bemoans the failure of the Democrats to ‘get their act together’ and have ‘day after day of hearings so that we can finally have a shared truth like with Watergate’

Craig Unger: the Times won’t touch his research on Trump’s mafia ties

https://www.patreon.com/posts/craig-unger-on-27823736

 

‘What’s undeniable that Trump is compromised by Russia-when did it happen?’

 

“He was compromised in the 1980s.’

 

I’ve talked a good deal in this book about the idea that for the MSM truth only matters if it confirms their preconceived narrative-if it doesn’t then the Savvy believe what Rudy Giuliani believes truth isn’t true. 

Jay Rosen in a very important piece elucidates how the MSM settles on narratives-according to Rosen the MSM doesn’t value truth all that high-or there is something more important than being right or accurate-being savvy.

Mark Halperin-he’s kind of a dick-whose time in the penalty box wasn’t so long wasn’t so long and who has not even attempted to make amends for the accusations that he has engaged in more or less systematic sexual harassment and misconduct of women working for him.

In the United States, most of the people who report on politics aren’t trying to advance an ideology. But I think they have an ideology, a belief system that holds their world together and tells them what to report about. It’s not left, or right, or center, really. It’s trickier than that. The name I’ve given to the ideology of our political press is savviness. And I see it in Australia too. When you watch political journalists on a roundtable program summing up the week and looking ahead, what they are usually performing for us is… their savviness. 

So let me explain what I mean by that term.  In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane.  Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) 

If you understand this then the question as to why the MSM settles on a particular narrative is much more understandable. As I’ve noted it’s certainly clear that the truth doesn’t matter to the MSM when it contradicts its own preconceptions. But the need and desire to be ‘savvy’ explains how it comes by its precoceptions.

Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political. And what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are. 

To the people inside it, savviness is not a cult. It is not a professional church or “belief system.” They would probably reject my terms. But they would say that journalists need to be savvy observers because in politics the unsavvy are hapless, clueless, deluded, clownish, or in some cases extreme. The unsavvy get run over: easily. They get disappointed: needlessly. They get angry–fruitlessly–because they don’t know how things really work. 

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passion, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit.  Therefore the savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you. They say: I am closer to reality than you. Especially if you are active in politics yourself.

Now in order for this belief system to operate effectively, it has to continually position the journalist and his observations not as right where others are wrong, or virtuous where others are corrupt, or visionary where others are short-sighted, but as mature, practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, child-like and dreamy.  This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog political realism to itself. 

 

 

 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/maggie-haberman-book-thrush

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/autopsy-results-add-to-questions-surrounding-epsteins-death/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

You tell Nate, Nate!

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-death.html

 

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-attorney-general-shakes-up-staff-at-jail-where-jeffrey-epstein-died/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

Jeffrey Epstein scandal fallout takes new turn

 

Don McGahn Is Not the Most Critical Witness on Impeachment

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-reassigns-warden-of-jail-where-epstein-died-puts-two-staffers-on-leave/2019/08/13/7da62ff2-bdf7-11e9-a5c6-1e74f7ec4a93_story.html

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1159508325526056961

 

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1159520821368492035

 

 

 

 

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/08/morning-joes-eugene-robinson-pins-death-of-epstein-on-the-rot-at-the-heart-of-the-trump-administration/

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-interview.html

 

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/12/1878437/-What-will-it-finally-take-for-newspapers-to-demand-Trump-resign-the-way-they-did-Bill-Clinton

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/attorney-general-rips-failure-of-prison-officials-to-keep-epstein-alive-vows-to-investigate-co-conspirators/2019/08/12/61e9c570-bd08-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

It’s impossible to have any sympathy for today’s mainstream media. They want to be the sole voice of journalistic authority-and for anyone who doubts the veracity of their reporting to be dismissed as ‘a conspiracy theorist.’

But it’s very tough to feel sympathy for them-they may want the journalistic authority they believe is their birthright but they squandered it over the last 26 years. There was a time when the media genuinely could claim to have well deserved authority but beginning with the early 1990s they quit being about the truth and became about their own narrative-supposedly their narrative has to matter more than anyone else’s for purely taugtological reasons-after all their journalists so there. 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/11/us/jeffrey-epstein-death-whats-next/index.html

 

 

CF:

Much as I hate to agree with a Deplorable at the NY Post he makes a good point here about the basic mentality of the MSM.

Whatever happened to the old journalistic adage that “if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out”? These days, too many reporters imagine their primary role is to police public discourse about the news — rather than, well, reporting the fact

Whatever happened to the old journalistic adage that “if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out”? These days, too many reporters imagine their primary role is to police public discourse about the news — rather than, well, reporting the facts.

Witness the mainstream media’s rush to tsk-tsk the deluge of social-media speculation in the aftermath of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody. Within hours of the story breaking, writers at mainstream outlets went patrolling the Internet for “conspiracy theories” to debunk, usually with that tone of superiority and self-satisfaction that so endears the blue-check Twitterati to the American public.

Speaking of which, shouldn’t the reporters who are busy lamenting our nation’s conspiratorial cast of mind wait for the facts to come out? After all, at least three local and federal probes have just gotten underway. The Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons have been careful to append the adjective “apparent” to the noun “suicide” in their statements on the matter. As Will Chamberlain of Human Events noted, the no-conspiracy journalists are “ahead of the facts.”

https://nypost.com/2019/08/11/journos-debunker-mentality-rush-to-rip-conspiracy-talk/

 

Of course the Deplorable author lets his true GOP partisan colors show at the end:

It’s all especially rich, given the fact that many of these same journalists have spent the past two years feverishly promoting the “collusion” theory. Here’s Coppins writing in 2017: “As evidence piles up pointing to the possibility that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, Republican lawmakers have largely ignored Democrats’ calls for urgent action.”

Actually, there was no evidence of collusion, as the Mueller report concluded. But don’t expect Coppins to take responsibility for injecting “conspiratorial thinking . . . into mainstream discourse.”

Actually there was tons of it but Mueller felt that collusion isn’t a chargeable crime-but why he didn’t hit Donald Jr on campaign finance violations remains to be answered-it’s scarcely been asked. Ironically here he agrees with the Ken Dilanian MSM view-and is totally wrong.

 

https://humanevents.com/2019/08/10/jeffrey-epsteins-death-stinks/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/epstein-conspiracy-theories/593605/

You don’t have to believe in lizard people or baby-eating politicians to understand why so many are looking at our leaders and letting their imagination run wild.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/it-was-inevitable-officers-watching-epstein-were-on-overtime-due-to-jail-staffing-shortage-union-president-says/2019/08/11/2b611404-bc5e-11e9-a5c6-1e74f7ec4a93_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/10/jeffrey-epsteins-apparent-suicide-is-unfathomable/

https://www.city-journal.org/jeffrey-epstein

“While officials from the department’s Bureau of Prisons, which supervises the MCC and other federal prisons, have said little about Epstein’s death other than to claim that Epstein hanged himself, officials told me Sunday that the prison’s psychological team had evaluated Epstein on a daily basis after his alleged initial suicide attempt and had found him to be no risk to himself or to others. Officials said that Epstein had met for many hours each day with his legal team, and that both he and his lawyers had repeatedly assured the prison that he did not want to kill himself and had asked MCC to remove him from the suicide watch. The prison has yet to comment on whether prison officials believe that the initial July 23 incident that landed Epstein on the suicide watch was, in fact, a genuine effort to end his life.”

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/epstein-suicide-conspiracies/595906/

Within hours, #EpsteinMurder was trending on Twitter, as was #TrumpBodyCount (where liberals speculated that the president had offed his former friend), and #ClintonCrimeFamily (where conservatives accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of orchestrating a murderous cover-up). But the speculation was not limited to the fringes—the president himself retweeted a video suggesting Epstein was now dead because he had information on the Clintons.

As the day went on, prominent commentators, journalists, and political figures used their platforms to broadcast conspiracy theories, implicate their ideological enemies, or simply engage in the Twitterwide guessing game about what really happened—all of them working with virtually no concrete information.

The MSNBC host Joe Scarborough tweeted, “A guy who had information that would have destroyed rich and powerful men’s lives ends up dead in his jail cell. How predictably…Russian.” His colleague Joy Ann Reid noted on air that the federal prison where Epstein had died was operated by the Department of Justice. “Let’s just be blunt,” she said. “William Barr’s justice department is not one that you can readily, simply rely upon, and feel confident in. So what do we make of all this now?”

Now that I a confirmed Trump hater am approvingly quoting a Trump worshipper over at the Post this no doubt fits seamlessly in Coppins comfortable word view-partisans of ‘both sides’ are equally crazy and outside of any decent polite society-managed by him and his MSM friends.

That both the Left and Right meet at some point and are equally wrong and ‘crazy’ while he and his MSM pundit friends hold a monoply on truth. But this is a misconception-that to be a journalist you have to be pure in your ‘nonpartisanship’

The idea that to be a journalist you must have no recognizable point of view on anything-Jay Rosen’s view from nowhere-is a modern media prejudice. Historically there’s always been this great tradition of advocacy journalism-a la Upton Sinclair.

 

https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/1160184410588758018

 

https://nypost.com/2019/08/11/journos-debunker-mentality-rush-to-rip-conspiracy-talk/

 

 

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/08/bill-barr-allegedly-made-secret-visit-to-jail-before-epsteins-death-when-does-that-happen/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/jeffrey-epstein-kills-himself-in-jail-according-to-media-reports/2019/08/10/a3d48862-bb73-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

 

 

Speaking of MSM fails see Brian Beutler’s excellent piece-not able to link too WTF indeed

August 6, 2019

The Case for A More Fighting Democratic Party

You can’t connect the dots here if you’re unable to grapple with the possibility that Trump orchestrated a far-reaching criminal coverup. Or that he’s intentionally encouraged others to to break the law or abuse their powers to help him win election and re-election. The dots encircle the hatred he’s incited, the violence he’s condoned, the impunity he seeks for supporters, the retaliatory measures he takes against his enemies, his attempts to coerce big media companies and tech platforms like CNN, the Washington Post, and Google to toe a party line, and cluster most heavily around his relationship with Russia. Why does Trump continue to deny that the Russian government committed crimes to help his campaign and that its attacks on our elections continue? Why did he want to place a crony who espouses those same lies in charge of the intelligence community? 

The answers to these questions are no more reassuring or elusive than the answer to the question that bedevils the political establishment most of all: Why does Trump constantly stoke hatred of immigrants and Muslims and minorities? They are all easy to answer if you can acknowledge that Trump is engaged in a fundamentally malevolent project. The inability to do that, and the attendant unwillingness to connect the dots around it, has given rise to a media failure that in some ways exceeds the 2002 and 2003 coverage of the build up to war in Iraq. The consequences of this more recent failure have not been as catastrophic, not so far anyhow, but at least back then the fact that the Bush administration was building a case for war with Iraq didn’t escape the notice even of the reporters who most eagerly laundered its lies and propaganda.

Today, before our eyes, Trump and his allies seek to crush the foundations of multiracial democracy and replace them with a white ethnostate where the ruling class directs violence at scapegoat communities to create the climate it needs to get away with looting the country and dismantling all checks on its power. If you can see that, and articulate it, you don’t ask what Trump might do to make things better, or say he “urges unity vs. racism.” If you can’t see it, or your job requires you to blind yourself to it, you must treat his ultimate purposes as an impenetrable mystery. You might explain away his efforts to end an investigation of an attack on the United States, and his coziness with the perpetrator, as impulses of a man who merely worries the Russia matter undermines his legitimacy. You might marvel at his occasional, scripted, disingenuous condemnations of all the forces he has fostered, and chase down Democrats to ask them if they think Trump is racist. But seriously: What the fuck?

Members of the Press, WTF Indeed!

 

Another media fail?

 

 

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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