Preface. Let’s be clear. Erroneous, agenda-driven spin, or “fake news” can occur across the left-center-right spectrum.
A recent message to MHProNews said in part: “You guys are batsh-t crazy. Leave politics unrelated to the industry out and stop trying turning the industry into a tabloid.” When that person was asked to identify specific examples that illustrate those claims and thus back up that claim, that person remained mute. Hmmm…
Like it or not, “politics” happens to impact our industry as well as our country that our profession operates in. “Politics” can have a serious impact, especially on smaller firms and affordable housing seekers. Denying that is so is to deny reality.
Reality matters.
Odds are you know someone who doesn’t believe that two-word statement, “Reality Matters,” correct? If so, challenge them to start by picturing the last person who stepped off a high ledge without a parachute or safety device, vainly thinking they could fly or defy gravity.
Whatever your thoughts are – for or against – former President Barack Obama, prior to diving into what follows, a look back at the 2018 Obama quote shown below sets the table. It is a fine example of the ancient wisdom of separating the wheat from the chaff that should be applied to all.
That noted, this Masthead will begin with several sets of extensive quotes from liberal and centrist media and tech experts. That will be followed by additional information, MHProNews Analysis, and Commentary.
- On 11.25.2020 at 7.49 EM ET, attorney-turned award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald sent the following to MHProNews and others. For those not familiar with Greenwald, Wikipedia noted that he was described by left-of-center MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow during Greenwald’s period writing for Salon as “the American left’s most fearless political commentator.”
Put differently, this is not a blind Trump supporter. Nor is he a blind Democratic supporter. He will take shots at both major political parties on specific issues.
With that introduction, let’s dive into Greenwald’s recent news/analysis provided to MHProNews.
Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan Sites” in Favor of “Mainstream News” (The NYT) is a Fraud
by Glenn Greenwald
The corporate news organizations masquerading as reliable and non-partisan are, in fact, as hyper-partisan as any sites on the internet, and spread as much misinformation.
The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.
The conceit that outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is one you would be eager to believe, or at least want to induce others to believe, if you were a tech reporter at The New York Times, furious and hurt that millions upon millions of people would rather hear other voices than your own, and simply do not trust what you tell them. Inducing Facebook to manipulate the algorithmic underbelly of social media to artificially force your content down the throats of citizens who prefer to avoid it, while rendering your critics’ speech invisible — all in the name of reducing “hyper-partisanship,” “divisiveness,” and “misinformation” — is of course a highly desirable outcome for mainstream outlets like the NYT.
The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.
It is hard to get more partisan than the news outlets which the NYT tech reporters, and apparently Facebook, consider to be the alternatives to “hyper-partisan” discourse. In April, Pew Research asked Americans which outlet is their primary source of news, and the polling firm found that the audiences of NPR, CNN and especially The New York Times are overwhelmingly Democrats, in some cases almost entirely so:
As Pew put it: “about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).” These outlets speak to Democrats, are built for Democrats, and produce news content designed to be pleasing and affirming to Democrats — so they keep watching and buying. One can say many things about these news outlets, but the idea that they are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is the exact opposite of the truth: it is difficult to find more hyper-partisan organs than these.
Then there is the question of who does and does not spread “misinformation.” It is rather astonishing that the news outlets that did more than anyone to convince Americans to believe the most destructive misinformation of this generation: that Saddam had WMDs and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda — The New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC and The New Yorker — have the audacity to prance around as the bulwarks against misinformation rather than what they are: the primary purveyors of it.
Over the last four years, they devoted themselves to the ultimate deranged, mangled conspiracy theory: that the Kremlin had infiltrated the U.S. and was clandestinely controlling the levers of American power through some combination of sexual and financial blackmail. The endless pursuit of that twisted conspiracy led them to produce one article after the next that spread utter falsehoods, embraced reckless journalism and fostered humiliating debacles. The only thing more absurd than these hyper-partisan, reckless outlets posturing as the alternatives to hyper-partisanship is them insisting that they’re the only safeguards against misinformation.
Note how insidiously creepy is The New York Times’ description of a censored, regulated internet. They call it “a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like,” and claim an unnamed Facebook employee described it as “a nicer news feed.”
Yes, discourse that is centralized and regulated, where no dissent is tolerated, where alternative voices are silenced, is always “calmer” and “less divisive.” That’s always the core goal of censorsing speech and ideas: to eliminate “divisiveness” and to pacify the population (“calmer” and “nicer”). That is always the result when orthodoxies imposed downward from the most powerful institutions of authority can no longer be meaningfully challenged.
The censorious mentality being peddled with increasing aggression is always chilling and dangerous. That it is media outlets — which ought to be the most vocal champions of free discourse — instead taking the lead in begging and pressuring Silicon Valley to censure the internet more and more is warped beyond belief. The internet should be free and left alone, especially by those with their record of deceit and propaganda.
Indeed, if we are to have it an internet controlled from above by unseen tech overlords in the name of eliminating “hyper-partisanship” and “disinformation” and fostering a “calmer” and “nicer” population, the sites now being artificially and manipulatively promoted are the absolute last ones who can credibly claim entitlement to that benefit.”
## End of Greenwald’s Substack/emailed article. ##
- From right-of-center Breitbart is the following from their recent radio interview with Sharyl Attkisson.
Sharyl Attkisson on Big Tech Censorship: Sheep Are Happy to Live in Artificial Reality
Sharyl Attkisson, host of Full Measure and author of Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism, told Breitbart News on Tuesday that big tech companies reinforce news media’s “artificial reality” of political narratives through censorship of inconvenient information.
A “homogenized news media industry seeks to impose its view of acceptable parameters of political discourse on the broader public,” Breitbart summarized Attkisson’s view. She highlighted technology companies’ reinforcement of news media perspectives through their restriction of access to contrary information.
“The way those who want to shape and manipulate our opinion see it, they have to portray those who are not on board with the narrative as somebody who’s off the reservation [and] not to be believed,” Attkisson told Breitbart.
News media and big tech will “controversialize” dissidents challenging their orthodoxies, said Attkisson.
“As the news has been yanked further and further left, we’re portrayed as the right for simply being in the middle,” Attkisson remarked, “and this is part of the redefining of news and the information landscape today.”
Bad faith news media manipulators have applied their tools to the online realm, Attkisson warned.
“The people who wanted to shape public opinion were very good in the past two decades at learning how to control the news media and make sure that they control the terms of how we talk about a story, that we interview the right people, that we don’t talk about certain topics, and we use their talking points,” Attkisson explained.
The election and popularity of President Donald Trump “frightened” news media manipulators, Attkisson determined.
Attkisson lamented that some news media consumers are “perfectly happy” to have social media companies and other technology firms restrict their access to information while providing “fake fact checks.”
“Sheep who don’t do their own research” will trust self-appointed “fact-checkers” to inform them, added Attkisson.
Attkisson remarked, “When these powerful interests found they couldn’t control information online after they had pretty much had success doing it on the news, they got busy online and these are the same forces that are trying to make sure when you get on social media or do a Google search, what you’re going to be hit with is this artificial reality that they want you to believe and see.”
Increasingly aggressive big tech censorship reveals as a lack of fear on the part of technology companies regarding consequences from either the public or government, Attkisson estimated.
“They were doing it in a fairly secretive way with … algorithms and shaping searches and so on,” Attkisson said, “but I feel like there was a sense of desperation in those weeks before the election when these powerful interests sensed that there could be a second President Trump term, and they began just stepping in and censoring things so overtly that there was no denying it, and they didn’t care that people saw outright that accounts were being cancelled, and these crazy labels were going on factually correct information, or opinions but claiming were false. They didn’t care, because they knew — and they rightly calculated — that they wouldn’t be held accountable for that before the election, and quite frankly, I think they won’t be held accountable for that after the election.”
Attkisson categorized the coronavirus outbreak as targeted subject by the news media and big tech partnership of information control. She held that “powerful interests” have assembled a “very organized movement” to discredit journalists asking “logical questions” about “certain aspects of the coronavirus.”
Attkisson said journalists questioning ubiquitous news media coronavirus claims are derided as “coronavirus doubters.”
## End of Sharyl Attkisson segment from Breitbart. ##
3. Next, the following from Dr. Robert Epstein, an expert that is a self-described Democrat who voted for Secretary Hillary Clinton.
Wikipedia says of Epstein, “Robert Epstein is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1981, was editor in chief of Psychology Today…”
This report is largely per Breitbart.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2020
“First of all, we had 733 field agents in three key swing states this year: Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida, and we preserved more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences… That’s about 30 times more data than we got in 2016,” said Epstein.
“Google search results were strongly biased in favor of liberals and Democrats. This was not true on Bing or Yahoo. The bias was being shown to pretty much every demographic group we looked at, including conservatives…. Conservatives got slightly more bias in their search results than liberals did. How do you account for that?”
“We also found what seems to be a smoking gun. That is, we found a period of days when the vote reminder on Google’s homepage was being sent only to liberals — not one of our conservative field agents received a vote reminder during those days.”
Epstein says that Google “backed off” after he went public with his findings. “They literally shut off that manipulation that night, and so for four days before the election they were showing vote reminders to everyone, finally.”
“The bottom line at the moment is that these manipulations, the ones that we’ve so far quantified, could easily have shifted at least six million votes in just one direction. That’s the bare minimum at this point, that I’m confident. The maximum we haven’t even begun to estimate that yet because we have so much data to look at.”
## End of Dr. Epstein segment, per Breitbart. ##
Additional Information, plus MHProNews Analysis and Commentary
According to left-of-center CNBC: “Almost no Trump voters consider Biden the legitimate 2020 election winner, poll says.”
A mere 3% of voters for President Donald Trump think President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election, while 73% think the incumbent was the victor, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll.
As Trump repeatedly loses vote challenges in court as his lawyers fail to prove wrongdoing in the election count, two-thirds of his supporters think he should never concede to Biden.
While there are those, like former VP Joe Biden, who want to get Republicans to join hands with Democrats and “heal” the national divide, that fails to ask or answer the question, who contributed to the divide in the first place?
It also fails to ask, is the stated desire to heal the divide sincere or not?
No seriously…how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?
We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.
— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) November 18, 2020
Law Enforcement Today noted that David Atkins is a DNC [Democratic National Convention] official. Aktins touts a resume of Democratic Party ties, “In addition, I’m a nationally recognized writer for a number of major publications covering both state and federal politics.” He also said that “I have the experience, vision, and dedication needed to accomplish progressive change on the DNC.”
The Democratic Party, and the Republican Party, have both gone through significant shifts. On the Republican side, considerable movement occurred during the past 5 years of more pro-Trump populists that often-ousted Bush-McCain style Republicans.
Among Democrats, they have lurched increasingly left, as Sharyl Attkisson and others have noted.
4. L. Lin Wood, a successful and respected attorney on the right that has been supportive of the efforts of pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell, tweeted today the following.
PATRIOT ALERT:
Information being received NOW that Communist China purchased Dominion Voting in October 8 for $400M.
Efforts underway to verify. If true, this confirms other evidence that Communists intend to overthrow our government to get our precious land.
NOT ON OUR WATCH.
— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 1, 2020
While he wisely qualified that, if that is true, that brings what is occurring in America into greater focus. Attorney Powell said days ago that foreign actors are involved in Dominion. If high level Democrats are operating in league with foreign actors, that raises the stakes in the post-election drama to a whole new level.
MHProNews has been spotlighting for several months the growing number of voices on the political left in media, academia, and entertainment that have been blowing the whistle on the corruption of the news for agenda-driven purposes. Agree or not with their politics, their warnings should be taken seriously.
More recently, Greenwald has added his voice to Dr. Epstein, and Attkisson has been sounding the warning.
This isn’t ‘new.’ There have been voices on the right saying for decades that the media is biased.
But when media becomes so biased that it ignores election theatrics, attempts to purportedly rig an election in favor of VP Joe Biden, and ignores, downplays, or surpresses the scandals associated with Biden, that’s a threat to our Republic. That in turn is a threat to our profession.
If that seems ‘batsh-t’ crazy, as the writer cited at the top claimed, in that person’s defense, that’s frankly understandable. Why? Because what is occurring in the U.S. and other nations fits the notion that Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minster, Joseph Goebbels promoted about a “big lie” so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone would have the guts to make such an outrageous claim.
Per the Jewish Virtual Library, Goebbels’ defined the big lie as follows. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Count us in as opposing the Big Lies, as well as lesser deceptions that arguably threats millions of people in a variety of ways. The Jewish Post spotlighted this from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
Viganò was the papal nuncio to the United States during the Obama-Biden administration.
When voices across the political and religious spectrums sound a very similar alarm, it is time to sit up and take notice. It is also time to stop blindly following mainstream news and their often equally biased fact-checkers.
It may take ‘a miracle’ for President Trump’s campaign to successfully challenge the understandably disputed 2020 races. For those who don’t ever listen to sources other than anti-Trump media, they may not even realize that there are valid constitutional reasons for disputing the contest in key battleground states.
But as Greenwald observed days ago, when far poorer countries can run successful elections without drama, how can one explain the fact that most U.S. states can efficiently count ballots without serious controversy, but the key battleground states there have been hundreds of witnesses and experts who have stepped forward under oath and cried foul?
When a relatively small group of people would benefit from this election outcome,
And when that same relatively small group of people have profited wildly from the pandemic,
There are numerous good reasons to question those who are trying to tell Americans, ‘there is nothing to see here, move on.’ Not just MHProNews, but tens of millions of freedom loving Americans aren’t buying it.
Facts or Evidence Don’t Matter For Those Who Will Not See or Hear
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By L.A. “Tony” Kovach – for MHProNews.com.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing.
For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com.
This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position, and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach
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