IT’S OK WHEN BILL DOES IT!
Paul Joseph Watson | February 19, 2021
Ukrainian Police Said They Conducted “Clearing Op” in Bucha a Day Before Dead Body Videos Emerged
Narrative fail
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | April 4, 2022
Ukrainian police posted on Facebook that they had conducted a “clearing op” in Bucha the day before videos emerged showing dead bodies scattered around the settlement, as the war of words over the alleged “war crime” continues.
NATO powers and pro-Ukraine commentators have seized upon the alleged atrocity in a bid to escalate the war, with MSNBC hosts and guests even asserting that it justifies directly attacking Russia and putting American boots on the ground in Ukraine.
MSNBC host Ali Velshi demanded “direct military involvement,” something that would almost inevitably kick off World War III, in response to the alleged incident.
Former Army Major John Spencer also appeared on the same show to demand American “boots on the ground” in Ukraine.
Moscow has vehemently denied involvement, claiming Ukraine shelled the city after Russian troops had already withdrawn.
The only evidence offered so far pointing to Russian responsibility is the claims of Ukrainian authorities, with are being breathlessly amplified by the mainstream media without an ounce of skepticism.
Margaret Brennan of CBS admitted that Ukrainian President Zelensky’s team had “handed” her the videos and they were broadcast, as journalist Michael Tracey wrote, with “zero independent corroboration.”
The notion that Ukrainian authorities, who have been caught staging innumerable incidents already in a bid to lobby for more NATO military involvement, would lie about this is seemingly not even a consideration.
A timeline provided from reporting by the New York Times suggests that pro-Ukrainian Azov neo-nazi militants entered Bucha after Russian troops left and after the Mayor of Bucha had announced the town’s liberation with no mention of any atrocities.
One member of Azov was reportedly heard asking if he could shoot individuals who weren’t wearing blue armbands.
Another report asserts that Ukrainian national police posted on Facebook how they had conducted a “clearing operation” in Bucha before the alleged atrocities occurred accompanied by a video of their men walking around the town.
“Today, on 2 April, in the liberated city of Bucha, Kiev region, special units of the Ukrainian National Police began clearing the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops,” the Facebook post said.
As ever, with propaganda on both sides, it is virtually impossible to know what happened in Bucha, but to claim it’s an open and shut case of “war crimes” as the western media proclaims without any independent evidence is clearly ludicrous.
Feds Secretly Paid Media to Promote COVID Shots
By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | March 9, 2022
The Biden administration made direct payments to nearly all major corporate media outlets to deploy a $1 billion taxpayer-funded outreach campaign designed to push only positive coverage about COVID-19 vaccines and to censor any negative coverage.
Media outlets across the nation failed to disclose the federal government as the source of ads in news reports promoting the shots to their audiences.
According to a Freedom of Information Request filed by The Blaze, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) purchased advertising from major news outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.
HHS also ran media blitzes in major media publications including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, BuzzFeed News, Newsmax and hundreds of local TV stations and newspapers across the nation.
In addition to paying news outlets to push the vaccines, the federal government bought ads on TV, radio, in print and on social media as part of a “comprehensive media campaign,” HHS documents show.
The ad campaigns were timed in conjunction with the increased availability of COVID vaccines. They featured “influencers” and “experts,” including Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the White House and director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In March 2021, Facebook announced a social media plan to “help get people vaccinated,” and worked with the Biden administration and U.S. health agencies to suppress what it called “COVID misinformation.”
BuzzFeed News advised everyone age 65 or older, people with health conditions that put them at high risk of severe illness from COVID, healthcare workers and those at high risk of exposure to the virus to get vaccine boosters, in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Other publications, including the Los Angeles Times, featured advice from experts on how readers could convince “vaccine-hesitant people” to change their minds.
The Washington Post presented “the pro-vaccine messages people want to hear.”
Newsmax said COVID vaccines have “been demonstrated to be safe and effective” and “encouraged citizens, especially those at risk, to get immunized.”
Yet, the latest data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System shows 1,151,450 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 24,827 deaths since Dec. 14, 2020.
Numerous scientists and public health experts have questioned the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines, as well as the data underlying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of the shots.
The media rarely covered negative news stories about COVID vaccines, and some have labeled anyone who questions the shots “science denialists” or “conspiracy theorists.”
“These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety,” The Blaze reported.
Congress appropriates $1 billion tax dollars to ‘strengthen vaccine confidence’
In March 2021, Congress appropriated $1 billion U.S. tax dollars for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend on activities to “strengthen vaccine confidence in the United States,” with $3 billion set aside for the CDC to fund “support and outreach efforts” in states through community-based organizations and trusted leaders.
HHS’s public education efforts were co-chaired by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins, Fauci, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky — with Vice President Kamala Harris leading the effort from the White House.
Federal law allows HHS, acting through the CDC and other agencies, to award contracts to public and private entities to “carry out a national, evidence-based campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for the prevention and control of diseases, combat misinformation about vaccines and disseminate scientific and evidence-based vaccine-related information, with the goal of increasing rates of vaccination across all ages … to reduce and eliminate vaccine-preventable diseases.”
HHS did not immediately respond to The Blaze when asked if the agency used taxpayer dollars to pay for people to be interviewed, or for a PR firm to place experts and celebrities in interviews with news outlets.
The Blaze also reached out to several news organizations whose editorial boards claimed “firewall policies” preventing advertisers from influencing news coverage, but which nevertheless took money from HHS for targeted ads.
“Advertisers pay for space to share their messages, as was the case here, and those ads are clearly labeled as such,” Shani George, vice president of communications for The Washington Post, said in a statement. “The newsroom is completely independent from the advertising department.”
Although The Washington Post may have several departments, they’re all under the authority of the same CEO and key executive team.
A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Times said their “newsroom operates independently from advertising.”
Former Newsmax anchor confirms network paid to promote only positive coverage
According to Desert News, Emerald Robinson, an independent journalist who previously served as the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and One America News, said she was contacted by a whistleblower inside Newsmax who confirmed the news organization’s executives agreed to take money from HHS under the Biden administration to push only positive coverage of COVID vaccines.
Robinson was also contacted by top Newsmax executives in 2021, and told to stop any negative coverage of the COVID shots as “it was problematic.”
Robinson said she was warned multiple times by executives and was told by PR experts who worked with Newsmax that medical experts or doctors likely to say negative things about COVID vaccines would not be booked as guests.
Robinson was reportedly fired by Newsmax after tweeting “conspiracy theories” about COVID vaccines and was later banned from Twitter for “repeatedly violating the platforms’ rules on COVID-19 misinformation.”
Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy in an op-ed applauded Biden for his vaccine efforts.
Ruddy wrote:
“At Newsmax, we have strongly advocated for the public to be vaccinated. The many medical experts who have appeared on our network have been near-unanimous in support of the vaccine. I myself have gotten the Pfizer vaccine. There’s no question in my mind, countless lives would have been saved if the vaccine was available earlier.”
In other examples cited by The Blaze, “fear-based vaccine ads” from HHS featuring “survivor” stories from COVID patients who were hospitalized in intensive care units were covered by CNN and discussed on ABC’s “The View” last October.
HHS ads on YouTube featuring celebrities like Sir Michael Caine and Sir Elton John garnered millions of views.
As The Defender reported in September, a group of people injured by COVID vaccines reached out to the media to tell their stories, only to be told by news agencies they could not cover COVID vaccine injuries.
Kristi Dobbs, 40, was injured by Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. Dobbs spent months pleading with U.S. health agencies to research the neurological injuries she and others are experiencing in hopes of finding a treatment.
Dobbs said she and others who developed neurological injuries after getting a COVID vaccine shared their experiences with a reporter, in hope of raising awareness about their experiences.
Dobbs said she and others knew they needed to tell their stories, without causing “vaccine hesitancy,” to protect others from the same fate — so members of the group started writing and calling anyone who would listen, including reporters, news agencies and members of Congress.
Dobbs said they tried the best they could as simple Americans to reach out to those who would hear their stories. Finally, a reporter from a small media company was willing to do a story. Dobbs and others from the group participated in a 2-hour and 40-minute interview.
“The story never went anywhere,” Dobbs said. She said the reporter told them a “higher up” at Pfizer made a call to the station and pressured staff there into not covering any other stories about vaccine adverse reactions.
As previously reported by The Defender, the same investment firms with financial interests in Pfizer also hold large ownership stakes of corporate media outlets.
In addition, Pfizer has contracts with the federal government, which has spent billions of American tax dollars both buying COVID vaccines and promoting only positive coverage to the public.
Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver told Desert News, “People have been injured and died as a result of the most extensive propaganda campaign in U.S. history and it was paid for with our taxpayer dollars.”
COVID vaccines are not safe or effective, but the American public has been given propaganda by the Biden administration instead of truth from the news media, Staver said.
“The consequence is that many people have needlessly suffered as a result of the censorship and propaganda.”
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
MSNBC Misinfo: Zeke Emanuel Peddles Fear, Says Unvaxxed Children ‘Likely To Get Serious Case Of Covid’
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 5, 2022
Dr Ezekiel Emanuel – former Biden Covid-19 adviser and brother of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (and the real ‘Ari Gold’ from Entourage) appeared on MSNBC Wednesday, where he proceeded to peddle the lie that unvaccinated children are ‘likely’ to get a ‘serious’ case of Covid.
“This repeats what we’ve seen in older kids, five and above, where we know the vaccine does protect very well. And there we still have under 50%, I believe, of the children vaccinated, and that’s a serious problem for the country,” Emanuel told host Kristen Welker after she asked about parents’ willingness to vaccinate their children. “Parents have to be more willing – I think they hear some of these rare side effects and think they’re very common.”
“With the omicron variant, kids are either going to get the vaccine or they’re likely to get a serious condition of omicron. Having omicron with the vaccine is almost invariably going to be better and safer for children,” Emanuel added. “I am confused about parents’ attitudes. Five and above seems like a no-brainer. Two to five, I understand some hesitancy. Two and under with the small dose, I think probably a very good idea.”
It’s been widely established that Omicron is a relatively mild strain of Covid – from which children face an extremely low risk.
Another recent study cited by economist Emily Oster also reiterated the extremely low risk young children face of severe COVID-19 outcomes. “What we can say is that based on everything we know, the risks to small children from COVID-19 are extremely small,” she wrote. –Fox News
MSNBC faced harsh criticism over Emanuel’s statement.
The network even tweeted (and then deleted) the easily debunked misinformation, receiving a serious ratio of comments to ‘likes.’
Intentional? Or…
Following the backlash, Emanuel issued a Saturday tweet in which he says he “misspoke.”
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy suggests Joe Rogan should be censored
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 27, 2022
The US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has suggested that Big Tech platforms should censor even more COVID “misinformation” on social media.
Speaking on MSNBC, Murthy said that online platforms have a role to play when it comes to censoring “misinformation” and ensuring that the public gets “accurate” information.
Murthy made the comments on MSNBC when host Mika Brzezinski pushed for a comment on the “best ways to push back on misinformation about COVID that continues to be aggressively pushed, whether it be Joe Rogan’s podcast or all over Facebook.”
“We can have the best science available, we can have the best public health expertise available. It won’t help people if they don’t have access to accurate information,” Murthy responded. “People have the right to make their own decisions, but they also have the right to have accurate information to make that decision with.”
Murthy added that Big Tech giants have an “important role to play” as they are the “predominant places where we’re seeing misinformation spread.”
“This [is] not just about what the government can do,” he went on to say. “This is about companies and individuals recognizing that the only way we get past misinformation is if we are careful about what we say and use the power that we have to limit the spread of misinformation.”
Where Can We Go for The Truth Anymore?
By Sandra Friedemann | American Thinker | November 29, 2021
In this messed-up mixed-up world the formerly respected Fourth Estate has devolved into a collection of flat-out liars, brain-dead ideologues and unmitigated ignoramuses. Turn on any of the mainstream media channels or go to any one of hundreds of online outlets and you’ll be swamped in effluent.
The horrific murderous tragedy in Waukesha, Wisconsin in which a man deliberately and determinedly drove his SUV at a high rate of speed through a parade last week is being called a “parade crash” by the most liberal media outlets.
According to 95% of the media talking heads and their cohort, Kyle Rittenhouse is a ‘murdering white supremacist.’ Laughably, Snopes calls the three convicted felons who attacked Rittenhouse — one a domestic abuser and rapist, another a pedophile, and the third a burglar — ‘victims.’ Snopes goes further saying those three felons were there to ‘peacefully protest.’ Never mind the fires, the looting and property destruction. None of which was discussed in the vast majority of the media during Rittenhouse’s trial or after his acquittal.
Now we have a new variant of COVID-19 which the physician who first encountered and reported it says is “mild.” In a report in the Telegraph, Dr. Angelique Coetzee, a GP for thirty-three years who also chairs the South African Medical Association says, “Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before.”
Mild illness. Zero hospitalizations. No deaths. Yet with this report, we have yet another round of wholesale fear mongering from the press and governments.
“Biden to restrict travel from South Africa and 7 other countries starting Monday” (Remember the cries and howls from the Left when Trump shut down travel when COVID first appeared? Xenophobe!)
“Boris Johnson announces ‘tighter rules’ in response to Omicron variant”
“Israel to ban entry of foreigners from all countries over Omicron”
Across the ether alleged “news” outlets are spouting nonsense about this variant that the WHO and CDC say appears to be mild and, thus far, not deadly.
MSNBC proclaims, “Omicron variant renews calls for more robust vaccination…” Why when the vaccines we currently have a) do not work against the pre-existing COVID variants and b) aren’t designed for this variant? (MSNBC’s institutional ignorance was run up the flagpole for fullest display with this story.)
“Omicron variant puts world in a ‘race against time’, says EU Commission President” is the headline quote from CNN.
MSNBC proclaims, “New covid variant: Omicron is a pandemic gut check.” They hype the “growing concern” and breathlessly report that “Omicron variant represents a ‘significant potential risk’ to its (Moderna’s) Covid-19 vaccine.” Well, DUH! Previous vaccines that didn’t work against alpha, beta or delta sure aren’t going to work against a new strain. The biggest risk is that if this is as mild or non-threatening as it seems to be thus far (zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, remember) is that the market for COVID vaccines may have just dried up.
As soon as news of this variant came out and was blasted around the world, financial and commodity markets tanked, prompting Goldman Sachs to announce, “This mutation is unlikely to be more malicious and that the existing vaccines will most likely continue to be effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. We do not think that the new variant is sufficient reason to make major portfolio changes.”
According to Paul Elias Alexander, PhD at the Brownstone Institute, it might be that COVID has now transformed so much that new variants might be more infectious but less deadly.
This is a brain twister of an article if you’re not accustomed to reading technical papers, but Alexander makes several key points (emphasis added):
“The virus is behaving just like how viruses behave. They are mutable and mutate and via Muller’s ratchet, we expect this to be milder and milder mutations and not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead-end.”
“For example, the (Pfizer) vaccine has failed to stop infection and spread against Delta… fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases.”
What’s most fascinating in this paper is a reference to a Swedish study of records of the nation’s entire population. The study’s findings are that efficacy of Pfizer’s BioNtech vaccine “waned progressively from 92% (effectiveness) at day 15-30 to 47% at day 121-180, and from day 211 and onwards no effectiveness could be detected.
AstraZenica’s mRNA vaccine fared even worse: “effectiveness of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 was generally lower and waned faster, with no effectiveness detected from day 121 and onwards.”
This Swedish study is news given that governments are forcing vaccines into our bodies. Shouldn’t this be reported? Shouldn’t it be headlines? Yet nowhere is this information readily available outside the medical community. WHO isn’t reporting it; CDC and FDA aren’t reporting on it in the US, and nowhere in Europe is it being reported.
The only reason Dr. Alexander’s paper and the Swedish study are presented here is because of diligent research through many sites and noting a single reference embedded in a longer article.
The fact is, all of this COVID hysteria is being driven by the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical companies and fomented by “news” organizations and governments for power and control over us, our livelihoods and our lives.
Isn’t it about time this nonsense ends?
Graphic credit: U3161929 CC BY-SA 4.0 license
With Democrat Back in White House, MSNBC Returns to Ignoring U.S.-Backed War in Yemen
By Adam Johnson | The Column | November 24, 2021
A review of MSNBC’s coverage from Nov. 3, 2020 to Nov. 22, 2021 shows MSNBC hasn’t run a single segment on the U.S.-backed war still raging in Yemen.
To the extent MSNBC did cover Yemen’s “civil war” during this time frame it was exclusively to pass along, without skepticism, claims last spring from Democrats that President Biden had “ended U.S. support for the war”—which turned out to not be true in any meaningful sense, a fact evident at the time but not met with any questioning from MSNBC reporters or pundits.
Since then, it’s become increasingly clear little has changed in the status quo. While the U.S. has halted some forms of assistance, like mid-air refueling of aircraft, other forms of vital participation remain, including: green-lighting of weapons transfers, maintaining spare parts for Saudi war planes, sharing some forms of intelligence, and training the Royal Saudi Navy, which is enforcing a catastrophic blockade on Yemen.
And then there is the political cover that the Biden administration is giving the Saudi-led coalition, a vital form of support that noted in September by Annelle R. Sheline and Bruce Riedel at The Brookings Institute—hardly a far-left bastion of anti-imperial polemic:
Biden’s broken promise on Yemen
… Unfortunately, Biden’s approach is fatally flawed. The president stated that he would “end U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen.” Yet the Saudi-led war on Yemen by definition, is an offensive operation. Saudi Arabia is bombing and blockading another country: Between March 2015 and July 2021, the Saudis conducted a minimum of 23,251 air raids, which killed or injured 18,616 civilians. The Houthis, known formally as Ansarallah, launch missiles in retaliation but if Saudi airstrikes ceased, the Houthis would have little reason to provoke their powerful neighbor. As long as the U.S. materially and rhetorically backs the Saudis’ war of choice, Biden’s assertion that the U.S. would end support for offensive operations is a lie.
The second crucial flaw in Biden’s approach is that he did not call for an immediate end to the Saudi blockade of Yemen. The blockade primarily blocks fuel from entering the Houthi-controlled Hodeida port; the Saudis also prevent the use of Sanaa International Airport. Blockades cannot be defensive: they are offensive operations, and therefore U.S. involvement should have ended following Biden’s declaration in February. The U.S. tacitly cooperated with the blockade by not challenging it, and the U.S. Navy occasionally announces it has intercepted smuggled weapons from Iran, suggesting a more active role than the administration admits. Congress should investigate.
Just this week, the Biden White House and State Department announced the US will be selling another $650 million in weapons to Saudi Arabia, hiding behind the nonsensical talking point that the weapons are “purely defensive.”
There was a time when MSNBC media personalities did act like they cared about what the UN calls the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster,” which has killed almost a quarter of a million people.
MSNBC ignored the war almost completely during the Obama years and early Trump years. But after the Saudi coalition bombed a school bus in August 2018, and Saudi dictator Mohammad bin Salman ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, they—like much of the U.S. media—finally began reporting on the regime’s human rights abuses. For a while.
MSNBC ran multiple segments on the war in the second half of 2018 when it was considered very much Trump’s war.
- Aug 9 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: Dozens of children killed in school bus bombing in Yemen
- Aug 10 2018 – Velshi & Ruhle: An airstrike in Yemen struck a school bus, killing children
- Oct 21 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: 14 Million People On Brink Of Starvation In Yemen
- Nov 15 2018 All in with Chris Hayes: Trump boosts authoritarians, as war rages in Yemen
- Sept 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: WSJ: Pompeo backed continuing US role in war in Yemen
- Nov 28 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: Senate advances bill to end support for war in Yemen
- Dec 12 2018: All in with Chris Hayes: Rep. Chris Murphy on what’s at stake with vote on Yemen
- Dec 12 2018 – All in with Chris Hayes: Paul Ryan’s Cowardly Act On Yemen
- Dec 13 2018 – Andrea Mitchell Reports: Bernie Sanders: Congress must determine U.S. involvement in Yemen crisis
- Dec 13 2018 – Ali Velshi: Senate votes to end U.S. support for Saudi-led war in Yemen
After this spasm of concern in late 2018, the coverage largely died out. As I noted in FAIR at the time, when activist pressure to pass a resolution compelling an end to U.S. support for the war was at its most urgent in March 2019, MSNBC ignored the effort altogether. There was a brief aside about Trump’s veto of said Yemen war powers act by Rachel Maddow on April 16, 2019, but it amounted to little more than a passing mention.
The next—and it turns out last—time an actual segment aired on the Yemen war was on Morning Joe in July 2020. This report, by NBC News’ Keir Simmons, did mention the war and the U.S.’s role in it, with a focus on how Covid was killing Yemenis. But since the July 2020 Morning Joe report, there have been no segments aired on MSNBC about the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing of Yemen.
In over 18 months, our nominally progressive cable network has not dedicated a single news report, roundtable debate, or segment to the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, which continues to be aided and armed by the U.S. government. When it was Trump’s war—and the Saudi regime fell out of favor with U.S. elites—their hearts bled. Now that we’re back to business as usual and the war is being armed and supported by a Democratic White House, it’s simply a non-issue.
In February 2021, President Joe Biden announced the U.S. was ending its support for “offensive” operations in Yemen, a deliberately vague and ultimately meaningless distinction that appears to have been designed to confuse progressives into declaring victory and moving on. Much to the White House’s liking, one can assume, the gambit seems to have worked, with MSNBC shelving the issue altogether and treating the U.S.-funded and backed war crime like it was wrapped up and out of our hands.
But it’s far from it. At any time, the Biden administration could cancel a U.S. program that provides maintenance for Saudi warplanes, the same warplanes that are still dropping bombs on civilians, including the recent bombing of a plastics factory in Sana’a. The Biden administration could reject the sale of U.S. air-to-air missiles, which can be used to shoot down airplanes and are one more tool the Saudi-led coalition can use to menace humanitarian workers who want to deliver supplies, or people trying to get their ill loved ones out of the country for treatment. And, it is an extremely low bar, but, at any point, Biden could clarify what is meant by support for “defensive” operations, and disclose the full extent of U.S. participation in the blockade, something he has repeatedly declined to do, even after 16 senators requested more transparency and robust action. These are all things the Biden administration is declining to do, thereby providing material and political support that is contributing to Saudi Arabia’s ability to continue the war.
After his six-month period in 2018 of breathlessly and repeatedly pronouncing the urgency of the issue, Chris Hayes’ show ‘All In’ has not run a segment on Yemen at all since December 2018.
Hayes hasn’t even mentioned the topic on Twitter since Biden took office Jan 20, 2021.
Mehdi Hasan, a consistent, long-time critic of Saudi Arabia and the war prior to joining MSNBC Feb 28 2021, did a segment on his online-only Peacock show after the election on Dec. 3 featuring prominent Yemen war critics Prof. Shireen Al-Adeimi and journalist Spencer Ackerman. In this segment, Hasan suggests in his opening that a Biden presidency would turn a page on the U.S.-Saudi relationship and end the war, neither of which happened (though both of his guests expressed profound skepticism). Also on his Peacock online-only show, he asked questions about continued U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, some quite skeptical, to guests Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in April 2021 and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) in May 2021. But none of this was on his main cable show on MSNBC.
Hasan has not done a single segment on the Yemen war for his MSNBC show since his show first aired Feb 28 2021. On March 14 2021, he did ask White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain about the White House going soft on Saudi Arabia in general and in a one “minute rant” from May 2021, Hasan did take about 6 seconds to mention the U.S. selling arms to Saudi Arabia that are used in Yemen.
But this is the full extent of Hasan’s—and thus MSNBC’s—Yemen coverage. It goes without saying that multimillionaire MSNBC personalities Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow haven’t done any segments on the war since Biden took office because, in the more than six years since it’s been raging, they haven’t mentioned it at all. To their credit, at least their indifference to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis isn’t motivated by partisan gotchas—they just don’t care in general.
In November 2020, Hasan insisted “we” needed to hold Biden to his promises that he would end US support for the war in Yemen.
Now that it’s been over a year since Biden’s election, and the U.S. is openly backing the Saudi blockade starving Yemenis, selling $650 million weapons to Saudi Arabia just this week, and continues to back SaudiArabia at the UN, perhaps media personalities with large platforms at nominally progressive cable networks should do just that.
Yet Another Media Tale — Trump Tear-Gassed Protesters For a Church Photo Op — Collapses
CNN with Anderson Cooper and Jim Acosta, June 1, 2020
By Glenn Greenwald | June 9, 2021
For more than a year, it has been consecrated media fact that former President Donald Trump and his White House, on June 1 of last year, directed the U.S. Park Police to use tear gas against peaceful Lafayette Park protesters, all to enable a Trump photo-op in front of St. John’s Church. That this happened was never presented as a possibility or likelihood but as indisputable truth. And it provoked weeks of unmitigated media outrage, presented as one of the most egregious assaults on the democratic order in decades.
This tale was so pervasive in the media landscape that it would be impossible for any one article to compile all the examples. “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op,” read the NPR headline on June 1. The New York Times ran with: “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church.” CNN devoted multiple segments to venting indignation while the on-screen graphic declared: “Peaceful Protesters Near White House Tear-Gassed, Shot With Rubber Bullets So Trump Can Have Church Photo Op.”
ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos “reported” that “the administration asked police to clear peaceful protesters from the park across the White House so that the President could stage a photo op.” The Intercept published an article stating that “federal police used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear protesters from Lafayette Square in front of the White House,” all to feature a video where the first interviewee said: “to me, the way our military and police have behaved toward the protesters at the instruction of President Trump has almost been Nazi-like.” Nazi-like. This was repeated by virtually every major corporate outlet:
This was the scene outside of the White House on Monday as police used tear gas and flash grenades to clear out peaceful protesters so President Trump could visit the nearby St. John’s Church, where there was a parish house basement fire Sunday night nyti.ms/2MhSGOQ
At a June 2 Press Conference, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) proclaimed with anger: “last night I watched as President Trump, having gassed peaceful protesters just so he could do this photo op, then he went on to teargas priests who were helping protesters in Lafayette Park.” Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed: “What is this, a banana republic?,” when asked about NBC News’ report that “security forces used tear gas and flash-bangs against a crowd of peaceful demonstrators to clear the area for the president.”
There were some denials of this narrative at the time, largely confined to right-wing media. ABC News mocked “hosts on Fox News, one of the president’s preferred news media outlets, [who] have spent the days since the controversial photo op shifting defenses to fit the president’s narrative.” Meanwhile, The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway — in an article retweeted by Trump as a “must read” — cited sources to assert that the entire media narrative was false because force was to clear the Park not to enable Trump’s photo op but rather “because [protesters] had climbed on top of a structure in Lafayette Park that had been burned the prior night” and the Park Police decided to build a barrier to protect it.
But as usual, the self-proclaimed Superior Liberal Truth Squad instantly declared them to be lying. The Washington Post‘s “fact-checker,” Phillip Bump, mocked denials from Trump supporters and right-wing reporters such as Hemingway, proclaiming that a recent statement from the Park Police “brings the debate to a close,” as it proves “the deployment of security forces using weapons and irritants to clear a peaceful protest so that the president could have a photo op.”
All of this came crashing down on their heads on Wednesday afternoon. The independent Inspector General of the Interior Department, Mark Lee Greenblatt, issued his office’s findings after a long investigation into “the actions of the U.S. Park Police (USPP) to disperse protesters in and around Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2020.” Greenblatt has been around Washington for a long time, occupying numerous key positions in the Obama administration, including investigative counsel at the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General and Assistant Inspector General for Investigations at Obama’s Commerce Department.
The letter released by Greenblatt’s office accompanying the report makes clear how far-reaching the investigation was:
Over the course of this review, our career investigative staff conducted extensive witness interviews, reviewed video footage from numerous vantage points, listened to radio transmissions from multiple law enforcement entities, and examined evidence including emails, text messages, telephone records, procurement documents, and other related materials. This report presents a thorough, independent examination of that evidence to assess the USPP’s decision making and operations, including a detailed timeline of relevant actions and an analysis of whether the USPP’s actions complied with governing policies.
The IG’s conclusion could not be clearer: the media narrative was false from start to finish. Namely, he said, “the evidence did not support a finding that the [U.S. Park Police] cleared the park on June 1, 2020, so that then President Trump could enter the park.” Instead — exactly as Hemingway’s widely-mocked-by-liberal-outlets article reported — “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.” Crucially, “ the evidence established that relevant USPP officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential Presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day.”
The detailed IG report elaborated on the timeline even more extensively. It was “on the morning of June 1” when “the Secret Service procured anti-scale fencing to establish a more secure perimeter around Lafayette Park that was to be delivered and installed that same day.” The agencies had “determined that it was necessary to clear protesters from the area in and around the park to enable the contractor’s employees to safely install the fence.” Indeed, “we found that by approximately 10 a.m. on June 1, the USPP had already begun developing a plan to clear protesters from the area to enable the contractor to safely install the anti-scale fence” — many hours before Trump decided to go.
The clearing of the Park, said the IG Report, had nothing to do with Trump or his intended visit to the Church; in fact, those responsible for doing this did not have any knowledge of Trump’s intentions:
The evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow the contractor to safely install the anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of property and injury to officers occurring on May 30 and 31. Further, the evidence showed that the USPP did not know about the President’s potential movement until mid- to late afternoon on June 1—hours after it had begun developing its operational plan and the fencing contractor had arrived in the park.
Beyond that, planning for that operation began at least two days before Trump decided to visit the church. “The fencing contractor told us and emails we reviewed confirmed that on May 30, the assistant division chief of the Secret Service’s Procurement Division discussed with the contractor how quickly the contractor could deliver anti-scale fencing to Lafayette Park,” the Report found.
Plans for the fence were finalized at least the day prior to Trump’s walk: “the fencing contractor’s project manager told us that she learned on May 31 that the Secret Service had contacted the fencing contractor about an anti-scale fence.” And while Attorney General William Barr did visit the Park shortly before Trump’s walk and saw what he viewed as unruly protesters, causing him to ask Park Police commanders whether they would still be there when Trump arrived, the order to clear the Park had been given well before that and was unrelated to Trump or to Barr: there is “no evidence that the Attorney General’s visit to Lafayette Park at 6:10 p.m. caused the USPP to alter its plans to clear the park.”
Indeed, none of the key decision-makers had any idea Trump was coming when they implemented plans to clear the Park:
The USPP operations commander, the USPP incident commander, and the USPP acting chief of police told us they did not know the President planned to make a speech in the Rose Garden that evening. The USPP incident commander told us he was never informed of the President’s specific plans or when the President planned to come out of the White House. He said, “It was just a, ‘Hey, here he comes.’ And all of a sudden I turn around and there’s the entourage.”
The USPP acting chief of police also told us he did not know about the President’s plans to visit St. John’s Church and that the USPP incident commander told him the President might come to the park to assess the damage at an unspecified time. The USPP acting chief of police and the USPP incident commander told us this information had no impact on their operational plan, and both denied that the President’s potential visit to the park influenced the USPP’s decision to clear Lafayette Park and the surrounding areas. Numerous other USPP captains and lieutenants and the ACPD civil disturbance unit commanders also told us they received no information suggesting that the USPP cleared the area to facilitate the President’s visit to St. John’s Church. The DCNG major we interviewed told us that his USPP liaison appeared as surprised as he was when the President visited Lafayette Park, stating, “We [were] both kind of equally shocked.”
Of the dozens of people who participated in the investigation, “no one we interviewed stated that the USPP cleared the park because of a potential visit by the President or that the USPP altered the timeline to accommodate the President’s movement.”
In sum, the media claims that were repeated over and over and over as proven fact — and even confirmed by “fact-checkers” — were completely false. Watch how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies, this one courtesy of CNN‘s Erin Burnett and Don Lemon:
With the issuance of this independent debunking of their claims, the journalists who spread this latest lie have started to come to terms with what they did — yet again. “A narrative we thought we knew is not the reality,” NBC News’ chief CIA Disinformation Agent Ken Dilanian awkwardly acknowledged on Meet the Press Daily. Shortly before publication of this article, Politico begrudgingly admitted that while “the department’s Park Police failed to give Black Lives Matter demonstrators proper warning before it cleared them from Lafayette Park,” their primary media claim was untrue: “its actions were unrelated to President Donald Trump’s photo-op appearance at a nearby church.” Time will tell how readily others who spread this lie will account for how they — yet again — got this story so wrong.
Over and over we see the central truth: the corporate outlets that most loudly and shrilly denounce “disinformation” — to the point of demanding online censorship and de-platforming in the name of combating it — are, in fact, the ones who spread disinformation most frequently and destructively. It is hard to count how many times they have spread major fake stories in the Trump years. For that reason, they have nobody but themselves to blame for the utter collapse in trust and faith on the part of the public, which has rightfully concluded they cannot and should not be believed.
Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One
By Glenn Greenwald | April 16, 2021
That Russia placed “bounties” on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless — as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media spokespeople now admit, largely because the tale has fulfilled and outlived its purpose.
The saga began on June 26, 2020, when The New York Times announced that unnamed “American intelligence officials” have concluded that “a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The paper called it “a significant and provocative escalation” by Russia. Though no evidence was ever presented to support the CIA’s claims — neither in that original story nor in any reporting since — most U.S. media outlets blindly believed it and spent weeks if not longer treating it as proven, highly significant truth. Leading politicians from both parties similarly used this emotional storyline to advance multiple agendas.
The story appeared — coincidentally or otherwise — just weeks after President Trump announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020. Pro-war members of Congress from both parties and liberal hawks in corporate media spent weeks weaponizing this story to accuse Trump of appeasing Putin by leaving Afghanistan and being too scared to punish the Kremlin. Cable outlets and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post endlessly discussed the grave implications of this Russian treachery and debated which severe retaliation was needed. “This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then-candidate Joe Biden said Trump’s refusal to punish Russia and his casting doubt on the truth of the story was more proof that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin,” while Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) demanded that, in response, the U.S. put Russians and Afghans “in body bags.”
What was missing from this media orgy of indignation and militaristic demands for retaliation was an iota of questioning of whether the story was, in fact, true. All they had was an anonymous leak from “intelligence officials” — which The New York Times on Thursday admitted came from the CIA — but that was all they needed. That is because the vast majority of the corporate sector of the press lives under one overarching rule:
When the CIA or related security state agencies tell American journalists to believe something, we obey unquestioningly, and as a result, whatever assertions are spread by these agencies, no matter how bereft of evidence or shielded by accountability-free anonymity, they instantly transform, in our government-worshipping worldview, into a proven fact — gospel — never to be questioned but only affirmed and then repeated and spread as far and wide as possible.
That has been the dynamic driving the relationship between the corporate press and the CIA for decades, throughout the Cold War and then into the post-9/11 War on Terror and invasion of Iraq. But it has become so much more extreme in the Trump era. As the CIA became one of the leading anti-Trump #Resistance factions — a key player in domestic politics to subvert the presidency of the 45th President regarded by media figures as a Hitler-type menace — the bond between the corporate press and the intelligence community deepened more than ever. It is not an exaggeration to call it a merger: so much so that a parade of former security state officials from the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS and others was hired by these news outlets to deliver the news. The partnership was no longer clandestine but official, out in the open, and proud.
John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona…
Also Michael Morell, John McLaughlin, John Sipher, Thomas Bossert, Clint Watts, James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, David Preiss, Evelyn Farkas, Tony Blinken, Mike Rogers, “Alex Finley,” Malcolm Nance…
The first goal this story served was to weaponize it in the battle waged by pro-war House Democrats and their neocon GOP allies to stop Trump’s withdrawal plan from Afghanistan. How, they began demanding upon publication of the CIA/NYT story, can we possibly leave Afghanistan when the Russians are trying to kill our troops? Would that not be a reckless abdication to the Kremlin of this country that we own, and would withdrawal not be a reward to Putin after we learned he was engaged in such dastardly plotting to kill our sons and daughters?
In late June, this alliance of pro-war House Democrats — funded overwhelmingly by military contractors — and the Liz-Cheney-led neocon wing announced amendments to the military budget authorization process that would defund Trump’s efforts to withdraw troops from either Afghanistan or Germany (where they had been stationed for decades to defend Western Europe against a country, the Soviet Union, that ceased to exist decades ago). They instantly weaponized the NYT/CIA story as their primary argument.
The record-breaking $740 billion military budget was scheduled to be approved by the House Armed Services Committee in early July. In a joint statement with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) on June 29 — the day the NYT story appeared — Liz Cheney proclaimed that “we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces.” One of the Democrats’ most pro-war House members, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), announced on July 1 (three days after the NYT story) his own amendment to block any troop withdrawal from Germany, citing “increasing Russian aggression.”
On July 1 and 2, the House Armed Services Committee held its hearings and votes — I watched all fourteen hours and reported on it in a series of articles and a 90-minute video report — and it not only approved this massive military budget but also both amendments to bar troop withdrawal. Over and over, the union of pro-war Democrats and Cheney-led neocon Republicans steamrolled the anti-war faction of left-wing and right-wing war opponents (led by Congressmembers Ro Khanna (D-CA), Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL)), and repeatedly used the Russia bounty story to justify continuation of the longest war in America’s history. This little speech from Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) was illustrative of how this CIA story was used all day:
The U.S. media was somehow more militaristic and blindly trusting about this CIA story than even this pro-war union of lawmakers. That the CIA’s leaked claim to The New York Times should even be questioned at all — given that it was leaked anonymously and was accompanied by exactly zero evidence — is not something that even crossed their journalistic minds.
These people who call themselves “journalists” do not view pronouncements from the U.S. security state as something that prompts skepticism let alone requires evidence before believing. The officials who run those agencies are their friends, partners and colleagues — those they most revere — and their every utterance is treated as Gospel. If — after watching them behave this way the last five years without pause — you think that is an exaggeration, watch this short video compilation produced by The Daily Caller to see for yourself how they instantly converted this CIA “Russia bounty” leak into proven fact that nobody, least of all them, should question:
As usual, the media figure most loudly and dramatically enshrining the CIA leak about Russia as Proven Truth was the undisputed Queen of demented conspiracy theories, jingoistic rhetoric, and CIA propaganda: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Over and over, she devoted melodramatic segments to denouncing the unparalleled evil of Russian treachery in Afghanistan (because the U.S. would never pay bounties to kill Russian soldiers in Afghanistan), at no point pausing her histrionics for even a second or two to wonder whether evidence ought to be presented before telling the millions of #Resistance liberals who watch her show that she is vouching for the truth of this story.
Predictably, now that this CIA tale has served its purpose (namely, preventing Trump from leaving Afghanistan), and now that its enduring effects are impeding the Biden administration (which wants to leave Afghanistan and so needs to get rid of this story), the U.S. Government is now admitting that — surprise! — they had no convincing evidence for this story all along.
The Daily Beast on Thursday was the first to notice that “the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had ‘low to moderate’ confidence in the story after all.” The outlet added: “that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.” The Guardian also reported that “US intelligence agencies have only ‘low to moderate confidence’ in reports last year that Russian spies were offering Taliban militants in Afghanistan bounties for killing US soldiers.” NBC News went even further, citing Biden’s campaign attacks on Trump for failing to punish Putin for these bounties, and noting: “Such a definitive statement was questionable even then…. They still have not found any evidence, a senior defense official said Thursday.”
What made this admission particularly bizarre — aside from rendering weeks of decrees from media figures and politicians humiliatingly reckless and baseless — is that the Biden administration continued to assert this claim as truth as recently as Thursday. When announcing new sanctions aimed at Moscow and diplomatic expulsions of Russian diplomats — primarily in response to allegations of Russian hacking — the White House said “it was responding to reports that Russia encouraged Taliban fighters to injure or kill coalition forces in Afghanistan.” The official White House announcement of the retaliation said explicitly that “the Administration is responding to the reports that Russia encouraged Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan based on the best assessments from the Intelligence Community (IC)” — a claim for which the IC itself admits it has only “low to moderate confidence” is even true.
When asked about this glaring contradiction yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave an answer that barely rose to the level of cogency, yet she clearly admitted the lack of evidentiary basis for this long-standing CIA/media tale:
That there is no evidence for this media-laundered CIA story is not something we learned only yesterday. It has been obvious for many months. In September, NBC News — as Maddow was in the midst of her performative sadness and indignation over the story on its cable network — noted:
Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian government bribed the Taliban to kill American service members, the commander of troops in the region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program.
“It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. continues to hunt for new information on the matter, he said.
“We continue to look for that evidence,” the general said. “I just haven’t seen it yet.
That was what made the refusal to question this story all along so maddening. Not only was no evidence presented to support the CIA’s assertions — something that, by itself, should have prevented every real journalist from endorsing its truth — but commanders in Afghanistan were saying months ago they could not find convincing evidence for it. That is what The Daily Beast meant in Thursday’s report when it said “there were reasons to doubt the story from the start” — not just the lack of evidence but also that “the initial stories emphasize[d] its basis on detainee reporting” and “the bounties represented a qualitative shift in recent Russian engagements with Afghan insurgents.” NBC News on Thursday also said that “such a definitive statement was questionable even then.”
But these doubts were virtually non-existent in most media reports. Indeed, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the story publicly attacked me as a conspiracy theorist back in September when I cited that NBC News story about the lack of evidence while pointing out what a crucial role this uncorroborated story played in stopping troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and claiming Trump was beholden to Putin. And while The Daily Beast on Thursday said there were reasons to doubt the story from the start, that same outlet was one of the most vocal and aggressive in pushing the story as true:
Even worse, other media outlets — led by The Washington Post — purported to have “independently confirmed” the NYT/CIA tale of Russian bounties. Twice in the last year, I have written about this bizarre practice where media outlets purport to “independently confirm” one another’s false stories by doing nothing more than going to the same anonymous sources who whisper to them the same things while providing no evidence. Yet they use this phrase “independent confirmation” to purposely imply that they obtained separate evidence corroborating the truth of the original story:
We have confirmed the @nytimes scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan. From @nakashimae @missy_ryan me and @shaneharris
For months, pro-war members of both parties and leading members of the NYT/CNN/MSNBC media axis pushed a story — an inflammatory, dangerous one — based on nothing more than the say-so of anonymous CIA operatives. How can anyone do this who knows even the bare minimum about what this agency does and what its function is: to spread disinformation not just to foreign countries but the domestic population as well? It is both mystifying and toxic. But for people who call themselves “journalists” to repeat, over and over, evidence-free CIA claims, telling those who trust them to believe it, is nothing short of repulsive.
If you think that, upon learning yesterday’s news, there was any self-reflection on the part of the media figures who spread this, or that they felt chastened about it in any way, you would be very, very wrong. In fact, not only did few if any admit error, but they did exactly the same thing on Thursday about a brand new evidence-free assertion from the U.S. Government concerning Russia: they mindlessly assumed it true and then stated it to millions of people as fact. They are not embarrassed to get caught spreading false CIA propaganda. They see their role, correctly, as doing exactly that.
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, run by Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, issued a short Press Release about its targeting of Russian-Ukrainian political consultant, Konstantin Kilimnik, with new sanctions. One sentence of this press release asserted a claim that the Mueller investigation, after searching for eighteen months, never found: namely, that “Kilimnik provided the Russia intelligence services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” that he received from then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Is it true that Kilimnik passed this polling data to the Kremlin? Maybe. But there is no way for a rational person — let alone someone calling themselves a “journalist” — to conclude that it is true. Why? Because, like the CIA tale about Russian bounties — a claim they learned yesterday had no evidence — this is nothing more than a U.S. Government assertion that lacks any evidence.
Do you think journalists learned the lesson that they just had rubbed in their faces hours before about the foolishness of assuming official statements to be true with no evidence? Of course that is a rhetorical question: too many to count instantly proclaimed that this story was true without spending an ounce of mental energy to question if it was or apply any skepticism. Here’s Maddow’s MSNBC comrade showing how this is done:
Do you see what Hayes just did there? It is vital not to lose sight of how irresponsible and destructive this behavior is just because it is now so common. He saw a Press Release from a U.S. Government agency, read an assertion that it contained in one sentence, had no evidence that this assertion was true, but nonetheless “reported” it as if it were proven fact to millions of people in a predictably viral tweet.
Hayes was far from alone. I cannot count how many employees of corporate media outlets did the same: read the Treasury Department’s Press Release and, without pausing for a second, proclaimed it to be true. Indeed, the two MSNBC hosts who follow Hayes’s nightly news program explicitly described this evidence-free Press Release as “confirmation”— confirmation!
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell celebrating an evidence-free Treasury Department Press Release as “confirmation,” Apr. 15, 2021
Let’s set aside the absurdity of treating this as some shocking revelation even if it were true. Just like the oozing historical ignorance of pretending that there would be something astonishing about Russians paying for the killing of U.S. troops in Afghanistan when the CIA just last week explicitly boasted of having done the same to Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, what is this Treasury Press Release supposed to prove that is so breathtaking and scandalous: that the Kremlin could not possibly have obtained polling data about the U.S. electorate had Manafort not provided it to them? That they never would have known that Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were swing states without an elaborate plot of collusion to learn this from the Trump campaign?
But the far more important point is the U.S. media’s willingness — their subservient eagerness — to obediently treat U.S. government pronouncements as Truth. Just like with the Russia bounty story, where there were ample reasons to doubt it from the start, the same is true of this Treasury Press Release. To begin with, if this were such a smoking gun “confirming” collusion, why did the Mueller investigation after eighteen months of highly aggressive subpoena-driven investigative activity not discover it?
Let’s express this as clearly as it can be expressed. Any journalist who treats unverified stories from the CIA or other government agencies as true, without needing any evidence or applying any skepticism, is worthless. Actually, they are worse than worthless: they are toxic influences who deserve pure contempt. Every journalist knows that governments lie constantly and that it is a betrayal of their profession to serve as mindless mouthpieces for these security agencies: that is why they will vehemently deny they do this if you confront them with this accusation. They know it is a shameful thing to do.
But just look at what they are doing: exactly this. These are not journalists. They are obsequious spokespeople for the CIA and other official authorities. Even when they learn that they deceived millions of people by uncritically repeating a story that the CIA told them was true, they will — on the very same day that they learn they did this — do exactly the same thing, this time with a one-paragraph Treasury Department Press Release. These are agents of disinformation: state media. And when they speak, you should listen to them with the knowledge of what they really are, and treat them accordingly.
Trump’s China tweet ‘destructive & deceitful’ as there isn’t ‘ANY QUESTION’ Russia behind latest hacking scare, Adam Schiff claims
RT | December 20, 2020
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in blaming Russia for a recent massive cyber attack. He also slammed President Donald Trump for the inconvenient suggestion China could have been the culprit.
“Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s any question that it was Russia,” Schiff, who is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Sunday, commenting on the hack.
The hacking operation in question targeted the SolarWinds Orion Platform, a network monitoring tool used by US government agencies and numerous corporations. There has been no evidence presented that Russia was behind the hack, but Pompeo alleged otherwise in a recent interview.
The president broke with his secretary of state on Saturday and called out “fake news media” for their anonymous reports pinning the hack on Russia. He also suggested China may have been behind the hack, tying it to his ongoing allegations of voter fraud in key swing states during November’s election.
Schiff, one of the president’s most vocal critics in the House and a supporter of evidence-free claims Russia colluded to influence the 2016 presidential election, called Trump’s tweets “uniformly destructive and deceitful and injurious” to the country’s “national security.”
In a previous tweet, Schiff called the president’s China accusation “another scandalous betrayal of our national security.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also pushed back against the president on Sunday, accusing him of having a “blind spot” when it comes to Russia.
“What Russia has done is put in place a capacity to potentially cripple us in terms of our electricity, our water, our communications,” the senator told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
The Republican called for the cyber attack to be “met with a very strong response, not just rhetorical, important as that is, but also with a cyber response of like magnitude or greater.”
Similarly to 2016, the claim of a major Russian cyber attack on the US comes amid the expected transition of power at the White House – although President Trump continues his legal efforts disputing the election result over the alleged mass-scale voter fraud. When Trump assumed his post in January 2017, the stage had already been set for the worsening of relations with Moscow, which included dozens of Russian diplomats getting expelled by the Obama administration over the allegations of meddling in US affairs and over “hacking” of the election. As Trump’s term progressed, overshadowed by the failed ‘Russiagate’ investigation, initial hopes of a detente with Moscow have all but faded.
“Free Speech Is Being Weaponized”: Columbia Dean and New Yorker Writer Calls For More Censorship
By Jonathan Turley | December 11, 2020
We have been discussing how reporters, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and key advisers. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Now, Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. That’s right. A journalism dean and writer declaring that the problem is that free speech itself is allowing too much freedom on the Internet and other forums.
Coll’s comments came in a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when he was asked by Kasie Hunt about the need for Big Tech to censor speech. Rather than defend the right of people to express themselves freely, Coll lashed out at companies like Facebook as “motivated, as all companies are, to make money” though at the same time is “acting like a public square.” He decried the failure to have more expansive regulation of free speech and showed little concern or merit for arguments from free speech advocates. Like Harvard academics who recently declared “China was right” about censorship, Coll just assumed that it was self-evident that too much free speech is a bad thing and that these companies need to protect people from harmful or false ideas.
“And yes, Facebook has moved somewhat. They’ve had a better election in 2020 than they did in 2016. They’ve learned to put some brakes on, you know, here and there, but you can’t get away from the fact that their mission is to connect everybody in the world. That’s what motivates Mark Zuckerberg and it’s his passion and he profoundly believes in free speech.”
What is most maddening is that Coll spoke on behalf of journalists in calling for less freedom:
“Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principle of journalism and what do we do about that,. As reporters, we kind of march into this war with our facts nobly shouldered as if they were going to win the day and what we’re seeing that is because of the scale of this alternative reality that you’ve been talking about, our facts, our principles, our scientific method–it isn’t enough. So what do we do?”
That used to be an easy question. What you do is allow free speech to combat bad speech. What you do is support the right of citizens and journalists to publish without censorship. What you do is to embrace the freedom of expression while reinforcing the need to use that freedom to counter disinformation. Instead, Coll is joining the forces seeking to silence or curtail the speech of others. You do not support free speech by calling for its curtailment. For free speech advocates, it is as compelling as saying that we needed to “save” villages by destroying them in Vietnam. Worse yet, he is doing it in the names of “good journalism.”
‘I want blood’: Rachel Maddow’s audience fired up by NYT story baselessly accusing ‘Russian hackers’ of attacking US hospital
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | November 30, 2020
Accusing Russia of hacking anything from the 2016 election to US cancer hospitals may be fun and games for MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, but when her audience responds by demanding apocalypse, the shtick stops being funny.
Maddow’s conspiracy theories about ‘Russian collusion’ and supposed hacking of the 2016 election that resulted in President Donald Trump have been a staple of MSNBC audiences over the past four years. She’s not giving up that routine now, even as the entire mainstream media machine has turned on a dime and insists that the 2020 election was flawless – since it resulted in Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, that is.
On Monday, Maddow cherry-picked a couple of quotes and linked a New York Times story – published last week – about ‘Russian’ hackers allegedly targeting the University of Vermont Medical Center last month.
The Times story is long on feelings and emotions of the medical personnel and cancer patients affected by the fact that the UVMC computers stopped working, but short on actual facts about the case. It works in a jab at President Donald Trump for firing head of the cybersecurity agency Chris Krebs – for disputing “baseless claims of voter fraud,” of course – even though that happened long after the alleged attack.
The story also notes that the FBI has requested the center administrators to refrain from commenting on the case – even to confirm or deny their own statements about alleged ransom requests. Absent the facts, the Times is happy to fill in the blanks by citing a private cybersecurity company, Hold Security.
Hold Security and its chief executive Alex Holden are the sole source for the claim that ‘Russian’ hackers were behind the alleged cyberattack on UVMC and other US hospitals – at least according to the Times, as well as the media coverage of the FBI’s warning in late October that Maddow referenced.
The whole thing sounds much like the debunked Times story about Russia allegedly paying “bounties” to the Taliban for killing US troops in Afghanistan, a June bombshell that was used to hammer Trump and oppose his efforts to end the endless US war there.
Even the Pentagon’s own denials didn’t make a difference; Maddow and her colleagues were “all in” on the bounties story being true. So was her audience, as evidenced by some of the replies to her tweet.
While much of the replies were in the same vein, there were some that crossed the line from partisanship into genocidal – and apocalyptic – calls for blood.
“Russia needs to finally be handled. They need to be knocked back into the stone age,” said one follower.
“I did not hate the leaders of the old Soviet Union as much as I hate the leaders of Russia right now. I want them to experience monumental, historic, unprecedented, apocalyptic pain for what they have done to us. I want blood,” said another.
Earlier this year, MSNBC’s lawyers defended Maddow against a defamation lawsuit by One America News (OANN) – whom she called “literally Russian propaganda” – by arguing her show isn’t news but opinion, and that her statement was “rhetorical hyperbole” that no reasonable person would understand as fact.
While that admission got Maddow and MSNBC off the legal hook, it raises the question of how many of her followers and their audience qualify as “reasonable” people – as the comments on her tweet about the Times story show anew.
No one, Maddow included, should be held legally liable for the content of their replies, obviously. It’s something beyond their control. But when a steady diet of propaganda, ‘insinuendo’ and conspiracy theories presented as facts creates an atmosphere that results in this sort of bloodthirst that’s on display, it doesn’t inspire confidence in her audience’s mental state.
Keep in mind that the politicians Maddow supports may soon end up with absolute power, if Trump’s claims about election fraud are really as “baseless” as the media claim. Also, don’t forget that the US and Russia have enough nuclear weapons between themselves to destroy all life on the planet. And that’s something people so obsessed with their feelings to be calling for “monumental, historic, unprecedented, apocalyptic pain” clearly haven’t given any thought.
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Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | May 4, 2020
In January, well before the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis would result in lockdowns, quarantines and economic devastation in the United States and beyond, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon were working with the National Security Council to create still-classified plans to respond to an imminent pandemic. It has since been alleged that the intelligence and military intelligence communities knew about a likely pandemic in the United States as early as last November, and potentially even before then.
Given this foreknowledge and the numerous simulations conducted in the United States last year regarding global viral pandemic outbreaks, at least six of varying scope and size, it has often been asked – Why did the government not act or prepare if an imminent global pandemic and the shortcomings of any response to such an event were known? Though the answer to this question has frequently been written off as mere “incompetence” in mainstream media circles, it is worth entertaining the possibility that a crisis was allowed to unfold.
Why would the intelligence community or another faction of the U.S. government knowingly allow a crisis such as this to occur? The answer is clear if one looks at history, as times of crisis have often been used by the U.S. government to implement policies that would normally be rejected by the American public, ranging from censorship of the press to mass surveillance networks. Though the government response to the September 11 attacks, like the Patriot Act, may be the most accessible example to many Americans, U.S. government efforts to limit the flow of “dangerous” journalism and surveil the population go back to as early as the First World War. Many of these policies, whether the Patriot Act after 9/11 or WWI-era civilian “spy” networks, did little if anything to protect the homeland, but instead led to increased surveillance and control that persisted long after the crisis that spurred them had ended.
Using this history as a lens, it is possible to look at the current coronavirus crisis to see how the long-standing agendas of ever-expanding mass surveillance and media censorship are again getting a dramatic boost thanks to the chaos unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, this crisis is unique because it also has given a boost to a newer yet complimentary agenda that — if fulfilled – would render most, if not all, other government efforts at controlling and subduing their populations obsolete. … continue
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