As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer discusses the recent Nobel Peace Prize given to Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, as both a warning and a "do better" for American journalists:
It’s fitting that — thanks to Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize — world history will likely cherish Ressa, Muratov, and their brand of death-defying journalism far longer than it will remember the totems of modern U.S. media like recently retired Washington Post editor Marty Baron — whose uninspiring response to the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump was, famously that “we’re not at war … we’re at work” — or the New York Times’ Dean Baquet, who doesn’t see journalism as activism but something he blandly calls “sophisticated true objectivity.”
Huh? [snip]For all the Beltway journalists so eager to restore a breathless access journalism and the most cynical, “savvy” form of politics-as-a-game news coverage, the embrace by both the Nobel committee and the wider world of the more daring vision of journalism as a chief weapon in the war against rising neo-fascism — the stance so boldly adopted by Ressa and Muratov — ought to serve as a wake-up call. [snip]
The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in “the work” of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war. We need to glom onto Maria Ressa’s vision — that when the truth is under attack, truth-telling is not a clinical science. Journalism is activism.
Sadly, due to the existential need to get clicks, ad dollars and subscriptions, we don't see the basic business model of American journalism changing, with the occasional exception for an investigative piece that makes a splash but is soon forgotten. How far from their examples our "journalists" are.
Speaking of American "journalism," Fox "News" recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Washington Post media critic Eric Wemple takes a few well- deserved swipes at the one institution news sewer that can claim responsibility for the poisonous, divisive, downward- spiraling state of American politics today:
It’s not too late for a retraction, Houston Chronicle! [snip]
... It’s one thing to corral a constituency; it’s quite another to poison that constituency. We won’t belabor the extensive and atrocious misadventures of Fox News, which this blog and many, many other sources have highlighted to our mutual exhaustion. There’s enough to fill a mammoth website.
For the sake of brevity, we’ll just highlight a development that so happens to coincide with the big 25th anniversary: The ongoing lawsuits against Fox News by voting-tech firms Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. Both of these companies claim they were the subject of false coverage in the aftermath of November’s presidential election, and both sued the network for the efforts of key hosts — Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs (who no longer has a show on Fox Business Network) are among the offenders — to associate their work with election-rigging. [snip]
It’s a machine, in other words — promoting lies, and then reporting their traction as national news. That’s what Fox News has done with the vocal plurality of Americans in its corner, 25 years running.
Their business model is stoking white grievance, racial hate, fear, all in service to their cult leader in his on- going coup.
On that on- going coup, laying the foundation for the next coup -- voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, allowing legislatures to overturn election results, etc. -- requires the willingness of elected Republican "leaders" to maintain the Big Lie. Rep. Steve Scalise (Coup- LA) at your service:
The House’s second-ranking Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say on Sunday that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, standing by Donald Trump’s lie that Democrat Joe Biden won the White House because of mass voter fraud.
More than 11 months after Americans picked their president and almost nine months since Biden was inaugurated, Scalise was unwilling during a national television interview to acknowledge the legitimacy of the vote, instead sticking to his belief that the election results should not have been certified by Congress.
“I’ve been very clear from the beginning,” he said. “If you look at a number of states, they didn’t follow their state-passed laws that govern the election for president. That is what the United States Constitution says. They don’t say the states determine what the rules are. They say the state legislatures determine the rules,” the Louisiana congressman said on “Fox News Sunday.”
These are human weasels (no offense to weasels). In Scalise's case, his description of himself as KKK leader "David Duke without the baggage" tells you exactly who he is.
This is the sub- moronic cult leader they're so desperate to re- install in the White House:
A new book reports that former President Donald Trump asked his top intelligence official to investigate an absurd conspiracy theory that Chinese thermostats changed votes in the 2020 election.
In an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released Betrayal by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, which was shared on Sunday’s edition of This Week, the former president was said to be “intrigued” by the theory – which was presented to him by Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as acting attorney general.
“[Clark] believed that wireless thermostats made in China for Google by a company called Nest Labs might have been used to manipulate voting machines in Georgia,” Karl wrote. “The idea was nuts, but it intrigued Trump, who asked Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to look into it.”
Some tinfoil hats should take care of it! Also, Jeffrey Clark, the skunk willing to subvert the Department of Justice to cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election, appears to be as nuts as his cult leader.
Lastly, for the best collection of links to posts from around the Internet, please visit Infidel 753's link round- up, which appears to get more comprehensive every week. Keep it coming; we can handle it!.
