JANUARY 30, 2019
He also covered Twitter’s ensuing crackdown on the phrase whereby they claimed it’s “targeted harassment” to tell a laid-off journos exactly what journos told laid-off coal workers after Obama regulations shut their plants down.
WATCH:
Transcript via NewsBusters:
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the past couple of weeks have been pretty awful for American journalists, hundreds of reporters and editors at places like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed lost their jobs, victims of systemic changes to their industry. No matter what you think of those sites, it’s sad. Anyone who has lost his job knows that it is very tough.
Now, those journalists suddenly have a lot in common with millions of other Americans, factory workers, loggers, retail clerks, coal miners, all of them, and many more have seen their way of life disappear thanks to technology or outsourcing or private equity. This kind of thing has been going on a long time.
Now in previous cycles of what we used to call to creative destruction, journalists had readied advice for newly unemployed blue-collar workers: just learn to code. Coding is the future, stop whining and embrace it.
Here’s a selection of headlines you might remember on that subject. This one is from NPR, “From coal to code: new path for laid-off miners in Kentucky”. From Wired, the tech evangelist magazine, “Can you teach a coal miner to code?” From CBS News, “Out of work coal miners find new work in computer industry”. And this from Bloomberg, “Appellation miners are learning to code”. And from the venerable New York Times, “The coders of Kentucky”.
See? It is that simple. Let’s say that you spent 30 years making a solid middle-class living in a paper mill in northern New Hampshire, then one day the mill spouts down, sold for scrap to China. Happened a lot. But no problem, just learn to code. Everyone in Brooklyn is doing it.
Well, coding was never a real solution to any of this, obviously. But it had the effect of making journalists feel even more self-satisfied. And of course that was the point, it’s always a point, actually.
Fast forward to this month. Someone on Twitter came up with a pretty brilliant piece of advice for all of those laid off journalists trying to figure out what to do with their lives. “Learn to code”. Perfect. Suddenly learn to code was everywhere on Twitter. But journalists did not see the humor in this at all. A former New Yorker employee called Talia Lavin called the phrase, quote, “far-right hate”. People who went to Wesleyan and should not have to “learn to code”.
So that they complained to the censorship of authorities at Twitter, who immediately concluded that asking someone to “learn to code” might be, quote, “targeted harassment.” But, only when it is directed at people who used to work at BuzzFeed. For the paper mill guy in New Hampshire, coding is still a future.
By Joe Simonson
Just mere days after BuzzFeed News dropped its hotly disputed report accusing President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice, the media decided to pick a new target: a group of teenage Catholic high school boys.
On Friday, a group of male students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky found themselves in the middle of a media firestorm after an initial video gave the impression that they had mobbed a Native American protester. Media figures, still reeling from the wave of criticism following the BuzzFeed News fiasco, smelled blood. Sure, the initial video didn’t show the students assaulting anyone, but that didn’t stop reporters, commentators and Hollywood celebrities from focusing on the smirk of a student in the video, which somehow triggered painful memories of lonely prom nights and failed junior varsity sport tryouts.
Of course, newer videos showed that the students were completely innocent. They were first taunted by a group of radical activists and the Native American protester approached them. (RELATED: The Real Story Behind The Catholic School Boys And Their Dust Up With A Native American Veteran)
Even with this new information, CNN decided to report the story with the following headline:
Facts first, of course.
BuzzFeed News Reporter, Anne Helen Petersen, made her colleagues proud by smearing one of the kids in the video and implied he had a future in sexually assaulting women. Petersen even acknowledged that other videos showed a completely different story, but that didn’t stop her diatribe about why a teenage boy’s face “caused a visceral reaction.”
Three Washington Post reporters, as National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty neatly explained, framed their story on how “a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” caps,” surrounded the Native American protestor Nathan Phillips and reported that he “felt threatened.”
Even The New York Times seemingly contradicted itself halfway through its own report:
The Atlantic’s James Fallows, just hours after the first video was released, wrote a bizarre column comparing the young boys to pro-segregation activists. Fallows seemed to even recognize that other footage might give a more complete picture of the incident, but he chose to brush this off as just “whatever happened.”
Even by Monday morning, MSNBC was still tweeting out clips from shows expressing sympathy for Fallows. One women, who purports to have been there, said she “witnessed something that was very aggressive and something that was very frightening.”
WATCH:
Other reporters, like The New York Times’ Jonathan Capehart, stood in solidarity with Phillips, while others like esteemed tech journalists Kara Swisher said this is exactly why Americans needed that insipid Gillette ad.
In fairness, a number of individuals apologized and shared the newer videos demonstrating the students’ innocence (which you can find in this piece by The Daily Caller’s Scott Morefield).
Despite these efforts, it’s important to keep in mind that the media’s efforts to tarnish the reputations of these innocent kids was being done while other social media users were encouraging violence and sending death threats.
One would think that following the fallout from the disputed BuzzFeed report, the media would take a minute before trying to ruin any more innocent lives, particularly when we’re talking about kids. Yet this whole episode makes one thing clear: Journalists aren’t willing to learn a thing.
Rather than having to download an app as before, Edge users on Android and Apple devices can now just click one button to enable its “green-red rating signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
Among the green-rated websites: Voice of America, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as left-leaning upstarts such as Vice News and Refinery 29. Ones that are given the red warning label of “failing to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability”: RT and Sputnik (obviously enough) and the right-wing Daily Mail, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, in addition to hundreds of other non-mainstream news websites such as Wikileaks.
Not only does the integration ensure that NewsGuard is present on every browser, and is easier to use than to ignore, but by making it a fundamental Microsoft-provided feature, the company gives it inherent level of trustworthiness, something akin to a bundled anti-virus feature, only this time the virus targets your brain, not your computer or iPod.
None of this is the slightest bit alarming if you believe that NewsGuard is an absolutely fair arbiter of what constitutes real news or propaganda.
Its pride of place is its “Nutrition Labels” which ape the precision of a list of calories, carbs, and saturated fats to give a supposedly scientific assessment of media reliability on nine different criteria. Among them: doesn’t repeatedly publish false content, avoids deceptive headlines, gathers and presents information responsibly, handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.
The green-listed media outlets above apparently do not ever engage in these practices, or at least not knowingly. So CNN never misleads with its headlines, the Guardian never dresses up its agendas as news, and Buzzfeed stories are always accurate. One literally doesn’t have to go back three days to find dozens of examples to the contrary, but this would be too mind-numbingly pedantic a task.
Even regular readers of the green-tick media must be able to see these are judgment calls. What is even “presenting information responsibly”?
Perhaps realizing that their pseudo-scientific fancy diagram is insufficient, NewsGuard has stressed that they are not using shadowy methods like tech companies and are open to two-way communication.
“We want people to game our system. We are totally transparent. We are not an algorithm,” company co-founder Steve Brill told the Guardian.
This is how he explained the Daily Mail red warning.
“We spell out fairly clearly in the label exactly how many times we have attempted to contact them. The analyst that wrote this writeup got someone on the phone who, as soon he heard who she was and where she was calling from, hung up. As of now, we would love to hear if they have a complaint or if they change anything.”
On the other hand, RT did answer NewsGuard’s queries in detail. You can guess how much difference that made.
But who are these people that the Daily Mail or RT have to impress and why?
Brill himself is a veteran centrist journalist and author, his co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a former Wall Street Journal columnist. After Brill, its second-biggest investor, along with his father, is Nick Penniman, the liberal publisher, and the third-biggest is Publicis Group, a multinational advertising agency.
Meanwhile, its advisory board includes Tom Ridge, the first-ever Homeland Security chief, and developer of another famous color-coded system, the terror alert, and Michael Hayden, the CIA director, also under George W. Bush. There are also several Obama and Clinton-era figures.
The overall picture emerges of a mix of establishment journalists, hawkish old-school Washington insiders, and so-called ethical businessmen.
They may all be experts in their fields, but if you believe that these are selfless neutral adjudicators you are probably beyond being helped by color charts. And this is not some one-off initiative either: NewsGuard is part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program, which combats purported election meddling, presumably primarily from Russia. The frontline of the information war is not customarily the place for impartial news judgment.
However much respectability NewsGuard enjoys through Microsoft, Edge has a laughably small – a fraction of a percent – market share on mobiles. In practical terms, even an increase of popularity of several thousand percent will only mean several thousand new users, and other browsers are available.
This would be that, if not for newsGuard’s self-proclaimed ambition “to expand to serve the billions of people globally who get news online.” This is just a beginning: there is an overarching plan where all public computers, from the school to the university to the library, are automatically equipped with the same “safe browsing” system.
And rather than as an individual warning, NewsGuard plans to make its designations work as an effective financial tool. The company, which has received $6 million in backing, also plans to soon work with advertisers, “keeping ads off unreliable news websites” to ensure “brand safety.” Fall foul of the green ticks, no money for you. Advertising managers are already demonetizing programs with alternative or controversial viewpoints elsewhere, and soon the process can be automated, and Brill is boasting that he is “happy to be blamed” – doing the dirty work for the platforms. No wonder alternative outlets in the US are openly opposed.
So, just like the use of NewsGuard in all public libraries in the faraway state of Hawaii (no money charged), it is best to look at the Edge integration is more of a test, a pilot project, a dry run. Latching NewsGuard onto a popular browser like Chrome, or a social network like Facebook, would stir tremors of public debate, as it has done in the past when similar initiatives have been tried. Instead, first they came for the Edge users.
By Mark Alan
The Democratic Party has been ignoring anti-Semitic views on the left, and with Omar’s appointment to the Foreign Affairs Committee, they now appear to be rewarding it. Anti-Semitism has been creeping into Democratic politics for quite some time now. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz has been extremely critical of the Democratic Party for their embrace of anti-Semitic candidates, and has repeatedly referred to comparisons of Donald Trump and Hitler by Democrats as a form of Holocaust denial.
Congresswoman Omar has repeatedly refused to apologize for a 2016 tweet in which she called Israel evil, and accused the nation of “hypnotizing” the planet. When asked about the comments yesterday during an interview with CNN, Omar bizarrely said it was regrettable she was being criticized. Omar also feigned surprise at the question, pretending she had never heard it before, even though she has been asked about the tweet countless times in the past.
During Representative Rashida Tlaib’s first day in congress, Buzzfeed reported that a map in her congressional office was altered to replace Israel with a Post-It Note reading “Palestine.” Earlier this month, Tlaib raised more eyebrows when she was photographed meeting with a man known for his anti-Semitic views. The man is a Hezbollah supporter, and has advocated removing all Jewish people from Israel. Tlaib has accused members of congress of being more faithful to Israel than the United States, promoting the anti-Semitic view that the US is somehow obedient to Israel.
Both Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar support a boycott of Israeli goods and services, commonly referred to as BDS. Both congresswomen have also accused Israel of discrimination. Neither woman has advocated boycotting any country except for Israel, and it’s blatantly obvious their promotion of the boycott is rooted in anti-Semitism. So far, Democratic leadership has shown no desire to defend the Jewish people against these vile anti-Semitic attacks.
JANUARY 19, 2019
“Can they get something wrong? Sure, of course, anybody can get something wrong — but this is a huge, huge deal and am I vouching for Buzzfeed,” Uygur said.
“They’re not going to make up that they have federal government sources if they don’t,” Uygur said. “And why would those government sources put this out there if it isn’t true?”
He went on to say Trump’s going to “resign” because the government will threaten to put all his kids in prison.
“Ladies and gentlemen we’re really, really close. We almost got them.”
The Special Council’s office debunked the story hours later.
By Joshua Caplan
The Thursday report claims that the president “supported a plan” arranged by Cohen to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election to “jump-start” negotiations on the real estate deal, telling his longtime attorney, “make it happen,” according to two federal law enforcement officials. Further, BuzzFeed’s report alleges that President Trump received 10 “personal updates” regarding the proposed project from Cohen, who according to the unnamed sources, requested that his lawyer tell lawmakers that his involvement in the project concluded earlier than it actually did. The sources also claim the president’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, received updates on the proposed tower.
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, dismissed the report, telling The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker: “If you believe Cohen I can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Several Democrats, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), have said they will take action against the president, pending the claims made in BuzzFeed’s report are factual.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) called for the president to resign or face impeachment — again — contingent upon the report being true.
In an appearance on CNN’s New Day Friday morning, Anthony Cormier, who co-authored BuzzFeed’s report, stood by his story, even though he had “not personally” seen the evidence. Host Alisyn Camerota also pressed Cormier on the “dubious past” of the report’s other author Jason Leopold, who had a story retracted by Salon in 2002 for erroneous reporting. Leopold also wrongly reported in 2006 that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, had been indicted.
In November, Cohen stated in a guilty plea that he lied to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal he pursued on President Trump’s behalf during the heat of the 2016 Republican campaign. He claimed he lied to be consistent with President Trump’s “political messaging.”
Cohen was sentenced December 12 to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to several charges, including campaign finance violations and making false statements to Congress. Prior to his sentencing, Federal prosecutors in Manhattan asked a judge to sentence Cohen to a “substantial term of imprisonment,” arguing that he had been motivated by “personal greed.”
The plea agreement made clear that prosecutors believe that while President Trump insisted repeatedly throughout the campaign that he had no business dealings in Russia, his lawyer was continuing to pursue the Trump Tower Moscow project weeks after his boss had clinched the Republican nomination for president and well beyond the point that had been previously acknowledged.
Cohen said he discussed the proposal with President Trump on multiple occasions and with members of the president’s family, according to documents filed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the presidential election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. Cohen acknowledged considering traveling to Moscow to discuss the project.
However, there is no clear link in the court filings between Cohen’s lies and Mueller’s central question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. And nothing said in court, or in associated court filings, addressed whether Trump or his aides had directed Cohen to mislead Congress.
Reacting to Cohen’s plea, President Trump called Cohen a “weak person” who was lying to get a lighter sentence and stressed that the real estate deal at issue was never a secret and never executed. Giuliani said that Cohen was a “proven liar” and that Trump’s business organization had voluntarily given Mueller the documents cited in the guilty plea “because there was nothing to hide.”
“There would be nothing wrong if I did do it,” the president said of pursuing the project. “I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gone back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”
Cohen is slated to testify before the House Oversight Committee on February 7 on his work for President Trump.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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