Do you have what it takes to be the next editor-in-chief of the New York Times? Find out with this fast paced game!

• Based on hundreds of real world news and headlines.
• Featuring the passive voice and many common framing techniques.
• Free casual play. A session lasts about 10 minutes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/43368326

text of microblog screenshot:

Assal Rad @AssalRad

Headline after headline fails to mention that seizing the ships and kidnapping humanitarians violates international law. Instead the articles repeat Israeli propaganda.

This is how Western media normalizes Israel's crimes.

embedded screenshot 1 (BBC News headline):

Israeli naval ships intercept Gaza-bound flotilla

embedded screenshot 2 (Reuters headline):

Live: Israel says it has stopped several vessels from Gaza aid flotilla

embedded screenshot 3 (AP headline):

Activists say Israeli navy has begun intercepting a Gaza-bound aid flotilla

embedded screenshot 4 (CNN headline):

Israeli military intercept and board several aid ships bound for Gaza, organizers say

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35820512

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35729944

"Student loan forgiveness is a bribe for young voters," shouted Newsweek in 2022. "Harris's call for price controls on groceries is more pandering than policy," declared The Hill in 2024. "Free for all: Democratic socialist’s policy pitches face tough fiscal reality in New York," warned Politico this year.

Every time an elected official or political candidate proposes a policy with even the slightest hint of actual populism, U.S. pundits, analysts and alleged experts line up to tell us that it’s just a scheme to "buy votes." Offering student-debt relief is just cheating. Lowering grocery costs is simply pandering. Eliminating public-transit fares is merely bribing voters. These initiatives aren't developed in good faith in order to improve the lives of the public; they're cynical ploys to help a given politician get ahead.

We know that some policymakers make promises that they'll never fulfill, or chisel away at robust and universal proposals, or backtrack on bold and transformative ideas. This happens all the time. But all too often, media’s default position is to assert that even the most modest of economically populist proposals are mere strategies to buy votes, revealing grim truths about what our media class seems to think the responsibilities of lawmakers and governments are.

On this episode, we examine the media tendency to assume that anything remotely close to populism is somehow cheating, playing the game on "god mode" or "democracy game genie," and ought to be discouraged by Serious People, putting a sinister spin on what is simply Doing Things People Want.

Our guest is FAIR's Janine Jackson.

Canada/Canadians do not care about Uyghur Muslims. They want to take work away from them, and they source CIA funded and terrorist adjacent organizations to do so.

More than 100 BBC employees have written to the director general, Tim Davie, to complain about the corporation becoming a mouthpiece for Israel.

The open letter (available below), which was signed by a further 300 media professionals including Miriam Margolyes, Charles Dance, and Mike Leigh, represents a deepening of the crisis engulfing the BBC over its coverage of the war in Gaza. It follows widespread revulsion over the BBC platforming Glastonbury Festival act Bob Vylan, a punk band who chanted “death to the IDF” on a live iPlayer stream.

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft: Big Ideas and Big Money: Think Tank Funding in America

This brief provides a detailed analysis of a first-of-its-kind, publicly available repository of U.S. think tank funding — www.thinktankfundingtracker.org. The repository tracks funding from foreign governments, the U.S. government, and Pentagon contractors to the top 50 think tanks in the United States over the past five years. It serves as a vital research guide for anyone wishing to learn more about the funding sources of prominent U.S. think tanks.

• Iran doesn’t have a bomb.
• Iran isn’t making a bomb.
• If Iran were to decide to make a bomb, it would take about two years, not a month.
• “Normal countries don’t blind women because they showed some hair.” — This is moldy atrocity propaganda. The US doesn’t give a shit about Iranian women any more than it gives a shit about Palestinian women. No serious person falls for Western imperialist human rights concern trolling anymore.
• ”They don’t empower little gangs and proxies to surround a country and fire rockets and rape people.” — You mean Israel, right?
• Iran’s nuclear capacity is domestic, not military, and they have the legal right to it by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which Iran and every UN member state but five (including Israel) is party to.
• Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, besides being extremely illegal under the NPT and other international laws, is just dropping dirty bombs on Iran with extra steps.

In this News Brief, we break down the insta-talking points to sell war with Iran––from Ticking Time Bomb '24' plots to cherry-picked, dubious anecdotes of Iranians supposedly begging for Israeli bombs.

Paywalled article in full:

It was in 2023 that I began hearing stories from sources in direct contact with Joe Biden about the president occasionally needing family members and close aides to finish his sentences and his problems walking down staircases. I learned that at pre-event briefings the Secret Service began requesting that no women should be sitting in the front row for any presidential speeches at any venues: the fear was that he might slip on being introduced and be rescued by a woman. The senior aides in the White House didn’t want that sort of photograph on front pages around the world.

Old friends from his days in the Senate soon realized that Biden was not always able, or permitted, to return cell phone calls. But it wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal published a major front-page expose on Biden’s serious condition on June 4, 2024, that I understood the extent to which I had censored myself.

One reason to dwell on the issue now is that Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, the authors of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the new bestselling book on Biden’s failings as masked by his family and staff, had every reason to know something—if not more than what the Journal published—long before the election season. As a broadcaster with a national audience, Tapper did no reporting for the public on that issue when it mattered—when there was still time for the Democratic leadership to pressure Biden to withdraw and hold an open convention to pick a new candidate.

We are now in a crisis of integrity and leadership in Washington—a badly depleted and demoralized official Washington. After the election but before the confirmation of the most inept Cabinet in modern history we in the press missed another chance to warn America about one of the bizarre advisers President Donald Trump has put in charge of funding and revamping the federal bureaucracy.

The crucial point man for Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE assault on the federal workforce and the many federal agencies that sponsor research into every aspect of the well-being in America has been Russell Vought. He is an extreme conservative who was the architect of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 blueprint that called for the all-out dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. In the view of the far right, that bureaucracy had morphed into an all-powerful and unelected fourth branch of the US government and the president no longer had control of the administrative state. Although this was a major issue in the 2024 campaign—Trump, under pressure, would disavow any connection to Project 2025 during the campaign—many in America, including some who supported Trump, were stunned when the president did what he said he wouldn’t do.

Vought was nominated by Trump to run the Office of Management and Budget, which controls the flow of money throughout the federal government; the appointment was approved by a straight party line vote in the Senate. OMB is the office that drafted most of Trump’s array of executive orders that called for immense federal cutbacks. Agencies were shuttered, and thousands of federal works were dismissed or reassigned to minimal tasks. Among the victims was the US Agency for International Development, whose ten thousand employees were responsible for distributing food and essentials to the needy around the world. The agency was committed to promoting agricultural development and improving food security and the quality of life in vulnerable communities in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.

Vought’s nomination was a shoo-in at the Senate, since the Republicans have a fifty-three to forty-seven advantage and none of the Republican members dared to cross the president. The cowed Democrats, who were unable to stop any of Trump’s shockingly unqualified Cabinet nominees, offered little more than a tepid response to the tsunami that was before them.

If the Democrats, or their staffers, had done their homework, they could have raised a spirited debate about Vought’s disturbingly paranoid view of America. The usually closed-mouth Vought, who for two years served with little publicity as OMB director during Trump’s less radical first term, gave what was for him an astonishingly informative interview two months before Trump’s inauguration to Tucker Carlson. I found no evidence in the Vought confirmation transcripts that any senator or their aides had seen or read transcripts of the interview, although a few Democrats posed sharp questions that received no direct response. There was, as all seemed to know, no chance that any of the cowed Republican senators would dare to defy Trump by not voting for Vought, unless Vought, as Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards famously said of himself decades ago, had been caught “in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”

Here are a few of Vought’s assertions from the Carlson interview transcript that have become conservative Republican dicta over the years, with one new fact: radical Republicans, led by a president with revenge and profit high on his agenda, are now in charge, and it will be the end of independent agencies throughout the government:

“The left has innovated over one hundred years to create this fourth branch of an administrative state. You and I might call it the regime— this administrative state that is totally unaccountable to the president that lets it move in the direction that it has been going. . . . They have essentially taken authority. . . . They have no legitimate authority in the Constitution. . . . [The president says:] ‘I am fully aware of the tools at my disposal and I’m going to use them on behalf of the American people . . . I’m going to go do what I said I would do. . . .’ It will certainly read in the papers like chaos. That’s good.

“Yeah, you’re going to have to kick over peoples’ paradigms. You’re going to have to kick over people’s turfs. You’re going to have to change peoples’ understanding of things that they have invested their whole life into. . . . That’s going to cause a lot of turmoil into these bureaucracies, and you got to fight through it . . . the aspect of ‘Oh my gosh, you guys are racist and you guys don’t care about us as people. . . . One of the arguments they’re using in the press against me right now, as they say, ‘He called for trauma inside the bureaucracies.’ Yeah, I called for trauma within the bureaucracies.

“The bureaucracies hate the American people. . . . So, yeah, I would want to provide trauma against that bureaucracy in a way that frees the American people from the people that have assumed the type of power that the Constitution in no law, no public debate ever gave them. Does that mean we dislike everyone working at federal agencies and want them to have a bad life. No, of course. . . . We want to turn over the bureaucracies that [are] traumatizing the American people. . . . I think [Trump is] so unique in terms of being an historical transformational person that can actually save the country. . . . We’re put here for a reason. We’re put here because God has given us a particular purpose for a particular time, and it’s incumbent to us to be responsible with those moments that we’re given.”

Invoking God is a standard political practice, but Vought’s message—and Trump’s—is one of enormous destruction. America has thrived because of the work done by independent agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which gives US citizens—whether Democrat, Republican or independent—a strong voice against abuses by banks and other financial institutions.

Vought thinks otherwise. He told Carlson:

“We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch. . . . The president has to move executively as fast, as aggressively, as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle the bureaucracy in their power centers. . . . There are no independent agencies. . . . And it’s always not just about firing [federal] workers, although there’s certainly going to be massive layoffs and firing, particularly across some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist. But what I found was you get better staff work when people are now in their mind realizing, ‘Okay, I’m not immune.’ . . . Why are the people that we pay with our tax dollars immune to the pressure that the rest of us feel?

“You have a president who steps in and says, ‘You know what? There is no constitutional amendment for me to take control of the administrative state. I am going to do in reverse everything that you have done.’ I think that is the great hope. What you need is people who are able to absorb political heat. They don’t have fear of conflict. They can execute under withering enemy fire. They are up to speed. . . . They are unbelievably committed to the president and his agenda and truly believe in their bones that they’re not there for their own agenda. They’re there for what President Trump was elected to do.”

As these comments make clear, we are in the hands of a small group of political zealots, who want to return to an America that no longer exists. But their leader was elected by the American people in a free and open election. I am not sure that, as the polls suggest, that everyone who cast their vote for Trump remains committed to his policies, as articulated by Russel Vought.

The next few years will be difficult.

Paywalled.

In late 2018 and early 2019, before the release of the Mueller report, I sometimes felt fear that if I didn’t get out of the legacy press soon, I might go on a tri-state killing spree, ending up a young father gunned down on the Taconic Parkway. I thought those feelings were past, but a clip of Ezra Klein chuckling to former Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith about Russiagate brought them all back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwXoZ1dF3G4

Smith, whose decision to publish the loony Steele Dossier in full despite obvious factual problems struck me as nuts at the time, and later doubled down on the decision multiple times (including in a long Atlantic piece in 2023), now smiles and speaks of regrets. Echoing former New York Times editor Dean Bacquet, who after the collapse of the Mueller probe complained of pressure on Russia from “our readers who want Donald Trump to go away,” Smith explained Buzzfeed’s predicament:

A lot of our readers felt, and a lot of Democrats felt, like, there’s no way this guy was legitimately elected. There are two theories. One, it was Facebook. Two it was Russia. And lots of media energy went into chasing those two things. The White House felt totally under siege from, like, that set of questions. I think I have regrets about that in retrospect…

Smith was speaking on his own “Mixed Signals” podcast. Guest and author Klein, whose current hit book Abundance enumerates the many things besides galactic media misses that contributed to “the rise of Trumpism,” grinned and asked:

“Do you regret publishing the dossier? Is what you’re saying? Is that the admission here, Ben?”

“I would say I’m more ambivalent about it than I used to be.”

Mixed Signals co-host Max Tani playfully jumped in, ragging his partner. “We made news on our own podcast! You’re not supposed to make news. Ezra is supposed to make news.”

Klein described his own attitude toward Trump-Russia. “I was always very hostile to the ‘Facebook did it through disinformation’ theory,” he said. “I mean, you go back to what I said then. I never thought there was evidence that Russian disinformation, or ads, or something on Facebook, had turned the election. I thought James Comey had turned the election, which I still think is true.”

At the time I was one of just a handful of mainstream press figures expressing reservations about Trump-Russia “collusion.” Like Glenn Greenwald, who was still at The Intercept and called for an independent investigation, and Aaron Maté, who was writing for The Nation, I was neither a fan of Donald Trump (I’d just published Insane Clown President), nor had I said much beyond noting a lack of evidence and stressing caution. Still, like Glenn and Aaron, I gained leper status anyway. Any colleague who expressed similar doubts would have stood out to all of us. We’d have been glad of those private thoughts of Ezra’s. It wasn’t to be. He went on:

The Russia stuff, I always thought that was worth investigating. I mean, I guess people can debate whether or not it got too much, and it definitely became a deus ex machina for liberals. I never believed that Russia had won the election for him, and I don’t think I ever said anything that would’ve suggested I did believe that…

Liberals had gotten themselves into a weird place where they wanted some explanation for how it had happened. There was some view that Mueller was going to come out with some report, and that would be the end of this. And I think something very different in the liberal mind is a recognition that there’s something very authentic in Trump’s appeal, and nobody comes in and saves you on a horse. And I think that’s really important. I also think the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, and that the election was so incredibly close in the battleground states in 2016, contributed to this feeling that this guy was a fluke and should be treated as kind of an aberration.

I’ve run into Ben maybe once or twice, don’t know Ezra, and have heard both are nice enough guys, but what the fuck? Listen to the reasoning: “Clinton’s close electoral college loss broke the brains of audiences, who to their credit have since come to accept that Donald Trump has enough authentic appeal to win elections. At the time, however, they were so incapable of believing the election had been won organically that they gobbled up any soothing explanation and were reduced to praying for rescue by divine plot intervention. And looking back, that’s what Russiagate was, right? Not that we ever believed Russia won the election for him…”

About that: on July 13, 2017, the Center for International Studies published, “Ezra Klein: Collusion is Likely,” featuring the money quote: “I believe at this point collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign is likely. We know for a fact that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee files and released them in ways… designed to hurt Hillary Clinton… Given how razor-thin the final margin was for Trump, we know they might have literally decided the election.” A few days earlier, in Vox: “We know that foreign power conducted a large-scale and successful cyber-espionage effort against the Democratic Party… The election is tainted. The White House is tainted. Our foreign policy is tainted.”

Later that year, on October 24th, 2017, the Washington Post finally broke the story that the Steele dossier was paid Clinton campaign research. That should have been the end of the story, but not to Klein, who wrote in Vox days later: “[Russia] really did conduct social media operations designed help Trump. Both their targets and their timing were extremely sophisticated for a foreign government that has traditionally shown itself to have a poor understanding of American politics… At this point, it would be a truly remarkable coincidence if two entities that had so many ties to each other… and that were working so hard toward the same goal never found a way to coordinate.”

If you’re looking for reasons why “liberals” fell into that “weird place” of putting their faith in that “deus ex machina,” you’ll find plenty more like the above. Most interesting, though, was the caveat Klein just offered in the podcast:

The idea that he was possibly compromised or that the people around him were, I don’t think was or is, by the way, crazy. I think that the network of corruption around Donald Trump is vast and much worse than we actually know — including now, by the way, where I think crypto has created whole new vistas of potential corruption.

In the middle of a speech about how readers (but not him!) lost touch and went searching for magic collusion connections instead of facing electoral reality and embracing tough policy changes as Abundance recommends, Klein moves to a new set of possible conspirators, whose reach could be “much worse than we actually know.” The lesson of Trump-Russia was about the danger of speculative rumination in realms beyond what we “actually know,” but apparently we’re not in the lesson-learning mode yet. Incidentally I agree it’s worth investigating Trump’s crypto connections and schemes like the Trump meme coin, but aren’t we also still waiting for a full autopsy on the Sam Bankman-Fried episode? At least one candidate to replace Gerry Connolly as ranking member at House Oversight was supported by an SBF-bankrolled PAC.

A last note: in that 2023 Atlantic piece, Smith talked about complaints he received from people like Jake Tapper (who worried the dossier’s publication made the Trump-Russia story “less credible”). “I’d expected that backlash, and at first welcomed it,” he wrote. “I thought we were on the right side of the decade-old conflict between the transparent new internet and a legacy media whose power came in part from the information they withheld. And, of course, I loved the traffic…”

The reason the publication of the Steele dossier freaked out a lot of people in conventional media was because it broke a longstanding taboo on publishing material one knows to be untrue or unverifiable. Of course, taboos are made to be broken, the Internet age did usher new variables into the media business, and part of the reason the dossier could be published by Smith and not at CNN or the New York Times was because, as Smith himself has said, Buzzfeed was a “slightly fringy place.”

Looking back, though, that “fringy” status of Buzzfeed just helped complete a complex end-run around the safeguards against fake news. Oppo researchers from Fusion-GPS tried to sell Steele’s reports to the Times, The New Yorker, ABC, and CNN. Those outlets passed, unable to verify the stuff. But the FBI, CIA, and NSA weren’t bound by journalistic ethics, and were able to stick Steele’s “blackmail” claim in an annex to an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017. Jim Comey then presented that Annex with the “blackmail” material to President-elect Trump in an early January briefing, ostensibly to help make him aware it was out there. After that, news of the meeting was leaked, leading to a January 10, 2017 CNN report that Smith says helped force his hand.

Once the dossier was published, other mainstream outlets felt like the choice was either report, or ignore a story that “lit up the Internet,” as The Guardian put it. It was all tidy: once Smith went public (and while his decision drew some fire, it was also backed by the Columbia Journalism Review) everyone had a justification for speculating about the unverifiable thing, which as Smith now notes, besieged that White House for a good long while. The smile as he speaks of “regrets” is so mischievously wry, it’s hard not to admire. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s really a hell of a smile, a perfect nod to a brilliant maneuver. Sure, it helped blow up the credibility of a storied industry, but wasn’t it also worth it, just a little? No wonder people hate us…

In his interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ezra Klein repeatedly—over and over again—launders the ongoing genocide by blaming Palestinians for it. He does this through the term "agency," the favorite liberal and pseudo-intellectual buzzword used to justify all their genocidal mania.

This is the magic of "agency": it turns everything into whatever you want while pretending you are making an objective, fair, and reasonable analytical point. It allows you to posture as intellectually honest and serious. That is who Ezra Klein is. He is the paragon of moral virtue, the quintessential New York Times liberal. He determines what is just and unjust for the world today and throughout history. The Ezra Kleins embody virtue.

So, are Palestinians being subjected to genocide by Ezra Kleins? That, in their moral framework, is virtue. That is moral necessity. That is the height of morality itself.

Why? Because "agency," a pseudo-intellectual concept I have thoroughly dismantled before.

In this public News Brief, we discuss the media and high-profile Democratic Party leaders and 'Free Speech' crowd's muted—or, in many cases, completely silent—response to the greatest attack on free speech in recent memory: Trump's kidnapping and disappearing of Palestinian solidarity students.

I’d never heard of the “Harper’s letter”: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/