The Worst Week in Media History: O’Keefe Exposes Bias of CNN’s Zucker

Posted on | October 15, 2019 | Comments Off on The Worst Week in Media History: O’Keefe Exposes Bias of CNN’s Zucker

First, there was Ronan Farrow’s exposé of widespread sexual harassment (and official tolerance thereof) at NBC News. Now, James O’Keefe has got undercover video confirming blatant bias at CNN:

CNN President Jeff Zucker has insisted the cable news network has to maximally focus on pushing the story of Democrats trying to impeach President Donald Trump, despite objections by staffers that the push is harming the organization’s journalistic integrity, according to undercover recordings.
“Impeachment is the story,” Zucker said during a recent 9 a.m. rundown call, according to one of the recordings, which were released on Oct. 14 by investigative journalism nonprofit Project Veritas. “You know, I know we’re going to feel a tendency to think we’re doing too much, but this is the story.”
At least some of the recordings were provided by Cary Poarch, a satellite uplink technician who works as a contractor at CNN’s Washington bureau.
“I just want them to own where they’re at,” he said of CNN. “Like, hey, if we lean left, cool, let’s just say we lean left, if we lean right, let it be known.” . . .
Several CNN employees told Poarch or other undercover reporters about their dissatisfaction with Zucker’s approach.
“There’s just nothing we can do if Zucker wants impeachment every single day to be the top story,” said Christian Sierra, media coordinator at CNN, in one of the recordings.
Sierra said he “hate[ed] how everything is like all Trump all the time now.
“Everyone at the network complains about it,” he said. “They hate covering Trump every day.”
Mike Brevna, CNN floor manager, expressed a similar sentiment in another recording.
“It’s the Trump Network, dog. It’s like, it’s everything is all Trump. They not even thinking about, they not even thinking about anybody else,” he said. “They sold themselves to the devil. It’s, it’s sad. Because there’s so much news going on out there, but they don’t cover none of it. All they do is, because of sponsors and everything.” . . .
Zucker seems to have a particular disdain for Fox News, a major competitor that is outperforming CNN in viewership ratings by more than two to one.
“I think what’s going on in America now is really, fundamentally the result of years of fake news, conspiracy nonsense from Fox News that has taken root in this country,” Zucker said during a 9 a.m. rundown call. “And I’m dead serious about this.”
It didn’t seem to be just a personal observation either.
“Fake conspiracy nonsense that Fox has spread for years is now deeply embedded in American society and at the highest levels of the Republican elected officials, as we’ve seen with [Sen.] Ron Johnson,” Zucker said. “Frankly, that is beyond destructive for America and I do not think we should be scared to say so.”
In what appeared to be another rundown call, Zucker noted that “a lot of people at CNN” were “friendly” with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
“Time to knock that off,” Zucker said. “And it’s time to call him out.”

Question: When did that happen? My hunch is that it was during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, when Graham became enraged by the obviously phony accusations of sexual misconduct Democrats used to smear the nominee. As long as Graham was perceived as a potential anti-Trump ally within the GOP, it was OK for CNN staff to be “friendly” to the South Carolina senator; but once the Kavanaugh hearings pushed Graham into the pro-Trump camp, Zucker said “knock that off.”

Almost nobody is watching CNN, as Jim Treacher notes:

If you don’t watch CNN, you’re in good company. It’s consistently the third-rated news network. Last week’s big event on CNN, that LGBTQ town hall, was watched by 1.1 million people. That’s compared to 2.5 million watching MSNBC and 3.7 million watching Fox News. Most Americans don’t get their news from cable TV, and most cable-TV news consumers avoid CNN. . . .
The network’s relentless anti-Trump drumbeat has driven people away. . . . CNN is pure propaganda for the Democratic Party, and most people aren’t interested in that.

This probably explains Zucker’s obsession with Fox News, as well as his idea that CNN’s job is to promote the impeachment of Trump. If you’re the third-place network, and the first-place network attracts mostly conservative viewers, there is a certain market logic in trying to maximize your share of the liberal audience. But that strategy was complicated for CNN by the fact that second-place MSNBC has built its “brand” around being a left-wing propaganda operation. Zucker was thus trying to compete with MSNBC for the kook-fringe Democratic Party base, and climbing aboard the impeachment bus — indeed, climbing into the driver’s seat of that bus — might have seemed to Zucker like a smart strategy. And he has failed, spectacularly so.

What next? Expect that CNN will claim to be a victim of anti-Semitism. It’s all they’ve got left: “Fox New conspiracy nonsense!”

Category: CNN

The Annual Admiral Of The Ocean Sea Appreciation Post

Posted on | October 15, 2019 | Comments Off on The Annual Admiral Of The Ocean Sea Appreciation Post

— by Wombat-socho

Yes, it’s time again to give Christopher Columbus his due, smack down Aztec apologists, and mock the weak and ungrateful Anglos who agitate for “Indigenous Peoples Day”. I say, if they don’t like it here in New Spain, they can go back to whatever endemonised Protestant hellholes their worthless ancestors came from. In the meantime, what better way to honor Columbus than by perusing his biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, written by the eminent naval historian, Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison? Speaking of Morison, you might also enjoy The Two-Ocean War, a distillation of his excellent fifteen-volume Official History of the United States Navy During World War II down into one volume.

It’s not often that an author can kill off his main character in the opening chapters of the novel and still make it work, but that’s exactly what Neal Stephenson does in Fall: or, Dodge In Hell, a sequel to his technothriller Reamde. Bluntly stated, this is a book about death and the afterlife, in an age when people with sufficient wealth can have their brains scanned and uploaded into computer networks. As the first man to have this done, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast finds himself with a lot of time on his hands but no idea what to do with it…at first. This book works on two levels – there’s the people trying to sort out the legal, moral, and practical aspects of dealing with people who are dead, but whose minds are very much alive on a network, and there’s the people living in the afterlife Dodge has made, some of whom are none too happy with it. That section reads like a bizarre riff on Greco-Roman mythology, with echoes from subplots in Cryptonomicon lurking in the underbrush. If you liked Reamde and its characters, you’ll probably enjoy Fall.

I was looking forward to Rebecca Kuang’s The Dragon Republic with mixed anticipation and dread – on the one hand, her protagonist Rin is easy to sympathize with, but on the other hand, the fantasy milieu of a China torn by the ravages of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is pretty horrifying, perhaps more so if you’re familiar with the history of that war. So at the beginning of the second novel, despite having obliterated the invading Mugen Federation by unleashing the Phoenix Goddess, Rin and her fellow mages/shamans (there’s effectively no difference) are hiding out, doing odd jobs for the Pirate Queen and on the run from the vengeful Empress. A good part of the novel has to do with the intervention of the technologically advanced Hesperians, who intervene on behalf of a rebel warlord whose wife was raised in Hesperia and is a fanatic worshipper of the the Hesperian god, the Maker. Rin is forced to undergo tests and examinations by the Hesperian priests, and manages to escape with some of her friends when the warlord betrays her to the Hesperians. There’s a lot of action in The Dragon Republic, since most of the book involves an ongoing rebellion against the Empress and ends with a secondary rebellion by the southern provinces against the Dragon Warlord and his Hesperian allies. All this is very entertaining, and occasionally horrific, but I for one am starting to wonder if I’m cheering for the wrong side here, since almost all of Rin’s choices seem to make things worse.

Next time around, I have a few things to say about Robert Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein and a few other books besides.

Hey! I have some short stories you might be interested in!

Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 10.14.19

Posted on | October 14, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.14.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Silver Spade
Ammo.com: “If It Bleeds, It Leads…”
EBL: CNN’s Big Gay LGBTQ Town Hall, also, Vintage Cartoon – Christopher Columbus
Twitchy: Byron York Makes Adam Schiff Look Even Worse For Booting Republican Matt Gaetz From Impeachment Hearing
Louder With Crowder: BUSTED – ABC News Caught Passing Off KY Gun Range Footage As Syria Footage

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Chinatown Wasn’t Meant To Be The Entire City, also, The Book Of 70 Shit Tests
American Greatness: Minnesota State Rep Among Antifa Mob Attacking Trump Supporters After Rally, also, The Strategies of Targeting Trump
American Power: Ronan Farrow, Catch And Kill
American Thinker: Fox News Joins The Fake News Pollsters, also, Trump Stands Between America & Tyranny
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Two Children Dead, 24 In Critical Condition After Receiving Spoiled Vaccine From State Clinic, also, Flashback – Barbara Walters Calls Communist Cuba “One Of The Freest Nations On Earth”
BattleSwarm: Giant Animatronic Donald Trump As Warhammer 40k’s God-Emperor, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
Camp of the Saints: American Leftists’ New Target – Ham Radio Operators
Cafe Hayek: Ignoring Income Inequalities
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, A Half-Baked Navy With Jimmy Drennan & Blake Herzinger On Midrats
Da Tech Guy: Dems Confirm My 2016 Religious Freedom Fears, also, Report From Louisiana – An Edwards/Rispone Runoff
Don Surber: America Must Save A Third World Nation, also, Highlights Of The News
First Street Journal: For The Democrats, There’s No Position That’s Too Far Left
The Geller Report: Turkey, Hezbollah Threaten Europe – Kneel Or Face Wave Of 3.6 Million Refugees, also, This Is What First World Civil War Looks Like
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Messier 104
Hollywood In Toto: Critic v. Critic – Joker, also, Woods, Carpenter Make Vampires A Neglected Treat
Joe For America: Shifty Schiff Now Claims Quid Pro Quo Unnecessary To Impeach Trump
Legal Insurrection: James O’Keefe To #ExposeCNN With Undercover Videos Dropping Today, also, Tulsi Gabbard Took Down Kamala Harris Over False Career Narratives, Will She Do The Same To Fauxcahontas?
The PanAm Post: The Golden Donkey, also, Maduro’s Plan To Recover Embargoed Gold In London
Power Line: Last Night, We Saw Fascism In The Streets, also, Trade Deal With China Is A Blockbuster
Shark Tank: FL Ag Commissioner Nikki Fried’s Political Balancing Act Continues
Shot In The Dark: Minnesota Department Of Predictive Intersectional Hate Hoaxing
STUMP: Pensions Primer – Public, Private, Single Employer, Multiemployer, & Church Plans
The Political Hat: Nevada Legalizes Torture Killing Of Dementia Patients
This Ain’t Hell: Eric Winstead – Phony SEAL With Fake Medal of Honor, also, Hanoi Jane’s At It Again
Victory Girls: Armed Robber Shot By Clerk – Robber’s Family Furious, also, Rashida Tlaib Plotting To Lock Up Trump Allies
Volokh Conspiracy: Federal Court Rules Administration Can’t Use National Emergency To Divert Funds For Wall
Weasel Zippers: MSGT Mark Allen Dies Ten Years After Being Shot In Head While Searching For Bowe Bergdahl, also, Rand Paul Calls For Probe Into Democratic Senators Who Threatened Ukraine
Megan McArdle: These Spineless Weaklings Have Shamed Themselves And Their Country
Mark Steyn: The Undoing Of An Election, also, The Forger & The Scrounger

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

‘There Are These People in This Country’

Posted on | October 14, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘There Are These People in This Country’

How our media overlords see us:

On Sunday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” former ABC “World News’ anchor Sam Donaldson accused President Donald Trump’s supporters of having a “fixation” on returning America to a “white Christian country.”
Donaldson said, “The Trump rallies are Trump’s strong supporters. I mean, ‘lock her up,’ all the things he says, all the vicious, mean things he says, they love it. There are these people in this country. They’re good Americans otherwise. They’ll probably give you the shirt off their back, they’ll help you if you need it, but they have this fixation. They want to return this country to the white Christian country that they believe it should be again. They don’t want the diversity, and they follow him for this, but they’re not the country. We are a diverse people, we are good and strong because of that, and we’re going to come back to that. I assure you.”

Let me say this: I like Sam Donaldson. He was not born to the moneyed blueblood Eastern elite. He is the son of a West Texas farmer and got his education at a second-tier state college (now UTEP) before joining the Army where he served as an artillery captain. So he is not like some of these young punks with their Ivy League degrees and arrogant sense of entitlement. What then explains Donaldson’s attitude? I blame two things: Partisanship and generational blindness.

Sam is a Texas Democrat, plain and simple. He was born and raised in an era when there was no such thing as a Republican in Texas, and in that sense resembles Dan Rather — a native of Wharton, Texas, three years older than Donaldson — and also his late ABC colleague, Cokie Roberts, the daughter of Louisiana Democrat Hale Boggs. To such people, the offspring of New Deal Democrats, and themselves old enough to recall the JFK “Camelot” era, the Democrats are and always will be the natural rulers of America. They instinctively act as cheerleaders for the Democrats the way I cheer for the Alabama Crimson Tide, expressing a sense of inherited loyalty, as it were. No fact or argument can dissuade them from this partisanship, because it is inherently irrational.

The other factor is that a rich old white guy like Donaldson cannot be made to understand what “diversity” means in practical terms for the young white person from less privileged circumstances. While his own four children are probably doing all right for themselves, it is the offspring of the white working and middle classes who are watching their communities and life prospects destroyed in the name of “diversity.”

What would Sam Donaldson say to the young white person in Minnesota, for example, who cannot go to downtown Minneapolis for fear of being assaulted by Somali street gangs? It’s impossible to make many people of Donaldson’s generation come to grips with such problems, or to make them understand that these problems are a result of policy decisions which could easily be amended or reversed without harming any lawful immigrant. It is only because our current crazy-quilt pattern of immigration laws act as perverse incentives — a magnet for illegal immigration — that we have the problems we now have, and most elders in both political parties are blind to the scope and nature of the situation.

Sam Donaldson’s accusation that Trump’s supporters are merely nostalgic reactionaries is typical of a certain class of people who, for various reasons, refuse to consider the possibility that America is now facing problems without precedence in our history, the solution of which will require us to alter or abandon our established pattern of politics.

Trump does not represent a return to some beloved status quo ante, but rather an attempt to shake off the legacy of what, for lack of a better term, I call Bushism — a go-along-to-get-along attitude of “bipartisan compromise” that makes Republicans not the opponents of Democrats, but rather their accomplices. In an age when Democrats are beholden to the likes of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, conservatives can no longer imagine that we are dealing with people of good will, who want the best for America’s future. Today’s Democrats hate America and want to destroy it, so that they can preside over the wreckage and ruin.

Category: Media Bias

Her Royal Majesty the Queen Declares Brexit Parliament’s Top Priority

Posted on | October 14, 2019 | Comments Off on Her Royal Majesty the Queen Declares Brexit Parliament’s Top Priority

Somewhat of a formality, but nevertheless important:

The U.K. government is still determined to see Brexit through by October 31 — and you can take that from the queen.
The monarch opened her speech Monday, which sets out the government’s legislative plans, by making it clear that Boris Johnson’s top priority is “to secure the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on 31 October.”
Speaking from the throne in the House of Lords, the queen said her government intends to develop a new partnership with the EU “based on free trade and friendly cooperation.”
The ceremony marks the beginning of a new parliamentary session and lays out the government’s new legislative agenda, with 26 bills announced on domestic policy areas including crime, immigration, health, and the environment.
However, since Prime Minister Boris Johnson does not command a majority in the House of Commons these plans are unlikely to become law quickly and instead are an indication of what the Tories would promise if they secure a general election.

Too bad the Queen didn’t demand the beheadings of Remainers.

Category: Great Britain

Rule 5 Sunday: Revolution Calling

Posted on | October 13, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It’s been a disappointing week on the Rule 5 front. All the actresses and models who normally get all excited about great social movements have fallen oddly silent this week, which I guess is better than the disgusting slurping on Chairman Xi’s microwiener currently being performed by the NBA and Blizzard, and as an ongoing perversion by Disney, Nike, Apple, and other supposedly American corporations. I don’t know, maybe while I was suspended from Twitter last night I missed Alyssa Milano’s heartfelt plea for freedom in Hong Kong, but somehow I doubt it. So this week, we’re going to again choose cute over pretty, and present the newest mascot of the Hong Kong protesters, Mei from the game Overwatch, which is very popular in America and Red China both. Mei’s background is Chinese, so it was almost inevitable that she’d be seized on as a symbol of freedom. Here’s one of the propaganda posters whipped up by online supporters of the Hong Kong protesters.

On a happier note, Ninety Miles From Tyranny brings us Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #769, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Persistence Hunting Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL has Bad Decisions, Cooking With Gas, Samantha Guthrie, Culture Of Corruption, Hong Kong Protesters, and Pumpkin Spice Rule 5.

A View From The Beach scoops up Blake Bartelli, Another Great Moment in Climate Hypocrisy, Fish Pic Friday – Cami Mantilla, Good Advice From MDDNR, Matt Lauer a Pain in the Ass at NBC, Tanlines Thursday, Fishing Edition, Ha, Ha, Fooled Ya!, Pumpkin Spice Tuesday, I Don’t See This as Bad News, “House of the Rising Sun” and Palm Sunday

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe this week is Jenny Agutter, and at Bacon Time it’s Rule 5 Redheads.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!
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Category: Rule 5

Leading #NeverTrump ‘Expert’ Has Just Now Noticed the Democrats Are Crazy

Posted on | October 13, 2019 | Comments Off on Leading #NeverTrump ‘Expert’ Has Just Now Noticed the Democrats Are Crazy

It’s possible you have no idea who Tom Nichols is, but he is The Expert™ who wrote The Book™ about being The Expert™ and he is one of the #NeverTrump contingent frequently mocked by Ace of Spades.

Despite his exaggerated sense of his own importance, Tom Nichols is actually such a dime-a-dozen nobody that you can ignore him completely (as is my habit) and never really miss anything of value. Nevertheless, because he is an ex-Republican who hates Trump, The Expert™ Tom Nichols has access to media platforms that are usually off-limits to actual conservatives, and so at times he becomes impossible to ignore.

In USA Today, Nichols takes issue with his new Democrat allies:

When we watched CNN’s LGBTQ town hall for the Democratic candidates Thursday, we had very different reactions. This is the event, you remember, where former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas said he’d punish religious institutions for refusing gay marriage, and where Sen. Kamala Harris of California started by informing us of her pronouns, and then host Chris Cuomo, after a mild and dopey joke, had to go on Twitter the next day and apologize for making light of it. This is where Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fielded a question about traditional marriage with a sneering, smug insinuation that the only people who would ask her about that are men who can’t find a woman.
You thought it was great. You saw a ringing defense of LGBTQ rights and a reaffirmation of what Democrats stand for.
I saw it and thought: Are these people insane? Are they trying to lose the election? . . .

Yes, Mr. Nichols, the Democrats are insane, and if you hadn’t been so busy with whatever it is you’re so Expert™ about, maybe you would have noticed before Thursday night. But ignore me. I’m just some guy with a blog, and USA Today would never let me publish a column there.