Big Brother is here

 

Victor Davis Hanson sees frightening parallels to our societal decline and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  His column at American Greatness (“Did Americans Come to Love Big Brother?”) concludes:

Under memory-hole rules, just as everything good under the prior administration is now “bad,” so everything bad under the new administration will be presented as “good.” 

Americans in the new calm of all good news, and no bad news, then will supposedly come to appreciate that our Ministry of Truth’s Wokespeak—our version of Orwell’s “Newspeak”—was for our own good. 

Will it be easier to sleep when President Xi Jinping smiles at us on CNN, when we read in the New York Times how Joe Biden is reining in Benjamin Netanyahu, and when MSNBC hosts a town hall with John Kerry and Javad Zarif to announce a new and improved Iran Deal? 

When you are tired, and stuck in commute traffic, would you rather hear yet another NPR theory about how the sinister Donald Trump never paid his taxes and made millions while in office—or listen to a softer, upbeat voice narrate how the Biden Foundation is helping needy, undocumented workers?

So will Americans, exhausted by Trump-Goldstein, at least confess that the Ministry of Truth’s new rosy fantasies are not as nerve-wracking and depressing as its old angry hate-Trump propaganda? 

In other words, too many Americans may come to resemble Winston Smith, the defeated hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, who at last accepts the false calm—in his appreciation that all the devilish enemies of the past have faded away and there is only the tranquility of media triumph: “Everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Full column is here.

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Journalism: RIP. Again.

 Instapundit published this today:

#JOURNALISM:

Or click here.

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Handy summary of Russia Russia Russia

Via Bookwormroom:

click to embiggen or go to the Bookworm link here and scroll down.

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The Great COVID-19 Hoax

photo credit: Milwaukee Independent 

Some skeptics probably rank man-made global warming/cooling as the world’s Biggest Hoax.  Alicia Colon nominates the COVID-19 lock-down and related control tactics (think: face masks) as the Biggest Hoax.  Both hoaxes are all about money and power.  Her article “Falling for the Biggest Hoax in History” at American Thinker begins:

It will probably take months if not years for the truth of the Covid-19 pandemic to emerge, but when it does will any politician take responsibility for the lies and disinformation or the damage this hoax caused this great nation? I don’t think so, but what it did prove was what happens when the Democrats are in charge. They may not be in the White House but it is the House that wields the power over legislation and our money.  Couple this power with the useful idiots in the mainstream media to promote the widespread hysteria, and we then had the total capitulation of a frightened nation that accepted an unprecedented total lockdown of its existence. Shame on us.

Further into the article:

In previous severe flu seasons, there were much higher death rates yet there were no mandatory lockdowns.  Why do I call this pandemic a hoax?  The only reason why politicians, especially the Democrats in charge, pushed for shutting down the economy was because economic destruction was their ultimate goal. Trump’s strong economy, low unemployment numbers for all Americans was a real obstacle to a Joe Biden victory. Democrats have seized on this pandemic because they never let a crisis go to waste.

Americans have been gaslighted. We can’t take anything reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, the Drudge Report and the Alphabet Networks as gospel because it’s all designed to frighten and delay the recovery. . . .

Read Ms. Colon’s complete article here.

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Hanson on “Biden: The Great and Powerful”

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson explains the bizarre Biden campaign in “Biden: The Great and Powerful” at American Greatness.  From the article:

So the lightweight Biden was reflated as a sort of centrist hot air balloon to be used to float the hard-Left basket carriage beneath across the election defining line.

But fusion/collusion is not just a matter of a Potemkin veneer. Biden’s agenda is a fantasy creation. His role was to save the party from Sanders, win suburbanites, and pander to the party’s socialist sympathizers of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is an impossible task because today’s Democratic Party is a conglomeration of squabbling tribes and looney agendas. 

Biden is now ordered to keep still on the issues of the day, because what he once said to get nominated and please the Left would lose him the election. He wants to defund the police, but not to defund the police. He wants to phase out fossil fuels and end fracking but not to end fracking in Electoral College-rich Pennsylvania. 

The rioting, Biden insists, is due to police brutality but not due to it entirely. Trump’s COVID policies killed thousands, but Biden’s own bromides are either identical or would be less effective. 

And on and on, as Biden is made to wink and nod to the Left that his only role is to get them elected before collapsing at the finishing line. 

The media thinks this will work, and so owns the project. Biden will stay sequestered, visit a key state occasionally, pop out of the plane to say he is “barnstorming” Michigan or Wisconsin and then fly back into his Biden bunker for more Zoom puff interviews—and hope progressive polls show that he can endure weekly bleeding until November 3.

Every four or five days the media will blast the airways with, “Trump is ripping out mailboxes,” “Trump won’t concede and will have to be forcibly removed,” “Trump insulted our war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ as he hid from the rain to keep his hair dry.” Most recently Bob Woodward’s book queued up for its turn of 72 hours of smears, right after gab-bag Jeffery Goldberg’s anonymous sources faded out. 

Will this joint project of progressive ideologues of the Democratic Party and the major media work? 

Read the complete article here. 

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The Hodge Twins on Cannon Hinnant

 The Hodge Twins post topical videos all the time on YouTube.  They are informative and funny.  This one (7:16 minutes) is on the more serious side, as they are commenting on the shooting of Cannon Hinnant.  However, considering the daily deluge of Black Lives Matter propaganda, they are also showing the bias and corruption in the media.

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A meme to start the week

Seen on social media:

The Summer of Our Gaslighting Discontent

Overwhelmed by the riots, statue-toppling, and other manifestations of insanity? Brian Cates at UncoverDC expects we are in for 4½ months of more of the same. But there is a brighter side to all this. His article “The Summer of Our Gaslighting Discontent” begins:

I’ve got some bad news for you, folks. To get to that massive Trump landslide in November, we’re going to have to go through an ordeal because there will be a relentless and almost overwhelming amount of gaslighting until the election gets here.

A massive amount of time, effort and money will be invested by the Progressive Left to hide the real cultural shift going on in this country, as they use the legacy media to try to manufacture a fake cultural shift in the other direction.

Confederate statues were the start, now in less than two weeks the mob has moved on to founding father Thomas Jefferson and President Abraham Lincoln.

. . .

Mr. Cates concludes:

So keep this truth in mind the next 4½ months as you watch many prominent celebrities, newscasters, sports stars, musicians, and major companies all endlessly babbling about this awesome cool cultural shift away from America’s systemic racism [and Donald Trump!] to Marxist Social Justice and Joe Biden.

Well, let them babble. This 2020 election is not the referendum on America’s Systemic Racist Past as the gaslighters are so desperate to frame it.

It’s about a return to SANITY. That’s what most Americans will demand, and the elections results will demonstrate that.

Mr. Cates’s column is here. (And I hope he’s right.)

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Lion lyin' media

The media manipulates just about everything we read and see.  Here's a meme from social media:

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Reasons to Stop Freaking Out About Coronavirus

image credit: ora.tv 

Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart has some public service comments on the media hysteria over the Coronavirus. Here’s the beginning:

Coronavirus is an “info-demic,” a panic caused by the spread of partial and often misleading information about a health risk, sometimes deliberately.

The virus is real, and a small number of people have been infected. But it is going to pass.

It is an unpleasant respiratory illness, but it is not an organ-destroying horror like Ebola. Precautions are being taken, a vaccine will emerge, and life will continue as usual.

Here are five specific reasons to chill out.

1. Coronavirus is a familiar illness, and not as bad as others. It is from the SARS family — and less deadly. As Ha’aretz noted, “the mortality rate from the current disease ranges from 0.5 to 2 percent, and is significantly lower than the mortality rate from the 2002 SARS outbreak (9.5 percent) and much lower than the 2012 SARS outbreak (34.4 percent). It may even be close to the mortality rate from an ordinary flu outbreak in the United States.”

2. The U.S. response has been exceptionally good. There have only been 16 cases thus far, none deadly. . . .

Pollak’s additional 3 reasons are here.

UPDATE From Conservative Treehouse:

If you are following the tiered and strategic deployment of COVID-19 hype, you’ll note the next round of heavy artillery (the WHO/CDC have been saving) is the announcement of an official global “pandemic status” being reached.  That will be worth a week of panic media and perhaps another thousand point drop for U.S. stock market.

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Katie Hopkins at the Brexit Celebration

photo credit: relocatemagazine.com

Today, the great Katie Hopkins posted her column on FrontPage about the Brexit celebrations last Friday.  Here’s a part that will likely resonate with any Trump supporter:

And then the jarring realization: what we came for could not be delivered.

This was not a Brexit celebration as advertised in our minds. We wanted to feel it was over. That the monster had been slain and the white knights were back in control. We wanted to feel elated by our win.

But we could not. This was not the end and we knew it. Our adversaries are all still there: the system, the media, Remainers, globalists, and self-serving politicians. And many of these are now hardwired for something that feels like revenge.

Gathered here in the mud and rain, perhaps we also allowed ourselves a moment of weakness, a kind of confessional that this has been really brutal with scars of the fight across all. We are nursing bruises from families divided, children fallen silent, Christmases made awkward, and the loss of friends.

. . .

We have suffered far beyond these personal or parochial injuries: the politicians, elected by us but unwilling to represent us; the lawyers, interpreting law to block Brexit and suit their partisan beliefs; teachers schooling our children that Leave was the wrong answer and that all Brexiteers are racists.

. . .

This crowd needed the kind of Trump rally I have seen, a chance to feel triumphant, to feel strengthened by tough leadership and to be lifted up. They needed refueling with patriotic pride. . . .

She concludes with a sigh – watching the corrupt media in action:

I walked away quietly, watching mainstream news crews try to pick off the most drunk or incoherent of us to humiliate for their TV shows in the morning.

I posted this as I expect she speaks for many Tea Party readers. The full column is here.

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Still an uphill battle

Most of the metrics are up: the economy, employment, Main Street, jobs, etc.  And even though the impeachment charade should never have been validated by the Senate, many conservatives can be comforted by the fact that things are, indeed, getting better. Or are they?  Mark Bauerlein at American Greatness sobers us up again:

The election of November 2016, the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Mueller report debacle, the Iran turnaround, and other wins for conservatives may be satisfying, but they have not shaken the leftist lock on our institutions one bit. The simmering stew of LGBT rights, toxic masculinity, white privilege, disparate impact calculations, and Millennial social justice campaigns has become dogma in corporate America, media, higher education, K-12 public schools (and many private schools, too), Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Broadway, the art world, museums, libraries . . .

. . .

For the Left, outcomes trump procedure just as politics eclipses intelligence, conscientiousness, and competence. One thing I saw in more than 30 years in academia was that while leftists on the faculty were not always the brightest bulbs in the room, they often managed to populate university and department committees where policies were created and passed. While we were teaching and researching; they were reshaping the institution. We were getting on with our work, pushing our individual careers, getting our names in print, and believing we were advancing the field and the school. They were taking over. Put it this way: We were clueless, they were canny.

Donald Trump understands this. That’s one reason the Left despises him. He typically doesn’t bother to debate ideas and ideals, but this is not anti-intellectualism, as the liberal says. It is, instead, his awareness that politics is now, first and foremost, a battle of persons, not ideologies or tax rates or trade. The Kavanaugh episode proves the point, for this battle was all about the individual (which is one reason why Supreme Court appointments are so heated).

In recent times, conservatives have tended to focus on ideas. If, after President Trump leaves office, they don’t start thinking more about personnel, if they don’t consider the population of institutions as much as they do the structure of institutions, if they choose a leader who thinks technocratically instead of ad hominem-ly, we will indeed end up with the permanent Democratic majority liberal intellectuals have predicted for the last 20 years.

Read the rest here.

And a follow-up: One American News’s special report on FISA abuse (blogged here) is not at present scheduled for a re-broadcast.

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Victor Davis Hanson on impeachment and TDS

Gary Varvel cartoon via indystar.com

Historian Victor Davis Hanson’s article “Is Trump the Only Adult in the Room?” has been linked on multiple web and blogsites. Here’s an extract via Fox News:

Democrats addicted to attacking Trump –

even if impeachment drive hurts them

. . . [N]o president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

. . .

The common denominator of all this petulance is exasperation over the inability to derail Trump.

Trump’s many enemies fear he will be reelected in 2020, given a booming economy and peace abroad. They know that they cannot remove him from office. And yet they fear that the more they try to stain him with impeachment, the more frustrated and unpopular they will become.

Yet, like end-stage addicts, they simply cannot stop the behavior that is consuming them.

Full article is here.

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Who do you know who still trusts the media?

image credit: woodylewis.com

I am always on the lookout for reports to share with liberal friends and relatives – on why they should be skeptical of what they read in the New York Times or cleveland.com -- or what they watch on TV.  Today, Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart dissects the lazy, not to say dishonest reporting on the impeachment “inquiry” – and it’s worth printing out and taking to your Thanksgiving dinner for another attempt to change minds. A brief sample:

The Media Neither Read the Transcripts 

Nor Watched the Hearings

The media seem not to have watched the impeachment hearings: they stopped paying attention the moment the witnesses’ prepared statements were leaked and the Democrats’ talking points were posted.

Nor did many journalists bother to read the transcripts of the witnesses’ depositions in the earlier, closed-door hearings.

Partly that was because Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) rushed the public hearings before some of the most important transcripts were ready. Partly that was because the sheer length of the transcripts — hundreds of pages each — was daunting for journalists working on deadline.

But partly it was because some journalists are simply lazy, and others share the Democrats’ goal of bringing down President Donald Trump by any means necessary.

That’s why the media reports of the hearings were so inaccurate. 

. . .

On Wednesday afternoon, I was at the media center outside the Democrat debate in Atlanta, Georgia, co-hosted by MSNBC and the Washington Post. In the hours prior to the debate, MSNBC’s live coverage of the impeachment inquiry was showing on all the screens. Many journalists in the hall seemed not to be watching at all. They were mailing about, chatting to colleagues, or enjoying refreshments.

Some of them were top correspondents for leading media outlets — the ones who pose questions to candidates, and shape public opinion on their panel discussions and Sunday shows. Yet they were ignoring the hearings.

. . .

And what kind of journalist decides what the verdict should be before the other side has even had a chance to make its case?

Schiff and the Democrats broke from tradition and refused to let the president be represented by legal counsel, or to give Republicans near-equal control over the witness list. They held the hearings in the Intelligence Committee so they could use a secret room. Not one media company in the House press gallery bothered to sue for access — the way they sue the Trump administration for any small inconvenience, like the suspension of Jim Acosta’s press pass.

The media did not report what actually happened in the impeachment hearings, but what they want to have happened. They have enlisted themselves in a distortion of due process that threatens the constitutional rights of all Americans. If the president himself is not safe from abuse, none of us can be.

Read the whole thing here – and print it out!!!

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Impeachment vote? Sundance explains

image credit: thecollegefix.com

Everyone has read that Speaker Pelosi is holding a vote on Thursday to authorize impeachment proceedings against President Trump.  If you are suspicious of the announcement, you should be.  Sundance at ConservativeTreehouse explains what is really going on, and the bottom line is that this vote is intended as a sleight-of-hand.  It intends to create the impression of following the requirement to vote to begin the impeachment process, while actually not voting to authorize – as a Constitutional authorization would give the President and his defense team due process -- to face his accusers, subpoena their own witnesses, cross-examine witnesses, and so on. Here’s Sundance getting into the weeds:

The rules for an “impeachment investigation” would provide rights for the minority and also rights for the Executive branch.

So instead of having a House vote to authorize an impeachment investigation, with subsequent rights for the minority; they are having a House vote to affirm the “impeachment inquiry” with an entirely different set of House rules that do not include rights for the minority.

. . .

Lawfare is hoping that through this Thursday vote scheme they will be able to twist the legal process into providing their House inquiry judicial enforcement authority, or punishment possible for the executive not complying with a House committee subpoena.

. . .

Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler and Lawfare are attempting to create “judicial enforcement authority” without having an actual and constitutional vote to authorize an official “impeachment investigation”.   That’s what this Thursday House resolution is all about.

The Thursday House resolution is intended to authorize and validate the pre-existing Pelosi “impeachment inquiry”, and then expand the authority within the rules to create the impression of a full House impeachment investigation; without actually having a House  “impeachment investigation vote”…. because that would open-up rights to the minority and rights to the executive.

. . .

Pelosi et al have the full support of the complicit media to promote this charade.  Read the whole thing here.

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The Media Threat to America

Daniel Greenfield analyzes the insidious influence of the mainstream media on American values and culture. In his article at Front Page Magazine (“The Media is a Threat to America: and it’s destroying the country”), he concludes:

The media has gone from taking part in a political debate to turning into a James Bond villain.

The problem is not, as the media insists, the First Amendment, or Russian bots, or Facebook. The problem is an industry that built monopolies around investments in outdated technology. These technologies, from the printing press to radio to cable news, were revolutionary at the time.

The internet killed their monopolistic power, and they’ve been trying to rebuild it ever since.

The media would rather have a monopoly in a broken country, than live in a thriving country where internet content is too diversified to support traditional media organizations. Like Milton’s Satan, it would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And it’s turning the country into its own private hell.

The First Amendment was meant to protect speech, not industries. The media industry is trying to kill speech and is willing to kill the country to make it happen. 

But it’s the industry that needs to die.

Full article is here.

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Propaganda vs expanded sources of news

image credit: vectorstock.com

Cherie Zaslawsky’s article, “Trump Derangement Syndrome: A Misdiagnosis” starts off:

Listen to Fox News, and you'll hear phrases such as “Trump derangement syndrome” and “liberal heads are exploding” on a daily basis. 

Conservative newscasts are peppered with comments like these: “They're delusional!”  “The Democrats just can't seem to accept that they lost the 2016 election.”  “They've gone crazy!”

Crazy like a fox.

. . .

From the beginning of its “long march through the institutions,” the Left has been playing the long game.  That hasn't changed.  Leftists are playing it today.

Why did they take over the media?  The universities?  Hollywood?  To get their hands on the key levers of propaganda.  Add to this the leftward tilt of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and we're looking at a virtual lockdown on the primary sources of information and public influence.

. . .

What can be done?

I suggest that, rather than only responding to each of the Left's baseless attacks on our president, those on our side change the debate by exposing the radical leftists' use of propaganda — by shining a light into the dark recesses of their strategy.  This may wake up some of their followers and maybe even begin to free America from the dark power of the Left.

I have had limited success pointing the media’s corruption to people I know who still rely on The New York Times or NPR or CNN for their news. One suggestion that has worked a few times is to propose that a person expand their sources of news. Tuning in to conservative talk radio can be traumatic, but browsing through aggregators and at least comparing headlines has made a difference with some friends and relatives. These days my go-to sites are Politipage, Instapundit, Lucianne, and a few others (but not Drudge any more). Full American Thinker article is here.

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Inspiring Cartoon of the Day

 Ben Garrison cartoon at grrrgraphics.com via Conservative Treehouse

From the grrrgraphics website (a sort of an extended caption):

Citizen journalists are patriots who fight for TRUTH every day, whether as journalists like Thomas Paine or meme creators like Betsy Ross. It was Betsy’s meme that the colonists rallied around as the symbol of American independence. Those first American patriots put it all on the line for truth and freedom, just like modern citizen journalists who are proudly raising the flag.

The_Donald on Redditt has given a good foothold to plant the flagpole as Rush Limbaugh and Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse are raising the original Flag to its upright position, reinstating the intentions of the first American rebels and displaying the political union of the Original 13 Colonies.

Thomas Paine and Betsy Ross (American Intelligence Media) honor the flag and are ready for the war of independence from British tyranny. They have invited patriots around the world to join them in the pursuit of global peace and prosperity, freedom and liberty.

The “fake news” media is in ashes and shambles on the ground due to their continuous lies, propaganda, and deceit spewed on moral and decent people everywhere who reject their falsehoods and evil.

The opposition party’s fake news machines are spent, broken, and crumbled into a trash-heap of garbage.

. . .

More here. 

RELATED: This cartoon is Conservative Treehouse’s illustration for his post titled “The Restoration Alliance.” See here.

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Protect your rights against those claiming a crisis

Our First Amendment rights are at risk because of corruption in Big Tech, and our Second Amendment rights are at risk because progressives are using crises and tragedy to go for the guns. Prof. William Jacobson puts both risks in perspective at Legal Insurrection:

Every time I think the media-Democrat frenzy could not get any more frenzied, it gets more frenzied.

How seamlessly they have transitioned from almost three years of Russia-collusion-mania to the current frenzy claiming that anyone and everyone who supports Donald Trump is a white supremacist.

Trump supporters now, according the narrative, are both Putin-puppet traitors AND Hitler-wannabees. It’s all so dishonest by design; the leaders of this charge don’t actually believe it, they cynically manipulate their media and social media power to drive their supporters, many of whom do believe it, into hating political opponents as an ideology. MSNBC is ground zero for this manipulative denigration of half the population.

If it only were dishonest, it would be bad enough. But it’s worse because it now has become a hunt to find heretics for public shaming. This is not new, but now it is legitimized as an anti-Trump strategy by the Resistance. Congressman Joaquin Castro naming names in his community, including retirees and homemakers, is a symptom of a culture of total political war on the left. Other symptoms include the attempt to deplatform non-liberal voices from the internet and airwaves, led by well-funded groups like Media Matters.

More here. And the Action Alert from my previous blog on proposed red flag legislation is here.

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Propaganda for fun and profit

art credit: no-gods-no-masters.com

Corruption in the media just keeps getting worse. The anchors and pundits brazenly lie. They hardly ever retract. I had assumed the propaganda was ideologically-driven and power-driven, but I had not really considered how much money could be made by manufacturing blatant propaganda for gullible -- or at least uncritical viewers/readers. Stephen Ryan at American Thinker puts a few things together:

Right now, left-leaning mainstream media is getting flogged, and they deserve it for their dishonest reporting on the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory. Mass firings and a month of apologies by Jeff Zucker and Rachel Maddow would not be sufficient to mend the harm these organizations have done to America’s trust in news reporting.

But the folks who truly deserve to be put in their place and totally humiliated are the viewers of these pretend news shows. At what point do the Wellesley and Williams-educated elites look in the mirror and accept the fact that they have been taken for fools? They have enabled progressive media to manufacture rotten journalism. They never turned the channel.  

Most people got a glimpse of Rachel Maddow’s ringmaster act when she ran the elephants around a circle for forty-five minutes entertaining the masses with the promise that Trump’s tax returns would shortly be shot out of a cannon.  As the fuse burned and Rachel Maddow whipped the crowd into a frenzy, insinuating that she had caught the tax cheat, MSNBC producers were madly counting the gate.

Slate Magazine writes: “There was, of course, the mid-month burst of global attention surrounding the program’s unveiling of President Trump’s 2005 tax return, a scoop that yielded a series-best audience of just over 4 million viewers.”

Then suddenly… Boom!  - “TRUMP PAID HIS TAXES IN FULL!!!” Whoops. Cut to commercial.

For a nanosecond, media critics seemed embarrassed.  Slate called it a “mini-backlash among critics who accused Maddow of overhyping the discovery.”

But the ringmaster understood that nobody listens to the critics. What mattered most was the act: the bearded lady would be on the show the next day and the mob would show up.

The Trump tax return debacle, in certain ways, was a game changer for progressive media.

The fallout from the Trump tax return show was that network news producers tossed their journalistic ethics out of the window. The ghost of Walter Cronkite could finally be ignored -- the news legend’s white privilege delegitimized his legacy.  News organizations found themselves free to manipulate or willfully lie to their audience every single day.

And nobody seems to care. Certainly, Maddow’s audience doesn't care -- they show up every night.  Network news producers understand that now. In today’s world, it’s no longer the New York Times’ laughable and pretentious axiom “All the news that’s fit to print” that matters, it’s Randy Newman’s tune, “It’s money that matters,” that news media organizations dance to. Just ask Rachel.

Will there be any reckoning? The rest of the article is here.

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