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Joel: Beware of False Claims in the Media

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2022 //
65

Our reader, who signs in as Joel, has frequently noted the bias in the media towards negativity and “worst case scenario.” How many stories were published predicting a Red Wave, lamenting the dozens of seats that Democrats would lose, predicting doom and gloom. There is also its problem of “both-sides-ism,” as though the scientist who says the sun rises in the west is as equal in credibility as the one who says it rises in the East. I leave his own sentence structure unchanged.

I asked Joel to describe himself. He wrote:

I am a retired Trade Union activist who sees the attacks on America’s teachers as an attack on the most visible and the largest of Americas unions.
It is no accident that whether the Billionaire oligarchs / plutocrats / politicians who attack public schools and their teachers consider themselves socially progressive or are religio fascist , they abhor Unions.

He writes:

So for two years now I have been pointing out crime statistics on Diane’s blog and on Union Facebook page’s. Knowing that the American Public is always a sucker for the big bad Black man coming to get you; or simply the Willie Horton story . Which actually predates Willie Horton going back to Goldwater and his Nation of Moral decay and Nixon’s war on drugs. Which targeted minorities disproportionately.

Both on crime and inflation the supposed “Liberal Media” did its best to prove Trump correct in his charges against them. Whether it was intentional or not, the hype was far greater than the reality. For a group of people who profess to despise Trump and his merry band of seditious Neo Nazi White Christian Nationalists, they did their best to bring them back to power. Crime sells advertising .

They say, Inflation is the worst it has ever been— except at its peak, it was half the rate of the 1980s and accompanied by 3.5% unemployment now, not 8%. Endless stories of the terrible economy.

Last Fall when they started blasting away, it was under 5% . With gas lower than it had been from 2011-14 . Wage inflation was already moderating. Tough to have a wage price spiral without the wage component. The media frenzy did allow Corporations with virtual monopoly power to take the Public’s expectation of inflation and deliver it to them, tacking on record profits far above increased costs.

But Crime is the issue that may have cost Democrats 4-5 seats in NY and with it the House. All in Down State districts formally represented by Democrats . Far more harm done to Democrats on MSNBC , CNN, WaPo and the NY Times than on Fox News, the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal”’…. No one who follows the Murdoch rags is voting Democratic to begin with.

On top of a redistricting enabled by Cuomo appointed Judges as part of bone thrown to Republicans when they controlled the State Senate with the help of Cuomo’s turncoat IDC caucus. On top of Adams and Suozzi running around like they were Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, there were 800 stories a month in 2022 about crime in the NYC Media Market vs 130 a month in deBlasio’s last term ending in 2021. Talk about manufactured consent.

What was the reality. Last year there were fewer murders than 2011 a year Bloomberg was running around calling NYC the safest big City in the Nation . This year with a 13% reduction there will be fewer murders than 2012 the next to last year he was in office when he was taking bows for how safe the City was .


But not only lower than 2012; significantly lower than every year between 2012 all the way till when America was GREAT in 1960.


Your odds of being injured on a 2 mile ride in your car are greater than being injured in a violent crime in the NYC Subway. The murder rate in NYC truly does make it one of the safest cities in America with bail reform having little or no impact on recidivism.

Of course that is not the narrative from CNN, MSNBC, nor the local mass media. The Press made it sound that murders were like the terrible 60s when there were 1000 murders a year by mid decade . The 70s when there 1500 , the 80s when there were 1800 to 2000 and the early 90s when there were 2400 murders . There were 468 in 2021 and 379 as of last week in 2022 with only 6 weeks to go.

So here is the thing . Excluding the Garbage dump in the Harbor (Staten Island) that should be turned over to NJ. 82 % of Manhattan residents voted for Democrats. Ah but they are just woke liberals . 79% of Bronx Residents voted for Democrats not so woke , 73% of Brooklyn and 67% of Queens residents. So where all this supposed crime was happening it was not a concern enough to sway voters .


Yet in the NYC suburbs (all six counties) where all the seats were lost. Crime was lower in almost every major category recorded. 2021 Lower than not just 2020 but most years back to 2017 the last year listed in the state crime registry. The 100 million dollar Republican Willie Horton Campaign supplement by the ” Liberal Media ” and their 800 stories a month.

Heck of a Job Joe Scarborough, mission accomplished. And I know he is a Conservative Republican but he also claims to be a never Trump-er. Perhaps they will give him an extra hour to cover Hunter Biden’s Laptop.

Categories Economy, Fake News, Media

Andrew Van Wagner: Our Broken Media

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2022 //
14

Andrew Van Wagner argues persuasively in this article that the media tries so hard to avoid charges of left wing bias that it ends up repeating the Republican narrative. In bending over backwards, he writes, the media has an anti-Democratic bias.

This “both-sides-ism” led the media to predict a Red Wave, to anticipate how the Democrats would react to their looming election disaster. If you follow the headlines, Democrats were about to take a drubbing.

Journalists have substituted election predictions for substantive coverage of the issues. Voters end up less informed when reporting focuses on the horse race.

He writes:

It would be interesting to find out how many positive stories the NYT ran about the Democrats—or their electoral chances—in the week before the election. You can see potential anti-Democratic bias in the 5 November 2022 NYTheadline “Biden and Obama Reunite in a Last-Ditch Effort to Save Their Party”—you can also see potential anti-Democratic bias if you look at the stories on the NYT’s 7 November 2022 front page, which says “Party’s Outlook Bleak” and “Democrats Brace for Losses”.

Imagine reporting that focused on the issues rather than predicting the outcome.

Categories Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Media

Musk Threatens to “Name and Shame” Advertisers Who Suspend Their Ads on Twitter

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2022 //
26

Musk has sent mixed signals about whether Twitter will or will not screen out tweets that are racist and hateful and tweets that contain lies and propaganda. The NAACP, among other activist groups, has called on Elon Musk to take a clear stand against hate. Major advertisers have suspended their advertising until Musk clarifies his policies.

Musk responded by threatening to “name and shame” the advertisers who have pulled their ads. This is a curious position, since their names are already in public.

He held a live meeting on Wednesday, attended by 100,000 or so people including some of Twitter’s largest advertisers and marketing partners, hoping to reassure the biggest sources of Twitter’s revenues.

Elon Musk laid out more of his plans for Twitter in a publicly broadcast meeting Wednesday, assuring advertisers he had noted their concerns about hate speech and misinformation on the site while saying the platform would continue changing rapidly and that some of its new features would fail.


Musk took questions over the course of roughly an hour from two of his executives and a representative of the advertising industry during a Twitter Spaces meeting, which was broadcast live on the site midday. More than 100,000 people listened live….


He repeated that the company hasn’t made any changes to its content moderation policies — which attempt to keep rule-breaking content off the site — but said he believes requiring more people to pay to use Twitter through a new $8 verification program would lower the amount of hate speech overall.

The billionaire said the company’s progress would be much more freewheeling than in the past, with new ideas rapidly becoming features and then being cut quickly if they don’t work out. Mistakes will be made, he said.


“If nothing else I am a technologist and I can make technology go fast,” Musk said. “If we do not try bold moves, how will we make great improvements?”

The move comes days after Musk – who acquired the company in a $44 billion deal last month – threatened a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against advertisers that jilt his platform.

Musk last week said Twitter was facing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers paused campaigns on the platform. Since Musk completed his acquisition, reports of hate speech and abuse on Twitter have swelled.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson called on businesses to drop their advertisements on Twitter “until actions are taken to make Twitter a safe space.” Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” accused businesses that participate in the boycott of “trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Automakers Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen have all pulled their Twitter ads, along with cereal and snack companies General Mills and Mondelez, the corporation behind Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and Sour Patch Kids candy. International ad and consulting firm Interpublic, which represents American Express, Coca-Cola, Fitbit, Spotify and dozens of other major corporations, has also suspended its Twitter ad buys.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Freedom of Speech, Media

Elon Musk Has Purchased a Regulatory Nightmare

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2022 //
15

Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School, writes in The Atlantic about the international appetite to regulate social media, a fact that Elon Musk seemed not to anticipate.

She writes:

In the coming weeks, Musk is in for some surprising meetings and phone calls, it seems (if anyone’s left in the Twitter legal department to set up those meetings or calls). Canada’s C-11 bill, also known as the Online Streaming Act, would greatly increase governmental control over online content, and it is part of a wave of new internet-speech laws now being debated or implemented in countries around the world….

Since then, Musk has made numerous statements about his plans to change how the platform moderates content—that is, how it treats the material that its users post on its site. Most of these plans seem to involve taking a lot less content down. The mercurial Musk might not actually follow through on these thought bubbles; making good on his vow to “defeat the spam bots,” for example, would require Twitter to shut down more accounts, not fewer. But the overall tenor of his comments reflects a certain nostalgia for the more libertarian early days of social media. Musk seems to believe that “the tweets must flow,” as one of Twitter’s co-founders famously declared in 2011.

But the halcyon days of social-media platforms’ youth are over, and the regulatory landscape that these platforms grew up in is gone forever. In fact, contrary to common understanding, social media has never been unregulated. As the Georgetown professor Anupam Chander has argued, “Law made Silicon Valley,” by intentionally giving platforms a wide berth in how they treated content on their website. The centerpiece of this approach is the now-famous Section 230, which immunizes platforms from liability for most of their content-moderation choices. No other country has been as hands-off as the United States, but platforms have enjoyed substantial regulatory leeway in much of the rest of the world too. Now, amid a widespread belief that the tech giants are changing society for the worse, many jurisdictions are looking for ways to rein them in. And in many places, they are succeeding.

In the U.S., members of Congress have introduced a pile of bills to amend Section 230, but even if none becomes law, the legal framework in which internet platforms operate appears to be on shaky ground. In October, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases that may dramatically narrow Section 230’s scope and expose platforms to much more regulatory risk. In the first, Gonzalez v. Google, the relatives of an American student killed in a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris are suingYouTube’s parent company over Islamic State propaganda on the site. The Court will decide whether social-media platforms become liable for users’ content if they algorithmically recommend it to other users. If the justices say yes, then Twitter could suddenly be on the hook for recommending defamatory speech or harassment or speech that supports terrorism. The impact of such a ruling on Musk’s platform could be enormous, because basically everything in most users’ Twitter feed is “recommended” in one form or another.

In the second case, Twitter v. Taamneh, the Court will decide whether platforms can be found to have aided and abetted terrorism if terrorist propaganda appears on their sites, notwithstanding the fact that platforms already remove a lot of such material. If both of these cases come out against the platforms, Musk’s apparent disdain for taking content down might quickly evaporate….

More regulation is coming across the Atlantic too. After Musk tweeted “the bird is freed” on Thursday, European Union Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton responded with a friendly reminder: “👋 @elonmusk In Europe, the bird will fly by our 🇪🇺 rules. #DSA.” The hashtag referred to the EU’s new Digital Services Act, which was passed this year and will take effect over the next few years. The complicated and sweeping law imposes a wide variety of risk-assessment, auditing, transparency, and procedural obligations on large platforms and exposes them to massive fines if they don’t comply. Unlike with the Canadian bill, Musk at least has heard of this one. In May, a few weeks after Musk announced he was buying Twitter with much bravado, Breton released something that vaguely resembled a hostage video, shot just after he had explained the DSA in a discussion with Musk. In it, the two men shook hands, and an uncharacteristically obliging Musk told Breton, “I agree with everything you said, really.”

In short, Musk wants fewer limits on Twitter content, but the regulatory environment is changing in ways that he won’t like. Not only in the U.S., but internationally. Racists, haters, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and conspiracy theorists might not find a congenial home on Twitter.

In addition tto regulators and courts, Musk will have to persuade the big advertisers whose revenue he needs that Twitter has not turned into a swamp of lies, hate, and propaganda.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Media

A Culture of Secrecy and Fear at Twitter

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2022 //
37

The Washington Post published a fascinating account of what’s happening inside Twitter, the company with 7,500 employees. The workers have heard nothing since the takeover. No word from the new boss. At one time, he said he would fire 75% of the workforce, then changed it to 50%. He is swiftly destroying whatever collegiality and trust existed among colleagues. A large number will soon have their computers locked and told to leave the building at once with their personal possessions.

With rumors of impending layoffs by new owner Elon Musk swirling inside Twitter on Wednesday, an employee noticed that the Google Calendar of one of their new bosses was publicly viewable. On it was an entry at 5 p.m. that day titled “RIF Review” — an acronym for Reduction in Force, or layoffs.

Another Twitter employee was able to view a group on Slack, the workplace chat tool, in which company administrators appeared to be finalizing the precise number of workers to be laid off, and how much they’d receive in severance.

By day’s end, word had spread across the company that layoffs — half the staff — would probably come Friday, and that Musk would require Twitter’s remaining employees to return to the office full-time. But that word didn’t come from Musk, or anyone on his leadership team. It came via Blind, the anonymous workplace gossip site that some Twitter employees say has become their best, and often only, source of information about what’s going on inside the company in the chaotic, surreal week since Musk acquired it for $44 billion.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the company’s leadership has not confirmed the layoff plans.

Since Musk closed the deal on Oct. 27, employees say, they have not received a single official communication from anyone in a leadership position at the company. They have not been told that Musk completed the purchase, that their CEO and top executives were summarily fired, or that Musk dissolved the board and installed himself as chief executive.

Instead, they have read about Musk’s dramatic plans to overhaul the company via media reports, Musk’s tweets, back-channel private chats and Blind. Twitter’s formerly open corporate culture, centered on all-staff meetings and freewheeling Slack channels where employees and managers shared ideas, plans and jokes, has turned suspicious and secretive, several Twitter employees told The Wasington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.

“It’s like Twitter’s culture has been completely turned inside out overnight,” one employee said. “Mass trauma event over here.”

The last official communication to the Twitter staff came the day before Musk took over, when Twitter’s head of people, Leslie Berland, sent a cheery email with the subject line “Elon office visit.”

“If you’re in SF and see him around, say hi!” Berland wrote. “For everyone else, this is just the beginning of many meetings and conversations with Elon, and you’ll all hear directly from him on Friday.”

But workers did not hear directly from Musk on Friday, when his planned introduction to the company was quietly canceled, or anytime since. The company’s regular all-hands meeting, scheduled for Wednesday, disappeared from everyone’s calendars on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Berland left the company, according to people familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Berland’s apparent departure, along with those of several other executives in recent days, was not announced either internally or externally, leaving employees to speculate on Blind about which of their bosses have quit or been fired.

Since Friday, employees have posted memes and comments on the company Slack noting each day that has passed without word from management. One person posted an image of a skeleton with a caption that read, “me waiting on updates from leadership,” according to documents obtained by The Post.

In lieu of communicating with employees, Musk and his new deputy Jason Calacanis, who appeared in a company directory over the weekend, have been brainstorming, focus-grouping and announcing new products and policies in public, via their personal Twitter accounts.Twitter’s employees have quickly learned to follow their new leaders’ Twitter feedsfor updates essential to their work.

Categories Cruelty, Disruption, Media

What Will Elon Musk Do to Twitter?

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2022 //
32

Many Twitter users are fearful for the future of the popular social media site since it was purchased by Elon Musk. He is taking the company private and will be the sole proprietor. He has said he is an absolutist on free speech, which raises questions about whether he will tolerate hate speech, lies, propaganda, anti-vaxxers, disinformation, even Donald Trump, who was permanently banned from Twitter for inciting violence.

Now, the concern about Musk was stoked when he retweeted gossip from a free weekly (the Santa Monica Observer) that Paul Pelosi was drunk, high on drugs, and got into a fight with a man he picked up at a gay bar.

Musk posted that there was a “tiny possibility” that this was true. As readers began to react with incredulity that the new owner would spread unsubstantiated gossip, Musk deleted his tweet. Musk has 112 million followers on Twitter.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

Musk responded Sunday at 5:15 a.m. Pacific time with a tweet that said, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” and posted a link to a baseless, anti-LGBTQ article in the Santa Monica Observer. By 10:30 a.m. Sunday, the message and link had been retweeted more than 30,000 times and liked more than 110,000 times, before being deleted less than an hour later.

Last year, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Santa Monica Observer was “notorious for publishing false news,” and once claimed “that Hillary Clinton had died and that a body double had been sent to debate Donald Trump.”

Axios posted that the Santa Monica Observer is not a trustworthy site.

Why it matters: Musk linked to an article from the Santa Monica Observer, a website known for years for publishing false stories.

  • The site “is anything but trustworthy,” according to an executive at NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalists to rate news and information sites.
  • The site has a trust score of 44.5 out of 100 points on NewsGuard’s rating scale for trustworthiness, due to repeatedly publishing numerous conspiracy theories and false claims about politics, the pandemic and more.
  • The site gets a red-rating and a warning for readers that says: “Proceed with caution: This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards.”

Responsible people in the media fact-check. Musk didn’t think it was necessary. This does not bode well for the future of Twitter.

We have had our fill of conspiracy theories in the past six years.

It’s awful to think that the sole owner of Twitter will be a dupe for conspiracy theories and gossip and spread them to his millions of readers.

Just for laughs, read this article in The Intercept, which predicts that Elon Musk will regret his purchase of Twitter.

It begins:

ELON MUSK (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.

That’s because as of this moment, it looks like Musk dug a big hole in the forest, carefully filled it with punji sticks and crocodiles, and then jumped in.

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Education Reform, Lies, Media, Scandals

Greg Brozeit: What Ken Burns Got Wrong

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2022 //
54

Greg Brozeit is a valued reader of the blog who is deeply knowledgeable about German history. In a private communication, he expressed to me his disappointment about Ken Burns’ “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” We agreed that Burns’s singular focus on Hitler’s Jewish victims slighted the other categories of people that he targeted for annihilation. They included Communists, socialists, trade unionists, the disabled, homosexuals, and Roma, as well as priests and nuns who opposed his monstrous regime. I invited Greg to write about his objections, and he did. Greg reminded me of the famous lines spoken by the German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, who was initially a supporter of Hitler but turned against the Nazi regime as he realized Hitler’s murderous ambitions:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

Greg Brozeit wrote:

The story of the Holocaust is about how the “other” could be created and marginalized through inhumane policies and practices supported by large swaths of people.

Or, if they were not supporters, they had been conditioned over years to live in fear and had little-to-no sense of civic duty or civil courage. That is a complex story in which Jews were specifically targeted, the most numerous of many contrived “groups” of victims. A large number of those classified as German Jews, who were eliminated or driven out of the country, viewed themselves as Germans first and Jews second. Both identities were equally important to many of them. The distinction was lost and later imposed on them.

I often cite the diaries of Victor Klemperer for one reason -they are the only personal, contemporary observations of what actually happened by someone who was “fortunate” to be last on the list of Jews who were to be eliminated in the
final solution. He was one of the latter; one thing few Americans know and his publishers do their best to hide from Americans is that Klemperer returned to Dresden and became a professor and loyal citizen of East Germany until his death. It would have been interesting to read his view of the Berlin Wall had he lived long enough to witness it. He knew he was persecuted by Nazis because they imposed the definition of Jew on him, one he never internalized. He was almost a victim of the Holocaust, but he would have classified himself as not being Jewish long before others would make him a Jew.

After watching the PBS/Burns program on the U.S. and the Holocaust, I was disappointed that he missed so many opportunities to tell a larger story. Burns rarely veered from the “Holocaust = six million Jews” argument and consequently undermined the message that I (and perhaps the producers) had hoped for. The term “Holocaust” is also used for political, not humanitarian or historical, purposes—the definition Burns’ narrative (naively or intentionally) underscored. And therein lies my problem. A casual viewer might easily get the impression that from the 1930s to the end of WW II, Jews were the only victims of the Holocaust. The actual history is more complex.

By focusing only on Jews we risk serious dishonor to the memory of the six million—a view confirmed in my mind after reflecting on the title of Malcolm Nance’s book, “They Want to Kill Americans.”

Nazis claimed they were eliminating Jews and other undesirables to strengthen Germany. They started out by killing Germans: communists, trade unionists, social democrats, writers, artists, ethical conservatives, Protestants, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, gays and lesbians, persons with developmental disabilities, political opponents, those who weren’t acquiescent to the new order, AND Jews, both those who identified themselves so and those who did not. Focusing almost exclusively on any one of these groups risks breeding resentment and isolation. It certainly diminishes the broad inhumanity of the Holocaust.

An accurate recounting would never gloss over the genocidal priority the Nazis tragically bestowed upon Jews, but neither would it underplay the fate so many others were consigned to in this tragedy. And in fairness, Burns occasionally hinted at this reality. In the film’s final hour a doctor who took pride in the T4 program to eliminate persons with developmental disabilities was highlighted.

But the narrative all too quickly returned to the storyline of “aggressions against only Jews.” While Burns gives an excellent introduction to US policy on Jews and the Holocaust, the series title, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” is misleading and inevitably expands (and eventually disappoints) the expectations and hopes for viewers who are not novices. The real story of the wide compass of inhumanity subsumed under the Holocaust is a profound lesson relevant to our present circumstances. Sadly, the program missed this larger opportunity.


Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Media

Please Watch “Abbott Elementary”

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2022 //
12

I don’t usually get enthusiastic about fictionalized portrayals of schools because they are typically sensationalized and hostile towards teachers and students. It’s easy to make a long list of such movies or TV programs, starting with “Blackboard Jungle.”

But wait!

Here’s a show you will love: “Abbott Elementary” is set in Philadelphia. The writer of the Emmy-award-winning show, Quinta Brunson, is also the star. She plays a first-year teacher in the first season. She is thrilled to be a teacher and her colleagues are helpful, funny, and the usual mix of personalities—real people. They care about the children. The children—all Black—are adorable. There’s not enough money for supplies, but everyone makes do. The spirit of the show is beautiful.

The show makes you feel like teaching is the very best job in the world. Don’t miss it!

Categories Education Reform, Humor, Media, Philadelphia, Teaching

Politico Was Bought by German Billionaire Who Prayed for Trump’s Re-Election

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2022 //
26

The Washington Post reported a new development in the media world. The influential and respected news site Politico was bought by a German billionaire who claims to be nonpartisan. But…

BERLIN — Months after his company bought Politico, Mathias Döpfner stood atop Axel Springer’s 19-story headquarters, gazing out at the double row of cobblestones that mark the outline of the demolished Berlin Wall, and explained his global ambitions. “We want to be the leading digital publisher in democracies around the world,” he said.


A newcomer to the community of billionaire media moguls, Döpfner is given to bold pronouncements and visionary prescriptions. He’s concerned that the American press has become too polarized — legacy brands like the New York Times and The Washington Post drifting to the left, in his view, while conservative media falls under the sway of Trumpian “alternative facts.” So in Politico, the fast-growing Beltway political journal, he sees a grand opportunity.


“We want to prove that being nonpartisan is actually the more successful positioning,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. He called it his “biggest and most contrarian bet.”


How exactly Döpfner, Axel Springer’s CEO, hopes to define nonpartisan journalism at an especially fragmented time for American politics is a question of intense interest as he aims to leave his mark on American media. His own politics have remained something of a mystery, too. But weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, he sent a surprising message to his closest executives, obtained by The Washington Post:
“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?”

Categories Democracy, Elections, Media, Trump

Australian TV on FOX, Trump, and the Big Lie

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2022 //
62

Please watch this fascinating series (part one and part two) by Australian television on the rank cynicism of Rupert Murdoch and FOX News.

Under his leadership, FOX turned into a propaganda machine for Trump. Its leading correspondents (Sean Hannity and Judge Jeanine) joined his rallies, urged people to vote for him. They ceased to be journalists.

The two parts are gripping and well worth watching. There are pending lawsuits against FOX, Rudy Guiliani, and Sidney Powell for slandering Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, another voting machine used only in Los Angeles.

Powell and Guiliani both said numerous times that the voting systems were used to hack the vote and steal the election. Powell has since said that her claims were so ridiculous that no one took them seriously.

A must watch.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Media, Propaganda, Trump
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