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Glenn Greenwald explains how media outlets "independently confirm" each others' falsehoods. It is shocking that an entire industry could so utterly humiliate itself so quickly. What American institutions are actually excellent these days?

All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to "independently confirm" a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term "independently confirm" significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.

But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have "independently corroborated" a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story. And just as CNN did -- repeated what they were told (almost certainly by Democratic Congressional members and/or their staff) without independently investigating it, because they knew any anti-Trump story would please their partisan audience -- NBC News pretended they had obtained "independent confirmation" when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.

This episode is so worth recalling not only because it is one of the most stunning and pathetic media humiliations of the Trump era -- though it is that -- but also because the shoddy tactic that drove it is still in full use by the same media outlets. We just saw proof of that again with a major Washington Post "correction" -- which should be called a retraction -- of one of the most-discussed news stories of the last six months: the Post's claims about what Trump said when he called a Georgia election official while he was still contesting the 2020 election results.

Forbes announces that they will automatically distrust any company that hires vocal Trump supporters. But this totally isn't "cancel culture", of which they disapprove.

Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump's fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We're going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we'd approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world's biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

This isn't cancel culture, which is a societal blight.

Good thing the media is so widely trusted so we ignorant plebes know who to obey.

Asymmetric warfare. Facebook and Twitter are The Man now, but they can't stop the signal. The Man can't censor you if he can't even follow your links.

Social Media Hider is a way to publish links to external web content to censorious social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook that they won't censor because their censorbots and employees won't see the actual link but just a cover image.

SMH looks like a classic URL shortener, and indeed it is a URL shortener, but it has an extra feature that decides whether to redirect to the target URL depending on what the IP address making the request is. If the source IP is in a subnet that the SMH operator doesn't trust then instead of returning the actual target URL it returns a decoy image or link.

So when The Man (or his AI crony) clicks your link he gets sent somewhere innocuous, but when your friend clicks your link he gets sent to your intended destination. Brilliant.

Social Media Hider is a bit technical to use right now, but just wait a week and there will be browser plug-in that handles everything automatically.

I'm not on Twitter much, and from what I see most social media seems to be pretty toxic for its users. Still, social media is ubiquitous, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that Twitter is essential for any media personality... but apparently not. Tucker Carlson is dominating cable news despite his meager use of Twitter (or because of it?).

As was the case in total viewership, Fox News led by Carlson, dwarfed the competition in the 25-54 demo.

1. Tucker Carlson Tonight (791,000), Fox News
2. Hannity (754,000), Fox News
3. Special Report (668,00), Fox News
4. The Five (655,000), Fox News
5. The Ingraham Angle (655,000), Fox News
6. The Story (603,000), Fox News
7. Cuomo Prime Time (587,000), CNN
8. Anderson Cooper 360 (568,000), CNN
9. CNN Tonight (524,000), CNN
10. Erin Burnett OutFront (502,00), CNN

For some context, Carlson's average is more than what sports shows, which tend to have a younger audience, draw in total viewership. ...

Executives are led to believe that the two demographics are highly influenced by Twitter and other social media platforms. Carlson, the media's biggest star, provided a brutal counterpunch to that belief.

Carlson tweets once or twice a week. He sent just one tweet in the entire month of April, a month he dominated the competition in. He excels absent of the microphone his competition views as a necessity to capture the demographics he just won.

What's more, when advertisers succumb to demands to boycott Carlson they're leaving money on the table.

Carlson is the antithesis of what the vast majority of media is today. He's the threat they warn you about. He's recently been under more fire for his stance on Black Lives Matter and the nationwide riots. Hopefully, by this point in the column, you'll know you can guess the results.

You guessed it, decision-makers, again, listened like cowards. Executives at Disney, T-Mobile, Papa Johns, and SmileDirectClub took the demands and pulled their advertisements from his show. The viewers, who the companies advertise for, did the opposite. Viewers of all ages flocked to him in record-setting numbers.

Not surprising that the GOP has already cut an ad from this cringeworthy CNN segment.

I personally think it would be great if both sides showed some respect for each other. The Left's disdain for Trump voters/sympathizers will be its undoing.

An anti-Trump cabal in the American government played the media for fools for the past three years, and journalists can't stop patting themselves on the back.

The Mueller report makes clear reporters were sold wolf whistles over and over, led by reams of unnamed official sources who urged them to see meaning in meaningless things and assume connections that weren't there. ...

More than anything, reporters should be furious at the many sources close to the various investigations who (it now seems clear) must have known pretty early there were serious holes in many areas of this story, and that a lot of these "dots" were dead ends, but didn't warn their press counterparts. For instance, the papers should be mad those who supposedly had misgivings about the Steele report didn't warn them earlier.

But they're not mad, which makes it look like a case of intentional blindness, in which eyes and ears were shut among other things because the Trump-Russia conspiracy tale made a ton of money. Media companies earned boffo ratings while the Mueller probe still carried the drama of a potential spectacular ending, with blue-state audiences eating up all those "walls are closing in" hot takes.

This fiasco will surely end up being a net plus for Trump. The obstruction parts of the report make him look like a brainless goon and thug, but the absence of what Mueller repeatedly calls "underlying crime" make his ravings about an elitist mob out to get him look justified. This is not an easy thing to achieve, but we're there, and the press is a big part of that picture.

I don't know who will win in court over Jim Acosta's press pass, but I'm pretty tired in general of lawyers fractally parsing our laws into incomprehensible gibberish. "Legal analysts" quoted by the media are predicting that CNN will win the lawsuit, but it's pretty obvious they shouldn't. The First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's obvious that no individual person has a right to a press pass to the White House. Jim Acosta is free to continue writing and saying whatever he wants. He has no right to have access to the President, either at the White House or anywhere else. If I applied for a White House press pass I'd be denied, and no one would be up in arms about it. Jim Acosta has no more rights than you or I do.

What's more, his employer, CNN, has dozens of press passes for its employees. To the extent that the First Amendment should be understood to protect corporations, CNN has plenty of alternatives to Jim Acosta. Even if you think CNN has a right to access the White House (which would be absurd) there's no reason they have to send Jim Acosta.

President Trump is obviously correct to assert that he is under no obligation to let any journalists into the White House.

Donald Trump sought Wednesday to land a massive blow in his long-fought battle against the news media, with administration lawyers asserting in court that the president could bar "all reporters" from the White House complex for any reason he sees fit.

The sweeping claim, which came in the first public hearing over CNN's lawsuit to restore correspondent Jim Acosta's White House credentials, could have a dramatic impact on news organizations' access to government officials if it is upheld in court.

Politico's characterization is dramatic and overwrought. Public officials don't talk to reporters because they're forced to by the Constitution, or merely because the reporters have physical access to a certain location. They talk to reporters when they want to. The relationship between a president and the journalists who cover him really depends on the whims of the president. Here's some data on the number of press conferences held by recent presidents:

By president: Total / average per month:

Obama - 163 / 1.72
George W. Bush - 210 / 2.18
Bill Clinton - 193 / 2.01
George H. W. Bush - 137 / 2.85
Reagan - 46 / 0.48
Carter- 59 / 1.23
Ford - 40 / 1.36
Nixon - 39 /0.59
Lyndon B. Johnson - 135 /2.18
JFK - 65 /1.91
Eisenhower - 193 /2.01
Truman - 324 / 3.48
Franklin Roosevelt - 1,020/ 7.0
Hoover - 268 / 5.58
Coolidge - 407 / 6.07

President Trump talks more than any past president -- directly to citizens via Twitter even if not to the media. He's under no Constitutional obligation to talk to anyone.

Project Veritas is performing a public service by giving politicians and their staffers an opportunity to reveal their true political beliefs. Veritas is a rightist group that is targeting leftist politicians, and what they've uncovered about Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and Tennessee Senate candidate Phil Bredesen is enlightening.

Here's McCaskill speaking with the undercover journalist:

Senator McCaskill revealed her intention to vote on various gun control measures in undercover footage:

MCCASKILL: "Well if we elect enough Democrats we'll get some gun safety stuff done. They won't let us vote on it, we've got 60 votes for a number of measures that would help with gun safety, but McConnell won't let 'em come to the floor."

JOURNALIST: "Like bump stocks, ARs and high capacity mags...?"

MCCASKILL: "Universal background checks, all of that... But if we have the kind of year I think we might have I think we could actually be in a position to get votes on this stuff on the floor and we'd get 60 [votes]..."

JOURNALIST: "So you would be on board with the bump stocks and... high capacity mags."

MCCASKILL: "Of course! Of course!"

And here are some Bredesen staffers who claim to know the candidate's true position on the Kavanaugh nomination.

Maria Amalla and Will Stewart, staffers in Bredesen's campaign, both say on hidden camera that if he were in the Senate, Bredesen would not actually have voted to confirm then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh. They explained that the statement Bredesen issued in support of Kavanaugh was a political ploy to gain the support of moderate voters in Tennessee.

JOURNALIST: "Like he wouldn't really vote yes [for Kavanaugh,] would he?

AMALLA: "No, it's a political move... He thinks that like we're down like half a point right now. It's like really close and we're losing by a point or two. So he thinks that if like by saying this he's appealing to more moderate republicans and he'll get more of them to vote for us."

JOURNALIST: "I was so confused because I just can't believe he would actually vote [for Kavanaugh.]

STEWART: "He wouldn't. But he's saying he would... Which I don't know if it makes it worse or better. No, it makes it better... "

[snip]

JOURNALIST: "So he'll lose voters if he says yes [to not confirming Kavanaugh?]"

STEWART: "Oh, straight up, yeah."

JOURNALIST: "Are the people of Tennessee that ignorant?"

STEWART: "Yeah."

This is all valuable information for voters, especially with public trust in our politicians at a record high!

Unfortunately Project Veritas only targets leftist politicians. It would be valuable if a similar group were to stage undercover interviews with rightist politicians.

New York Times has hired Sarah Jeong, who apparently doesn't like white people very much.

Jeong can like or hate anyone she wants, and the NYT can hire anyone it wants... but this is an example of why trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low.

The NYT says that Jeong "regrets" her previous "approach" to social media but... does she still think the same things that she thought from 2013 to 2015? There's no indication that she has changed her mind, only that from now on she intends to write hateful things in a less forthright manner.

John Hinderaker points out a great example of AP reporters Ken Thomas and Jill Colvin intentionally missing the point Trump is trying to make.

Tuesday night's freewheeling rally lasted more than an hour and included numerous attacks on the media, as well as one glaring false claim. Trump was railing against the idea of noncitizens voting and advocating stricter voting laws when he claimed that IDs are required for everything else, including shopping.

"If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID," he said at the event at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa. "You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture."

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about when the billionaire president last bought groceries or anything else himself. Photo IDs are required for certain purchases, such as alcohol, cigarettes or cold medicine.

Is the point about groceries? Is the point about who does Trump's shopping (or Hillary's, or Obama's)? Obviously the argument Trump is making is that requiring identification to vote is reasonable, since identification is already required for many mundane transactions (like buying groceries with a credit card or check). Journalists may or may not agree with his proposal, but they should at least engage with the President's proposal in good faith rather than pretending that it's incomprehensible.

Roger Simon says that modern journalists depend more on leaks than on investigative ability.

After all, this was the Golden Age of Journalism. That was what should have been emphasized. Look how Donald Trump was being so bravely exposed.

What a crock! It's the Golden Age of Leaking, not Journalism. The fantastic success of Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate has brought us to that. Blame "Deep Throat." A journalist is now someone who answers the phone from a leaker, takes down what he or she says, and spits out the innuendos and lies to win a Pulitzer. You don't have to be Hemingway to do that. You just have to have a decent digital rolodex and be a good kiss-ass.

Adam O'Fallon Price writes lovingly about the em dash, which I also love. (Although I like to put spaces on either side of them, which appears to be entirely wrong.) I'm sure I overuse them -- but why shouldn't I? They're awesome. I'm going to write a poem about em dashes -- stay tuned.

It might be useful to include an official definition of the em. From The Punctuation Guide: "The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark. Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons--in each case to slightly different effect." The "slightly different" part is, to me, the em dash's appeal summarized. It is the doppelgänger of the punctuation world, a talented mimic impersonating other punctuation, but not exactly, leaving space to shade meaning. This space allows different authors to use the em dash in different ways, and so the em dash can be especially revealing of an author's style, even their character.

Paula Bolyard lists out numerous media outlets who refuse to count an unborn baby as a "real" victim.

Take, for instance, the Chicago Tribune, which wrote, "Kelley shot and killed 25 people at the church. Authorities have put the official toll at 26, because one of the victims was pregnant." The newspaper didn't want to get caught recognizing the humanity of the unborn baby, so they deferred to "authorities." There wasn't a deceased baby, there was a pregnant victim, according to the Tribune.

CNN wrote that "the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs will reopen its sanctuary as a memorial on Sunday, one week after a gunman killed 25 people and an unborn child." In other words, 25 real people and one blob of tissue.

At USA Today, they didn't even try to cloak their hostility toward unborn babies in clever wording. "The memorial ceremony was a block away from the First Baptist Church, which is slated for demolition after the massacre during Sunday services Nov. 5 that killed 25 people including a pregnant woman and wounded 20," an article declared.

And many more.

Obviously if an unborn child can be a victim of a shooting, he can be a victim of an abortion.

That "plus one" baby had a name: "Carlin Brite 'Billy Bob' Holcombe." John Holcombe, who was shot in the leg but survived the shooting alongside two of his children, wrote on Facebook that the name "includes [his wife] Crystal's pick for a girl, a boy and the nickname the kids gave the baby." Holcombe lost a total of eight family members in the shooting.

I gotta say, I not only love all these examples of retro 90s-style web design, but many of them are easier to navigate than modern "optimized" sites. Click all the links.

To navigate the website for Arcade Fire's coming album, "Everything Now," users need to click through a cluttered cascade of Windows 98-style pop-ups.

Balenciaga's new website looks as stripped down as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with plain black boxes and no-frills Arial font.

And the D.I.Y.-looking home page for Solange resembles the desktop of a candy-colored iMac, complete with QuickTime windows and rows of blue folders. ...

One way is to create a website the old-fashioned way: by enlisting a friend who knows basic HTML. That is what Billy Silverman, 40, a restaurateur, did in the harried final days before opening Salazar, his acclaimed Sonoran barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles.

He tapped his buddy Zack McTee, who runs a small production company in New York, to slap together something quick. The two decided that, if they didn't have the time or money to make the website good, they would at least make it fun.

In a bizarre turn of events, CNN has threatened to dox an anonymous internet GIF artist who made fun of the network.

CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski opted not to identify the user "because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again."

But Kaczynski then added that "CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change," seemingly indicating that CNN would identify the user if he repeats his "ugly behavior" on social media. That sentence was widely interpreted as a threat.

CNN's meltdown continues.

Update:

Now CNN is claiming that their victim has assured them that he doesn't feel threatened. Do they not see how bad this looks? What else would the victim say, with CNN holding him hostage?

Kaczynski also said the Reddit user had been made aware of the ongoing Internet kerfuffle and had gotten in touch with him again.

"FYI 'HanA**holeSolo' just called me. 'I am in total agreement with your statement. I was not threatened in any way,'" Kaczynski wrote.

Kaczynski initially said the user "posted his apology before we *ever* spoke" to him, calling KFile afterwards to apologize again. But after further questions, Kaczynski said the initial apology didn't come until CNN had contacted the user and asked to talk to him.

And of course, now there are a million more GIFs mocking CNN.

Poet Sara Holbrook describes how questions about her writing in a standardized test are completely nonsensical. When I was in school, I always suspected that the teachers were making up stuff about the "intent" of the various authors we studied.

Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I'm a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.

These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids' futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions.

Then I went online and searched Holbrook/MIDNIGHT/Texas and the results were terrifying. Dozens of districts, all dissecting this poem based on poorly formatted test prep materials.

Jack Shafer writes that fear of the effects propaganda is excessive and elitist. If anyone was deceived by "fake news" this year, it would seem to have been the elites.

In this sense, the shrillness of the propaganda debate reveals a deep distrust of citizens by the elites. The Ignatiuses and Stengels of media and government don't worry about propaganda infecting them. Proud of their breeding and life experience, they seem confident they can decode fact from fiction. What they dread is propaganda's effect on the non-elites, whom they paternalistically imagine believe everything they read or view. But they don't. The idea that naïve and vulnerable audiences can be easily influenced by the injection of tiny but potent messages into their media feedbag was dismissed as bunk by social scientists as early as the 1930s and 1940s. According to what academics call the hypodermic needle theory (aka magic bullet theory, aka transmission-belt model), there is little evidence that the public was the defenseless prey of mini-doses of propagandists. Larger doses don't seem to be very effective, either.

Will Rahn of CBS correctly identifies the media's problem: hubris.

The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It's a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There's been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from "heroin country" that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it's our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

Donald Trump is responsible for his own vulgarity, but it's obvious that the media (including NBC, his former employer) is conspiring to maximize the damage to Trump's campaign. The tape is certainly newsworthy, but the decision to delay its release demonstrates why Americans don't trust the media.

NBC execs had a plan to time the release of the Donald Trump audio to have maximum impact on both the 2nd presidential debate and the general election ... sources connected with the network tell TMZ.

Multiple sources connected with NBC tell us ... top network execs knew about the video long before they publicly said they did, but wanted to hold it because it was too early in the election. The sources say many NBC execs have open disdain for Trump and their plan was to roll out the tape 48 hours before the debate so it would dominate the news cycle leading up to the face-off.

As we reported, Billy Bush was bragging about the tape -- in front of NBC execs at the Rio Olympics -- in early August. NBC says it's only known about the tape for a little more than a week.

Hillary and the media have a shared goal: defeat Trump. Do they pass each other notes and hold conference calls to coordinate their attacks on Trump? That's just a crazy conspiracy theory! Oh wait...

Over the weekend, several major American newspapers printed a variation of the same article pointing out instances, ion their view, when Donald Trump has lied to the American people during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Hillary posts pages of "documented Trump lies" and holds a conference call with members of the media detailing the same theme [on Friday] and within 48 hours [on Sunday] major publications print articles following along with Hillary's prescribed narrative.

Hillary and the media are on the same side. Are they "coordinating"? Yes -- at the very least they watch each other for cues about how to advance against their common opponent. But sometimes they send each other notes or pick up the phone. Does this obvious coordination help or hinder Hillary?

"Trump has all the right enemies" in the eyes of his supporters says @mikeallen

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) September 26, 2016