Rolling Stones Over and Finding…Nothing?

 

The BBC told us that Trump dodged the bullet after having criticised Obama for doing the same and avoided linking Islam and terrorism in the same sentence in his speech in Saudi Arabia….

He did not include the controversial phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”. In the past, he has criticised his predecessor, Barack Obama, and others for not employing these terms, considered offensive by many Muslims.

Clearly they weren’t listening to the speech as they’ve had to update their report trying to wriggle out of their mistake and then parse his words so that somehow it’s all a big cock-up by Trump…

His highly anticipated address did not include the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”, which he had used before and is considered offensive by many Muslims. A transcript of the text published on his Facebook page included a mention of “Islamist extremism” and “Islamist terror groups”.

But in his speech Mr Trump said: “That means honestly confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds.” It was not immediately clear if he stumbled over the word or decided to change the script.

Then again the BBC isn’t too bothered with the truth where Trump is concerned, they will report any old rumour or gossip as sensationalist fact no matter what the source.  Paxman was right…the BBC no longer does investigative journalism, it merely cuts and pastes news releases and news reports from other news providers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.  This could be a mistake…as both are ardently anti-trump and themselves have few scruples when it comes to the truth.

We’ll look at the media response in more detail but first a look at some points of interest.

The BBC et al claim the Russians were trying to influence the US election in order to get Trump into Office…and yet they also tell us that the infamous dodgy dossier, cobbled together by an ex-MI6 agent who doesn’t like Trump, was the result of information gleaned from…er..Russian agents….from the BBC’s Paul Woods in the Spectator not on the BBC…

Claims about a Russian blackmail tape were made in one of a series of reports written by a former British intelligence agent. As a member of MI6, he had been posted to the UK’s embassy in Moscow and now runs a consultancy giving advice on doing business in Russia. He spoke to a number of his old contacts in the FSB, the successor to the KGB, paying some of them for information.

So the Russians were both trying to get Trump elected and em, not elected.

The BBC originally used the phrase ‘shared classified information with the Russians’…now it uses ‘leaked’…both assertions, however phrased, are suspect….first no proof it happened, the Russians deny it as do US Officials present at the meeting, second the President can release whatever he likes legally…and it certainly wouldn’t be described as a ‘leak’…a very loaded term from the BBC….and as for ‘classified’…that can mean anything from merely ‘restricted’ [which can be applied to just about any government publication…such as Army basic training manuals] to the very highest security classification…so what classification was the information BBC?

The BBC peddled the Washington Post story about that ‘sharing’ of information as fact and as a sensational security breach when we know that the Washington Post itself had published detailed accounts of why security measures were being upgraded, listing the threat and technical details that would give away the source of the information just as they claimed Trump had done.

We also know that Russian officials apparently celebrated Trump’s election.  How do we know that?, because US intelligence released details of that…which gave away the fact that they were intercepting certain communications….but apparently that wasn’t a problem for the left-wing media as long as it took down Trump.

But then again the left-wing media has a long and dubious record of reporting fake news and indeed of revealing top secret information that puts the nation at risk, national security at risk, lives at risk, such as Snowden and Bradley Manning.

The Guardian is guilty of faking news to attack Trump via Assange [Justin Webb also attacked Assange on Saturday…so the attacks continue]…Glenn Greenwald tells all…

The Guardian recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how those false claims — fabrications, really — were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news.

The purpose of this article is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to suppress content in the name of combating it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.

Note well that last paragraph….hits the nail right on the head…the BBC and the Left want to stamp down on the internet and right-wing publications so that they can control the news, what people see and hear and thus what they understand of the world and how they then expect politicians to react…one way of doing this is to invent the crisis of ‘fake news’and target the Right as the main perpetrators of this crime….giving politicians the excuse to bring in controls.  Of course that will backfire on the Left as they too will become victims of the same draconian laws.

The Washington Post is just as guilty of peddling lies if it has an agenda it wants to push…

‘Fake News’ And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid

On Friday the Washington Post sparked a wave of fear when it ran the breathless headline “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.”

Yet, it turns out this narrative was false and as the chronology below will show, illustrates how effectively false and misleading news can ricochet through the global news echo chamber through the pages of top tier newspapers that fail to properly verify their facts.

From Russian hackers burrowed deep within the US electrical grid, ready to plunge the nation into darkness at the flip of a switch, an hour and a half later the story suddenly became that a single non-grid laptop had a piece of malware on it and that the laptop was not connected to the utility grid in any way…..the Post finally updated its article, changing the headline to the more muted “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say”

The following morning, nearly 11 hours after changing the headline and rewriting the article to indicate that the grid itself was never breached and the “hack” was only an isolated laptop with malware, the Post still had not appended any kind of editorial note to indicate that it had significantly changed the focus of the article.

This is significant, as one driving force of fake news is that as much of 60% of the links shared on social media are shared based on the title alone, with the sharer not actually reading the article itself. Thus, the title assigned to an article becomes the story itself and the Post’s incorrect title meant that the story that spread virally through the national echo chamber was that the Russians had hacked into the US power grid.

This might be relevant for the BBC to consider as it rushes to publish the latest from the WP and NYT without doing the footwork to check the information..

“breaking news” is a tremendous problem for mainstream outlets in which they frequently end up propagating “fake news” in their rush to be the first to break a story. In a world beset by false and misleading news, do top tier news outlets have a professional responsibility to step back from breaking stories and only report on them after all details are known and they have had an opportunity to speak with all parties involved and understand more definitively what has happened?

And the Washington Post yet again spinning lies about its favourite conspiracy theory of Reds under the beds….

Then there was the episode in which the Washington Post ran that breathless story, Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,  about Russians aiding the spread of “fake news.” That irresponsible story turned out to have been largely based on one highly dubious source called “PropOrNot” that identified 200 different American alternative media organizations as “useful idiots” of the Russian state.

The Post eventually distanced itself from the story, saying it “does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings.” This was a very strange thing to say in a statement that isn’t an outright retraction. The idea that it’s OK to publish an allegation when you yourself are not confident in what your source is saying is a major departure from what was previously thought to be the norm in a paper like the Post.

 

The BBC seems to not want to bother with the details, the facts or anything resembling actual journalism, happy it seems to just cut and paste anti-Trump material from the WP and NYT verbatim leaving it for others to do the troublesome work of actually asking a few questions and raising a few doubts about the massive attacks on Trump….

Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media

Russia scandals have bloodied the Trump administration. But it carries dangers for those reporting it

There are big dangers for the press. If we engage in Times-style gilding of every lily the leakers throw our way, and in doing so build up a fever of expectations for a bombshell reveal, but there turns out to be no conspiracy – Trump will be pre-inoculated against all criticism for the foreseeable future.

The press has to cover this subject. But it can’t do it with glibness and excitement, laughing along to SNL routines, before it knows for sure what it’s dealing with. Reporters should be scared to their marrow by this story. This is a high-wire act and it is a very long way down. We might want to leave the jokes and the nicknames be, until we get to the other side – wherever that is.  

 

Something About This Russia Story Stinks

Nearly a decade and a half after the Iraq-WMD faceplant, the American press is again asked to co-sign a dubious intelligence assessment

I have no problem believing that Vladimir Putin tried to influence the American election. He’s gangster-spook-scum of the lowest order and capable of anything. And Donald Trump, too, was swine enough during the campaign to publicly hope the Russians would disclose Hillary Clinton’s emails. So a lot of this is very believable.

But we’ve been burned before in stories like this, to disastrous effect. Which makes it surprising we’re not trying harder to avoid getting fooled again.

 

How Did Russiagate Start?

Amid the chaos of James Comey’s firing, new questions about the timeline of his fateful investigation.

Liberal thinkers have traditionally abhorred secret courts, secret surveillance and secret evidence, and in the past would have reflexively discouraged the news media from printing the unverified or unverifiable charges emanating from such secret sources. But because it’s Donald Trump, no one seems to care.

We should care. The uncertainty has led to widespread public terror, mass media hysteria and excess, and possibly even panic in the White House itself.

All of this is exacerbated by the constant stream of leaks and hints at mother lodes of evidence that are just around the corner. It’s quite literally driving the country crazy.

The public deserves to know what’s going on. It deserved to know before the election, it deserved to know before the inauguration, and it deserves to know now.