Category: Narrative For Sale!
-
Heads We Come Here, Tails We Move Here
Last week, I was listening to NPR. I know, I know. Worth with me, here. I can’t find it online – I didn’t try all that hard, but then I suspect it’s not the only piece like this. that’s going to turn up if you look hard enough. An earnest-sounding SEIU leader – y’know, a…
-
Don’t Mess With Fergus Falls
German “journalist” Claas Relotius spent many years on the European and world journalistic fast track, until it was realized he’d spent years falsifying stories. One of those stories was about the xenophobic misanthropic fascist racists in… …Fergus Falls, MN. And he didn’t just make up the little stuff. Two local residents combed through the story:…
-
All The News That Fits (The Narrative)
A friend of the blog writes: So, a group of black men video a Chipotle manager refusing service to them. Video goes viral. Good Morning America is all over it. Manager fired. Except, we find out these guys dine and dash all the time. Brag about it on Twitter… Corporate virtue signaling has become more…
-
That Moment When…
….you see it in black and white: Big Left’s “elites” really, really don’t understand the Constitution, federalism, checks and balances…representative republican government. I don't think people are ready for the crisis that will follow if Democrats win the House popular vote but not the majority. After Kavanaugh, Trump, Garland, Citizens United, Bush v. Gore, etc,…
-
Layers And Layers Of Gatekeepers
NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sen. Grassley’s referral of Julie Swetnick and her “teenage rape gang” story to the FBI: Was this an intentional attempt to mislead our reporters? Evidence points that way… https://t.co/MOxE8WiGK4 — Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) October 26, 2018 Mr. Todd: Isn’t it your job to figure that out? Perhaps – radical thought, here – before…
-
It’s That Time Of Year Again
It’s that time of election season when everyone who, for any reason or no reason at all decides not to vote Republican will get their Warhol – mandated 15 minutes of fame. Is it a “gun owner” “resisting tthe NRA? Is it an evangelical congregation where a few members have broken with conservatism? Or is…
-
Wrap Your Head Around This
Check out the tone in this tweet from Monday: That’s an American newspaper, writing about a dictator whose government is holding an American hostage – and who has strongarmed most of the formerly independent Turkish media into submission, which normally is a big deal to, y’know, America’s ruggedly independent media, as well – with a…
-
The WaPo: Fake News
That story that Trump has instituted a list of “banned words” at the CDC? The one the WaPo reported on? You might as well be reading Buzzfeed. The terms are “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “evidence-based” and “science-based,” according to a story first reported on Friday in The Washington Post. But Fitzgerald said in a series of tweets on Sunday…
-
Open Letter To The Law-Enforcement/Media Complex
To: The Mainstream Media, and the cops and prosecutors who are your sources From: Mitch Berg, obstreporous peasant Re: World’s Smallest Violin Dear Cops, Prosecutors and their Media mouthpieces, Last week, a shooter at a WalMart in the Denver area killed three people. Colorado being a shall-issue state, and WalMart being an almost-stereotypical hangout for…
-
Compare, Contrast
Why, it’s almost like… … Big Media is trying to pick winners and losers or something…
-
The Last You’ll Hear Of This Story
SCENE: Mitch BERG is waiting to speak to a manager at O’Gara’s about some entertainment business. Avery LIBRELLE walks into the bar, holding a tin cup, seeking donations for Carlton students with “Triggering Fatigue”. LIBRELLE notices BERG. LIBRELLE: MERG! BERG: Oh, hey, Avery. How ya doing? LIBRELLE: Fascists are launching that wave of violence.…
-
Punch Back
The builders of the Dakota Access Pipeline are suing the racket of “environmental” groups that spent half a year obstructing their work: From last summer through the first couple of months of 2017 there was an all-out assault on the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protesters, summoned to rural south central North Dakota by…
-
Another Of Joe’s Rhetorical Questions
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Why doesn’t the public trust the media? Joe Doakes Because the public keeps trusting its lying eyes?
-
Narrative Check
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Trump claims John Podesta barred the FBI from looking at the DNC computer. You remember that computer – not the one in Hillary’s bathroom that she wiped with a cloth, this is the DNC server that supposedly got “hacked” by the Russians to steal the Democrats’ emails, which the…
-
Telegraphing
To: Minnesota Public Radio News From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant Re: Your Teaser This Morning Heard on MPR’s morning edition: Cathy Wurzer blurbs to tease an upcoming story: “Will an Embridge pipeline in Northern Minnesota become the next Standing Rock?” Given MPR’s connections to the Twin Cities’ Big Environmentalist Left, you’ll pardon me if it…
-
Narrative Slide
Jeremy Joseph Christian kills two in an anti-Muslim rampage on a train in Portland, Oregon. Word gets out that Christian was a “white supremacist”. Media assume that means “Right Wing Pro-Trump Hate Criminal” – and brows are furrowed as our high priests of knowledge obsess over What It All Means. Then, it turns out Christian…
-
Challenge Accepted
Chris “The Ken Doll Of News” Cuomo doesn’t like being called a “fake newsman“: “I see being called ‘fake news’ as the equivalent of the N-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity,” Cuomo said on SiriusXM. “That’s what ‘fake news’ is to…
-
Fake News
You’re soaking in it. Charlie Martin on the mainstream fake-news media’s ongoing narrative campaign.
-
“I Will Gladly Present You The Data Next Tuesday, If You Accept My Conclusion Today”
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: When you read a science report claiming that 2016 was the hottest year on record, you might expect that you will get numbers. And you would be wrong. “Note to the New York Times: ‘trouncing’ and ‘blown past’ are phrases appropriate to sports reporting, not science reporting. Except that…
-
Journalism Without Limits!
Well, the title is a little misleading. Where I wrote “without limits”, I guess I what I meant was “no bottom to the barrel”. Because in the arc of downfall for the City Pages, from its heady days in the eighties publishing James Lileks, and its journalistic peak in the nineties, where they ran a lot…
-
Layers And Layers Of Gatekeepers, Part MMMLXVIII
SCENE: Mitch BERG is leaving a downtown Saint Paul bar after happy hour with friends. As he fumbles for his keys by his car, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, steps out of an organic tax accountant office. Dressed in a hemp power skirt, her brunette-but-slightly-prematurely-gray hair cut into the…
-
The Best Threat Money Can Fabricate
I’ll say it here and now: “right wing terrorism” is a boogeyman that the left has been floating out there for decades to try to create a sense of urgency and alarm among their base. There certainly has been some terror associated with the…well, not “the right”, per se; more like “the non-left”. The “Klan” has…
-
Desired Results
Thirty years ago, white supremacy groups were a real, legitimate, dangerous thing. Various groups – “Christian Identity”, “Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord” , the “Posse Comitatus” and of course the Klan – had, if not “power”, at least an effect on the world around them. I’ve run into it twice in my…
-
NPR’s “On The Media”: Fake Analysis Of “Fake News”
There are a few things in the American media for which I have more contempt than the WNYC program “On The Media”. I’ve written about it in the past – it’s an NPR show, hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, that seems to be based around the premise the journalist is a noble order of high…
-
Mark My Words
Someday, when there is a post-cold-war style reckoning with the past crimes of the American media – and I realize this may be more an “afterlife” kind of thing – the ongoing effort by the American media to slander people not like them, politically speaking, will be an entire wing in the museum. Let’s allow…