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‘One national news story flying under the radar of most mainstream media outlets is the murder of an investigative journalist in Las Vegas.
Jeff German, the journalist, had unearthed startling revelations about Clark County Public Administrator Robert “Rob” Telles. Telles is a Democrat. The revelations are many, and likely a major reason Telles lost his bid for re-election in a Democrat primary.
German was found stabbed seven times, prosecutors said, outside of his home. DNA from German’s hands matched the DNA of Telles.
Executive Editor of the Review-Journal said the arrest of Telles is “an enormous relief and an outrage.”
“We are relieved Robert Telles is in custody and outraged that a colleague appears to have been killed for reporting on an elected official. Journalists can’t do the important work our communities require if they are afraid a presentation of facts could lead to violent retribution. We thank Las Vegas police for their urgency and hard work and for immediately recognizing the terrible significance of Jeff’s killing,” Cook reportedly said.
Astonishingly, a tone-deaf Las Vegas journalist actually attempted to place at least part of the blame for the violent act at the feet of — you guessed it — President Donald J. Trump.
Here was the exchange from Thursday’s press conference. You can watch it below:
REPORTER: “Sheriff you said the murder of a journalist is especially troubling. Now is probably not the appropriate time to talk politics, but do you condemn former President Trump’s normalization of violence against journalists?”
SHERIFF LOMBARDO: “I think this is probably the inappropriate venue to speculate on that or opine on that. I think it needs to be stated and noted that it is troublesome because it is a journalist and we expect journalism to be open and transparent and the watch dog for government. And when people take it upon themselves to create harm associated with that profession, I think it’s very important that we put all eyes on and address the case appropriately, such as we did in this case.”’https://theiowastandard.com/blame-trump-democrat-official-murders-journalist-sheriff-asked-if-he-condemns-trumps-comments-about-media/
‘When I worked at the New York Times, I don’t think I ever wrote a Spiderman story.
What’s a Spiderman story?
That now-famous meme:
A Spiderman story is any investigative piece where the side the reporter is attacking can say EXACTLY the same things about the other side.
You’re misinforming!
No, you!
No, you!
No, you!
… ad infinitum.
I wrote lots of investigative pieces (mostly about drug and other medical companies) in the 10-plus years I worked for the New York Times; I’m proud of them. Some are still quoted, more than a decade after I left.
Here’s how I viewed my job: finding, investigating, and reporting on criminal/quasi-criminal and concealed/quasi-concealed corporate behavior.
All those words matter. Executives usually try to avoid breaking the law overtly. They don’t like prison. Prison isn’t fun. They prefer golf. (I’m not entirely sure why.)
Of course, there are exceptions. A few executives, like Elizabeth Holmes, are frauds basically from the jump. Other will cross the line when the walls are cracking and they get desperate. But generally, well-lawyered companies prefer to look for loopholes.
If paying a physician directly to prescribe your drug is illegal, offer volume “rebates” for drugs administered directly by physicians.
Or create a “naturalistic” clinical trial – where the physician receives hundreds of dollars for filling out a one-page form every time she enrolls a patient.
Or offer a free, all-expenses paid continuing education seminar for physicians about “new treatments” at a ski area, and keep the schedule light. And hire “key opinion leaders” – other physicians – to give the seminars – you can pay them, they’re working. And pay those KOLs to “consult” with your marketing division about the best ways to promote your drug.
You get the idea. When the product is a pill that costs pennies to make and can be sold for dollars (or sometimes hundreds of dollars), there’s LOTS of money sloshing around. You just need to put it to work.
So criminal OR quasi-criminal.
And concealed OR quasi-concealed. Obviously, companies will not go out of their way to describe clearly illegal behavior – cash in bags, et cetera. Getting at that usually requires whistleblowers (another topic) and internal documents.
But public companies have strict disclosure requirements. And pharma companies have to provide data to the Food and Drug Administration both before and after their products are approved and register their human clinical trials prospectively with the National Institutes of Health (they didn’t always). And lawsuits and the discovery process can also be great sources, which is yet another reason the vaccine immunity is so problematic.
So the truth – some version of the truth – is out there. Getting to it is often an iterative process – write a story, people talk, more documents come out, write another story, new evidence arrives in your email, et cetera. Bethany McLean did this brilliantly with Enron 20 years ago.
But please – pretty please – note two facts about the process I am describing.
First, it is a process of finding HIDDEN facts and data.
Second, Spiderman is nowhere near it. When Eli Lilly tried to hide the dangers of its drug Zyprexa from doctors treating people with schizophrenia – among the most vulnerable people in the world – nobody said the people with schizophrenia were hiding anything from Eli Lilly.
That’s investigative reporting. Bringing hidden facts to light. Protecting people who cannot protect themselves from companies with vast resources – armies of lawyers and marketers.
What Elizabeth Dwoskin (who, by the way, did not include me in her Washington Post story today – either she or her editors must have realized how terrible that would look after what I posted late last night) – is nothing of the sort. It is opinion and argument, pure and simple.
Why?
NOTHING ABOUT WHAT I AM DOING IS HIDDEN. The opposite: I present my findings every day in as close to real time as possible. And I have no hidden financial conflicts of interest.
AND READERS PROVIDE THE VAST MAJORITY OF MY INCOME. Either directly through Substack and Amazon or indirectly through publishers like Regnery and Simon & Schuster – who offer me advances in the hope they will sell enough books to recoup them, and pay me a portion of the money they make after those advances have earned out.
Investigative reporting would be: discovering that I’m lying about this and some bad actor is funding me. (Who? I even don’t know – the Russian government, maybe?) Which would be impossible, because it’s not true.
Investigative reporting would be: discovering that I have been making up sources or lying about what the documents I present say. Also impossible, because it’s not true.
Instead these people who call themselves reporters basically say, what you are saying is wrong – and not merely wrong, misinformation – because the Centers for Disease Control says so.
What?
I say again, WHAT?
You’re not Spiderman, I’m Spiderman!
I am reporting and have reported that public health authorities have vastly overestimated the efficacy of the vaccines for more than year and are presenting their data in a way that is effectively false. To say the CDC disagrees with me is not to shoot me down; it is to confirm what I am saying.
And it is not reporting, it is stenography of government institutions.
If these people had been covering Robert McNamara we’d still be in Vietnam.’https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/what-has-happened-to-reporters
Rubert Murdoch owns Sky News here in Australia and fortunately for many of us in regional Australia we receive without charge what the Leftists call Sky after dark. It’s then we conservatives are allowed to hear Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and others. Nevertheless, here and around the Western world ‘For the left, Rupert Murdoch truly is an, if not the, Antichrist. He has been so before Trump and is likely to be so after Trump is gone. This is one of the great political constants of the last four decades across much of the English-speaking world.
That Murdoch has “extremely polarised” our politics, or that he has “poisoned” our media, is really a shorthand for “he has dared to provide an alternative view” for that part of the electorate that is instinctively not left-wing. More so than any other media owners (most of them by now in any case gone, like Conrad Black), Murdoch has successfully worked to fill this rather big niche in the market.
Today, he and his media empire are the only thing standing in the way of the total monopolistic domination of the English-language media by the left-wing Public-Private Partnership of state-run and funded and various supported privatemedia outlets. That’s why the left hates him – if not for Murdoch, left-wing voices would be the only ones heard and read by the hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Great Britain and Australia.
The post-Marx, Gramscian/Frankfurt School left has seen the path to political power leading through the gradual take-over of the “commanding heights” of cultural production – if you can influence and control what people are taught, what they see, hear and read, what they feel and what they think, you will get your hands on the levers of power in a surer (and more peaceful) way than through a revolution and take-over of the means of production. This is in a way the reversal of classical Marxism where the economic power arrangements shape the culture of the people; for the new, cultural left, those who control the culture will in time hold the economic and political power too. This is not a conspiracy, just an ideological outlook that explains why our contemporary culture, education and the media overwhelmingly skew to the left.
But Rupert Murdoch remains a giant steaming Australian turd on the banquet table of the modern left.
Look at the United States. Of the biggest circulation daily newspapers, only two can be considered to the right of centre – “New York Post” and “The Wall Street Journal”, though the later more in its opinion pages than news reporting. Both are owned by Murdoch. The rest of the field offers various shades of conventional left. In 2016, only six newspapers endorsed Donald Trump (granted, a rather unconventional GOP candidate) for president, including such giants of print industry as “St. Joseph News-Press”, “Santa Barbara News-Press”, “The Waxahachie Daily Light”, Hillsboro’s “Times-Gazette”, “The Antelope Valley Press”, and (for a change in pace) “Las Vegas Review-Journal”. You get the drift. News and popular interest and lifestyle magazines – anything from “Time” to “Vanity Fair” — skews even more decisively to the left. On the small screen, Fox stands alone versus all the major free-to-air and cable channels. Radio is the only mass medium with a significant right-of-centre presence, talk radio having been an oasis of voices other than the progressive mainstream for at least 30 years now.
In Great Britain, Murdoch owns the tabloid “Sun” and the respectable “Times”. The former is actually pretty ecumenical both in reporting and in opinion. The only other major British daily more unequivocally associated with the right, “The Telegraph”, is not owned by Murdoch, which makes it a significant outlier in the English-speaking world. Murdoch’s Sky is the only counterbalance to the progressive bias on the silver screen, led, of course, by the taxpayer-funded BBC empire.
Australia is a newspaper outlier. This is where Murdoch’s media empire has started and this is where Murdoch owns just over half of daily newspapers, altogether accounting for about 70 per cent of the total circulation. The others, including the Nine newspapers, correspondingly lean to the left. If Australians at least have a better than elsewhere choice in print media, the television is pretty uniformly non-right, nowhere more so than at the state-owned (read: taxpayer-funded, left-run) ABC. As an alternative to it all there is only Sky, which as a subscriber-only service has a smaller reach compared to the free-to-air channels. Then there’s the trust-fund kids of The Guardian Australia, the abuse of union superannuation funds that is The New Daily, the left-wing Melbourne millionaires’ playthings such as The Monthly and the Saturday Paper and Crikey and that symbol of so much that is wrong with our universities, The Conversation.
Take away Murdoch then, and you have the mainstream media almost completely devoid of voices other than the conventional left-wing perspective in opinion and the crusading, politicised, biased reporting in the news. The alternative provided by most (but certainly not all) Murdoch’s outlets means that the progressive “education” of the population cannot be successfully concluded. As the popular observation goes, the left loves diversity in everything except opinion. The progressive utopia looks like United Colors of Benneton all singing from one catalogue. That we’re not there yet, despite the ginormous effort by the left, is largely due to Murdoch.
No wonder the left hates him so much. But he is 89 (though if it’s true you’re only as old as the woman you feel, thanks to Jerry Hall, he’s only 64). His children are no ideological warriors; they range from safely conventional to conventionally left-leaning.
So let’s enjoy Rupert while we still can – after he’s gone there is no one person to replace him in his role as the lone counter-point to the left’s domination of the media. We will need an army of Ruperts instead to stand athwart the narrative and call the bullshit. And we better start planning for it soon.’https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/10/rupert-murdoch-doesnt-dominate-our-media-he-stands-in-the-way-of-total-left-control-hence-the-hate-campaign/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FLAT%20%2020201102%20%20AL&utm_content=FLAT%20%2020201102%20%20AL+CID_901f08e715bf311aa0c7b813ed70b327&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Australia&utm_term=Arthur%20Chrenkoff
The following is a portion of a speech by Michael Goodwin ‘…delivered on April 20, 2017, in Atlanta, Georgia, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar.’
Michael Goodwin
‘I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.
It’s not exactly breaking news that most journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up at The New York Times, so I’m familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government—and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford in All the President’s Men. Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find a Deep Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That’s because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.
During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.
The rest of that journalistic ethos—“afflict the comfortable”—leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
A New Dimension
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened. This was not naïve liberalism run amok. This was a whole new approach to politics. No one in modern times had seen anything like it. As with grief, there were several stages. In the beginning, Donald Trump’s candidacy was treated as an outlandish publicity stunt, as though he wasn’t a serious candidate and should be treated as a circus act. But television executives quickly made a surprising discovery: the more they put Trump on the air, the higher their ratings climbed. Ratings are money. So news shows started devoting hours and hours simply to pointing the cameras at Trump and letting them run.’ https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/2016-election-demise-journalistic-standards/?appeal_code=MK617EM2&utm_source=housefile&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2016_election_demise_journalistic_standards&utm_campaign=imprimis&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8xC9qvSWV5-xz889Lo2pUynHpbDIeJNdI0N-j9LKB2mTI5Caki20vGUTsvAzQhXcBZKR0gt3XOpDvyC_vrvbTlKbiHlw&_hsmi=53242815
whatyareckon 