Fox lied as a matter of law

[AUDub 11,167]

17 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Truth Social would gladly take him

[AUDub 11,167]

49 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Who? The slack-jawed mule working for MSNBC is a perpetual DNC ass-kisser.

You have no cogent arguments beyond "he works for MSNBC."

Mr. "Anti-narrative" lol. Talk about being high on your own supply. 

[TexasTiger 12,997]

3 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Says the narrative monkey. For true narrative slavishness, I would recommend dub, homey, yourself, and several others. 

I am as anti-narrative as anyone on the board. 

You’re as reliably on narrative as anyone. Yours just lack coherence much of the time. 😉

[DKW 86 7,439]

1 minute ago, AUDub said:

You have no cogent arguments beyond "he works for MSNBC."

Mr. "Anti-narrative" lol. Talk about being high on your own supply. 

Caught me doing my best DUB dismissal crapola here. I fully admit it. I was mimicking you.

[AUDub 11,167]

19 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

 

Going with trollface as your avatar is quite telling. 

[DKW 86 7,439]

16 minutes ago, AUDub said:

Going with trollface as your avatar is quite telling. 

Maybe some of the low-information folks will figure it out.

[AUDub 11,167]

3 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Maybe some of the low-information folks will figure it out.

It's 2023 most know what 4chan is. 

[DKW 86 7,439]

13 hours ago, AUDub said:

It's 2023 most know what 4chan is. 

Apparently, you dont. 

4Chan uses 

[AUDub 11,167]

13 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Apparently, you dont. 

4Chan uses 

No pepe came later. Trollface is one of the OGs. 

[DKW 86 7,439]

Just now, AUDub said:

No pepe came later. Trollface is one of the OGs. 

pepe is the man now tho, from my modest trolling on 4chan.

trollface, as the gif was named, is now just a troll....

[AUDub 11,167]

Just now, DKW 86 said:

pepe is the man now tho, from my modest trolling on 4chan.

trollface, as the gif was named, is now just a troll....

Pepe had been around for a while but really took off in around 2015 when the alt-right denizens of /pol/ decided he'd make a good mascot. 

[DKW 86 7,439]

https://www.racket.news/p/msnbc-sucks

Please note: This was written BEFORE Taibbi was interviewed by Mehdi Hasan. 

1) Taibbi agreed with Hasan and corrected two things in the 100s of pages of his reporting on Twitter Files.

2) Hasan, to his credit, refused to defend MSNBC and their 4-6 year coverage of Russiagate. 

The Nance situation was symbolic of what happened at the network from the beginning of Trump’s term, really beginning in early 2017. It went from being a place where you had to be at least in the ballpark of demonstrably true to being a place where the factual standard was, “Whatever dogshit drops out of the mouth of any hack or spook.”

Moreover the network didn’t just re-report this stuff, it became the favored launching pad for all the most blatant blue-Anon disinformation, like California congressman Adam Schiff saying he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, or former Obama defense official Evelyn Farkas suggesting the Trump administration would try to destroy evidence if they “found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians.” Farkas later testified under oath that she “didn’t know anything” about collusion.

You’ll read about this (and see it, in an extraordinary video mashup our own Matt Orfalea prepared for a larger story series coming out in the next weeks), but we found MSNBC mentioned Hamilton 68, the infamous “dashboard” of accounts supposedly linked to “Russian influence activities” outed as a fraud in the Twitter Files, over 100 times in a period between the summer of 2017 and November of 2019.

One of those instances came in a typical MSNBC broadcast from that time, on January 19, 2018. It featured a quartet of security-state goblins — former Bush official Nicolle Wallace, Langley-sniffing Ken Dilanian, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, and ex-CIA official Evan McMullin — gang-botching a story about the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag:

Note how many things they get wrong in this segment. Vance says there’s nothing to accusations of FISA abuse later proven by Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz (“A lot of hullabaloo about nothing at the end of the day”). The CIA’s McMullin touts the Steele Dossier (“Much of it has been validated”). Dilanian rushes at the end to squeeze in the Hamilton hoax (“This release…is the top hashtag among Russian bots and trolls, according to Hamilton 68”).

It’s extremely rare that a journalist who’s actually trying to avoid mistakes makes even one factual mistake as big as falling for the Hamilton hoax or the Steele Dossier, or dismissing the Nunes memo. These people managed all three at once. If I’d made even one error of that magnitude early in my career, I wouldn’t have had a career. This kind of thing was basically constant for years, when MSNBC was the staging ground for many lunatic conspiracy theories involving Trump, Russia, and their delicacy item, the Dossier.

Edited April 9, 2023 by DKW 86

[DKW 86 7,439]

More...

From that period in early 2017 through the crushing release of the Mueller report — forcing Rachel to cut a trout-fishing vacation in Tennessee short to stammer out, eyes welling with emotion, “This is the start of something, not the end of something” — I do not believe even one person expressing skepticism of the Trump-Russia story came on the channel. That streak ended with poor Chris’s post-Mueller bummer-cast with Michael Isikoff and David Corn, on March 25, 2019.

This video should be shown to every J-school student as a “Scared Straight” exercise. In it Yahoo!’s Isikoff, the first prominent journalist to quote Christopher Steele, said of his dossier, “It was endorsed multiple times on this network, people saying, It’s more and more proving to be true. AND IT WASNT.”

The directors cut away as Hayes started nodding with energy. As blood visibly drained from the face of Isikoff’s unrepentant toad-faced co-author David Corn, the veteran reporter went on to add — that Mueller’s report “undercuts almost everything that was in the dossier”:

After this the network doubled down, seemingly hiring as contributors every

[DKW 86 7,439]

Again, More...

America became familiar with Page and Strzok after their texts — referring to the Trump-Russia investigation as an “insurance policy,” and ripping “sandernistas,” among other things — became public. These were living monuments to press excesses of the Trump era. As Gerth wrote, Strzok saying, “We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Strzok in other words was exactly the kind of person to whom Rachel might have been referring when she rhapsodized about FBI “not saying anything” to dissuade us from believing errors.

Page on April 10, 2017 got a text from Strzok, saying he wanted to talk to her “about [a] media leak strategy with DOJ.” This was a day before a Washington Post story that cited “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” in saying the secret FISA court found probable cause to believe former Trump aide Carter Page (no relation) was an “agent of a foreign power.” Whoever leaked this was sabotaging not just the Post, but every downstream media org picking up the story, because the story at its roots was wrong: Carter Page was not an “agent of a foreign power,” as the FISA court had been misled, by Steele and the FBI. MSNBC was one of the first outlets to regurgitate this thing.

When sources lie to you, you should be mad. At minimum, you should be ripping their names out of your Rolodex (or modern equivalent). MSNBC did the opposite, hiring seemingly everyone who’d helped them down this reputation-tarnishing path.

[DKW 86 7,439]

Again, even more...

After all this, after throwing away all their standards, clowning themselves with years of wrong stories, doling out rice bowls to the procession of spooks who now clog their airwaves, and watching as their ratings predictably collapsed, now they want to give me a hard time. Not because I got anything wrong, but because they don’t like my opinions, or where things like the Twitter Files reports came from. After the first thread, Mehdi was one of 27 media figures to complain in virtually identical language: “Imagine volunteering to do PR work for the world’s richest man.”

I laughed about that, but couldn’t believe the reaction after Twitter Files #6, showing how Twitter communicated with the FBI and DHS through a “partner support channel,” and in response to state requests actioned accounts on both sides of the political aisle for harmless jokes. Mehdi’s take wasn’t that this information was wrong, or not newsworthy, but that it shouldn’t have been published because Elon Musk put Keith Olbermann in timeout for a day, or something.

Because we all know Olbermann is the gold standard for sane rational thought...<FER>

“Even Bari Weiss called him out, but Taibbi seems to want to tweet through it,” Mehdi tweeted.

If it sounds like my beef with MSNBC is personal, by now it is. Take the Twitter Files. When first presented with the opportunity to do that story, my first reaction was to be extremely excited, as any reporter would be, including anyone at MSNBC. In the next second however I was terrified, because I care about my job, and knew there would be a million eyes on this thing and a long way down if I got anything wrong. If you’ve ever wondered why I look 100 years old at 53 it’s because I embrace this part of the process. Audiences have a right to demand reporters lie awake nights in panic, and every good one I’ve ever met does.

But people who used to be my friends at MSNBC embraced a different model, leading to one of the biggest train wrecks in the history of our business. Now they have the stones to point at me with this “What happened to you?” routine. It’s rare that the following words are justified on every level, but really, MSNBC: Fnck you.