Tag Archives: MSM

Twitter is democratizing nothing

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Tweetgasm. Photo: CC/Roland Harvey

Tweetgasm. Photo: CC/Roland Harvey

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy Buzzflash. But I did do a search of tweets hashtagged, #iranelection, as this columnist, below, suggested.

And, you know what I found?

Tweets of mainstream news stories,  retweets of those tweets, and tweets of Alex Jones’ coverage, which itself is sourced from the MSM.

And shame on Andrew Sullivan for patting himself on the back, with a reader’s message–citing Sullivan’s tweet pickups–that “the revolution is on” in American media.

It simply isn’t.

This is a repeat of the Mumbai massacre/Twitter story. Remember that? Turned out that was complete bullshit, too.

Here’s a bit from the Buzzflash columnist’s tweetgasm:

This is an historical turning point in journalism. Hundreds of users Twitter on this subject every minute and release news of deaths, rallies, protests, and everything in between. A simple search of #iranelection on Twitter will provide each post with that tag, where most, if not all, the breaking news is occurring and Iranians are communicating.

via How Twitter Democratized a Dictatorship | BuzzFlash.org.

Meanwhile, Iranians, no doubt prompted to some degree by U.S. intelligence forces, are spilling their blood for a hopeless cause.

MSM obessing over Twitter

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Photo: CC/Jim Milles

Photo: CC/Jim Milles

The geezer media believe that the kids love Twitter (they don’t), so they are flogging away at the thing.

WaPo columnist Kurtz cites this lame-o example of pop culture nattering (below), to bolster his threadbare argument that something remarkable is taking place in Twitter:

When I mentioned on my Twitter page that I would be talking on the air about Conan O’Brien taking over “The Tonight Show,” I got a flood of messages. Some called him a genius, others think he’s a goofball. What I quickly learned is that O’Brien is a polarizing figure in the late-night world, loved and loathed with equal fervor.

via Howard Kurtz – Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes: How Twitter Users Are Changing the Landscape – washingtonpost.com.

Pittsburgh paper links mass killer to Alex Jones, Neo-Nazis

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Alex Jones. Image: CC/Hippy Jon

Alex Jones. Image: CC/Hippy Jon

A leftie blogger flips over a Pittsburgh paper’s slipshod report, about one of last week’s mass murderers:

Believing most media were covering up important events, Mr. Poplawski turned to a far-right conspiracy Web site run by Alex Jones, a self-described documentarian with roots going back to the extremist militia movement of the early 1990s.

via the joshua blog: Pennsylvania cop killer obsessed with Glenn Beck-hyped conspiracy theories.

The original, poorly-headlined Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article says the Pennsylvania cop killer, Richard Andrew Poplawski was “into conspiracy theories”–as if that should be considered a warning sign for potential mass shooters.

Excerpts, below, from the original article:

“Poplawski was a young man convinced the nation was secretly controlled by a cabal that would eradicate freedom of speech, take away his guns and use the military to enslave the citizenry,” reads the breathless lead of the story–as if any of these fears are unjustified.

Real quick, need I remind anyone: Government plans to take over the news media, and the rest, are a matter of record.

Even worse, the Pittsburgh paper lumps patriot radio broadcaster Alex Jones in with the Neo-Nazi Website, Stormfront, implying that Poplawski’s interest in either one should be seen as troubling:

Around the same time, he joined Florida-based Stormfront, which has long been a clearinghouse Web site for far-right groups. He posted photographs of his tattoo, an eagle spread across his chest.

Geezers get in on the Web action

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CC/Travis Church

Grandma: The computer will keep her at bay. Photo: CC/Travis Church

Thanks to my brother, Erik Baard, for passing along this piece, about grannies and grandpas making their holiday appearances via webcam:

“We would be strangers to them if we didn’t have the Web cam,” said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, La., who will be a virtual attendee at Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren in Jersey City this year.

Over the last year, Ms. Pierce and her husband watched Dylan, 17 months, learn to walk and talk over the Web cam, and witnessed his 4-year-old sister Kelsie’s drawings of people evolve from indeterminate blobs to figures with arms and fingers and toes.

But the powerful illusion of physical proximity also sharpens their ache for the real thing. “You just wish you could reach out and cuddle them,” said Ms. Pierce, a nursing professor. “Seeing them makes you miss them more.”

But many grandparents find that the Web cam eases the transition during in-person visits, when grandchildren may refuse to sit on their laps or may reject their hugs because they do not recognize them. As one Web cam evangelist wrote on her blog, www.nanascorner.com: “You’ll be able to pick up where you left off without those warming up to you, awkward moments.”

My emphases, in the excerpt, above. Two concerns: Visiting via webcam makes separation more painful, the article seems to suggests; I resist any technology celebrated for ameliorating natural human feelings, as noted by the Times, when it cites this incredibly fart-y website.

via Grandma’s on the Computer Screen – NYTimes.com

Bush, Obama, Cheney, Ramses: All in the family

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(Blood is thicker than water. Photos: Ramses, right, by Jimmy Smith; President George W. Bush, courtesy of the White House)

from Mark:

I’ve listened to enough patriot radio, and done enough Googling, to know that America’s leading politicians and personalities are related (see link, excerpt, below).

Still, I was struck by this recent statement by the far-out occult conspiracy researcher and broadcaster Freeman: “George W. Bush is a direct descendant of Ramses (one of the ancient Egyptian kings).

This is an important assertion for students of the reptilian/ET agenda. It is also, I imagine, impossible to prove.

I do not know a thing about family trees, so I cannot tell you whether this one from David Icke is accurate…

But I am astonished at how the mainstream media uses firm evidence of elite inbreeding, where it exists, to mock conspiracists and to claim, perversely, that it somehow proves politicians serve very different masters.

FactCheck.org: Are Barack Obama and Dick Cheney cousins?
Obama’s other relatives, by the way, include George W. Bush, who, according to the Sun-Times, is his 11th cousin. They share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, a 17th-century Massachusetts couple named Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley. And Harry S. Truman was Obama’s fourth cousin four times removed, the paper says. The New York Post, using ancestry.com, reported that Brad Pitt and Obama are ninth cousins. Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga told the BBC that his maternal uncle was Obama’s father, making them first cousins (we think).

We wouldn’t make too much of this, though. After all, according to at least some researchers, a common ancestor for all humans now alive may have existed just several thousand years ago. That means you, dear reader, could have a cousinly relationship that may not go all that far back to everyone from Jack Kevorkian to Tina Fey to Hugo Chavez to the woman selling trinkets from a piece of cardboard on a Bangalore street corner.

Mideast muscle flex looks phony

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(null)
Not much of a confrontation, after all.


Even Fox News smelled something fishy about the U.S. Pentagon’s very clearly altered video of the recent chest puffing exercise in the Strait of Hormuz.

But all of the mainstream media (including CNN, depicted above) are letting this slip, as if they’d learned nothing since the U.S.-led Iraq invasion. If they do it again (I suspect the Hormuz bit was a Pentagon trial balloon to check its media play), it will be fair to call the MSM complicit in a deception meant to garner public support for invading Iran.

More from here:

POLITICS-US: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel

Despite Cosgriff’s account, which contradicted earlier Pentagon portrayals of the incident as a confrontation, not a single news outlet modified its earlier characterisation of the incident. After the Cosgriff briefing, Associated Press carried a story that said, ” U.S. forces were taking steps toward firing on the Iranians to defend themselves, said the U.S. naval commander in the region. But the boats — believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy — turned and moved away, officials said.”