Jonathan Turley on the MSM, American’s state media
This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.
The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”
The NY Times did the same thing, as Turley points out.
There is no end to the creativity of the MSM. They can do this in their sleep at this point, they are so practiced at it.
More:
The brilliance of the Biden team was that it invested the media in this scandal at the outset by burying the laptop story as “Russian disinformation” before the election. That was, of course, false, but it took two years for most major media outlets to admit that the laptop was authentic.
But the media then ignored what was on that “authentic laptop.” Hundreds of emails detailed potentially criminal conduct and raw influence peddling in foreign countries.
When media outlets such as the New York Post confirmed the emails, the media then insisted that there was no corroboration of the influence peddling payments and no clear proof of criminal conduct. It entirely ignored the obvious corruption itself.
Now that the House has released corroboration in actual money transfers linking many in the Biden family, the media is insisting that this is no scandal because there is no direct proof of payments to Joe Biden.
Let’s continue to move those goalposts!
The MSM is counting on the ignorance and stupidity of the American public. As Turley points out:
The whole purpose of influence peddling is to use family members as shields for corrupt officials. Instead of making a direct payment to a politician, which could be seen as a bribe, you can give millions to his or her spouse or children.
Moreover, these emails include references to Joe Biden getting a 10 percent cut of one Chinese deal. It also shows Biden associates warning not to use Joe Biden’s name but to employ code names like “the Big Guy.” At the same time, the president and the first lady are referenced as benefiting from offices and receiving payments from Hunter.
Turley gets to the heart of his message here:
The coverage this week has all the markings of a state media. The consistent spin. The almost universal lack of details. The absurd distinctions.
It is the blindside of our First Amendment, which addresses the classic use of state authority to coerce and control media. It does not address a circumstance in which most of the media will maintain an official line by consent rather than coercion.
I have one disagreement with Turley, which is that the MSM is not a state media, it’s a party media. When a Democrat is in office, the MSM blocks anything bad about that person and the Democratic Party, and tries to turn it around to make Republicans look bad. But when a Republican is in office, it is the opposite. So the MSM swings back and forth between supporting the administration and working to undermine it, depending on which party is in power.
In the USSR, the newspapers were state media because only one party, the Communist Party, was allowed to be in power. In the US, there is still ostensibly the possibility of the right gaining power, so we have this back-and-forth by the media depending on who is in power. Make no mistake about it, though; the goal is to cement the power of the left so that the right can never win again. At that point, the MSM will become the voluntary state media.
At that point, the MSM will become the voluntary state media.
By the groupthink of the ‘journalism’ majors who’ve infested the ‘news’ media for the last thirty years, that volunteerism has been an unspoken, unbroken part of the deal. Since the 60s, the Long Marchers have entered the trade to ‘make a difference’, and now they’re closing in on the climax: owning the Word of God, the ‘What You Need to Know’, as the Seattle Times puts it.
One wonders why various Republicans – who’re fated never to see a majority again on this course – are not barnstorming with direct communications to the voters on this subject, and all others which the MSM so cleverly suppresses.
The principal reason to create such LLCs (shell companies within shell companies) is certainly to hide the real ownership and to render exceedingly difficult the tracing of any possible connections to an original source, the more opaque the ownership structure of anything, the harder to prove any possible criminal activity. This is but one of the many reasons to believe not only the Biden criminal syndicate to be guilty, but also Dominion (Fox having been foolish indeed to settle the worthless suit).
Interesting, j e.
Do you have any links to articles on Dominion establishing shell companies and/or cut-outs?
“One wonders why various Republicans – who’re fated never to see a majority again on this course – are not barnstorming with direct communications to the voters on this subject, and all others which the MSM so cleverly suppresses.”
Republicans won’t understand that the constitution won’t protect them until Democrat henchman have them rounded up in stadiums and are using their heads for batting practice (to honor their sainted Che). It’ll be too late then.
Turley wags his finely-manicured forefinger at the Corrupt Media (who really, really couldn’t care less).
Now Durham points his at a vewy, vewy nawdy FBI, which no doubt will find it extremely difficult to…keep a straight face)….
‘Jim Jordan plans to summon Durham to testify after release of damning report;
“The FBI has long defended its conduct in probe, but Durham said his probe provided a “sobering” look at miscondict’—
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/john-durham-releases-final-report-concluding-fbi-had-no
Durham, continued….
A bit more comprehensive (and, perhaps, hopeful)…:
“BREAKING: Durham Releases Russia Hoax Bombshells in New Report”—
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2023/05/15/durham-n2623276?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=28454522
as one recalls dominion operated through another firm scytl, which is based in barcelona, and largely owned by a hedge fund state street capital
Imagine the MSM’s reaction and the reaction of congressional demokrats if this influence peddling / money laundering scheme had been conducted by any republican.
I will repeat what I have said before;
the “reporters” at Izvestia and Pravda during the murderous regime of Stalin at least had an good excuse in printing the Stalinist line if they hoped to avoid being murdered by the Russian secret police.
Today’s media in the USA acts as the propaganda arm of the demokrat party voluntarily and willingly, and can honestly claim they are “independent” news outlets.
Izvestia and Pravda could never make this claim nor could Hitler’s Der Sturmer.
I don’t see this ending in anything but one-party rule. All it will take is a cycle with a Democrat Pres/House/Senate and you’ll have a packed court, D.C. as a State and permanent voting rule changes. Combine that with a complicit press and you’ll have the U.S. version of the thousand-year Reich. Even if times become very bad, the vast majority of people will never know anything but the Government spin. Vast swaths of the country will be like California and will always vote Democrat because anything else will be unthinkable.
Meanwhile, Brandon and Son of Brandon went to the presumably legitimate granddaughter’s Penn graduation. As the MSM obligingly notes, Hunter gave the presstitutes in the crowd a brazen thumbs-up sign:
“Biden and first son Hunter Biden sat together Monday at the University of Pennsylvania graduation ceremony for Hunter’s daughter Maisy — as House Republicans investigate the president’s role in foreign business dealings and prosecutors review possible criminal charges against Hunter. The 80-year- [sic] president and his son, 53, wore matching aviator sunglasses in the bleachers at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field — with Hunter at one point flashing a thumbs-up to journalists. . . . The elder Biden earned nearly $1 million from the University of Pennsylvania between 2017 and 2019 despite just nine reported public engagements with students, some of which appeared unrelated to his role as ‘Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor’ — such as a 2017 visit to promote his own book ‘Promise Me, Dad.'”
https://nypost.com/2023/05/15/biden-joins-son-hunter-at-penn-graduation-as-corruption-claims-swirl/
JoJo’s Penn professorship is aptly named, as he still needs lots of practice in presidentin’. And I just hope Maisy’s half-sister Navy will never be dragged down by the Biden crime family.
https://www.steynonline.com/13482/steyn-vs-ofcom-it-on
“I have one disagreement with Turley, which is that the MSM is not a state media, it’s a party media.” Indeed, but I think it goes even further than this. It’s not so much that the media (and much of academia) sees itself as the willing servants of the Democratic Party, it’s that it sees *itself* at the appropriate choosers of who may and may not hold high office in this country. See my post The Rage of the Prince-Electors:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/67520.html
also, this book review:
https://ricochet.com/871838/book-review-year-of-consent-by-kendell-foster-crossen/
Thanks Neo and I’d also like to point out Elon classification of NPR on twitter was wrong in a similar manner. It should have been labelled party affiliated media.
I will give the MSM a bit of credit. When I was younger I wonder if it was truly fair to hang Julius Streicher since when you get down to it he was mostly a newspaper publisher.(He wasn’t actually in charge of the military) Anyway seeing their propaganda first hand these days yes I understand that Streicher was actually guilty even just as a publisher and deserved to swing. In another moment of irony turns out Streicher’s IQ was 106, he was pretty much the least intelligent of all those damn nazis.(I think that says something about journalists.)
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I’d think that the best description is: Deep-State Media. DSM.
Snorri Godhi–
“DSM” certainly fits– the acronym is well known to many of us as referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the current edition being DSM-5.
Thank you PA+Cat.
DSM sounded familiar to myself, but i did not bother to look it up.
It’s better than i thought.
The Murdoch settlement with Dominion was strategic. Rupert did not want to be bothered in his dotage with testifying under oath. Maybe he is senile and the sons are running things completely. The firing (sort of) of Tucker Carlson was another “We don’t care” moment. Fox News has been drifting left for several years. As has been pointed out, their income is largely from cable subscriptions. Advertising has largely dried up as a result of leftist boycotts. They are easing into the state media model.
“State media” was at once a more damning term and a more humorous one. Brian Stelter tried to use it against FNC, but it was easily turned against Stelter himself, since he seemed so clearly a typical propagandist. Musk called NPR, PBS, CBC, BBC and other outlets, “state-affiliated media,” or “government-funded” media. That may not have been the chief objection to them, but it wasn’t wrong. Recently, the labels have been dropped. I’d agree that “party media” is a more accurate term, but if you believe in the Deep State or permanent government, then “state media” isn’t wholly inaccurate. Parties alternate in power, but the Deep State is forever (plus, “party media” can also apply to Instagram selfies of drunken coeds and frat boys at college get-togethers).
When the mainstream media notices the Hunter Biden story, the latest line of defense is that the committee didn’t prove that Joe Biden got money himself. They wouldn’t have dismissed the findings so easily if the scandal had been about the Trump brothers. It’s amazing that they don’t see the obvious connection with Hunter’s emails about 10 percent for the Big Guy and about having to pay Joe’s bills, but not noticing, not being curious, and not digging are probably skills taught at today’s j-schools.